Humanities Professors Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies will launch their new book, L.A. Chic (Intellect, 2018), on Nov. 15 at 3 p.m. in Room 503, Scott Library.
L.A. Chic documents the makeover of the city of Los Angeles, which is transforming it from a sprawling city of freeways and suburbs, sunshine and noir, into a walkable, pedestrian-friendly, ecologically healthy and global, urban hot spot of fashion and style, while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core, public spaces and ethnic neighbourhoods.
Ingram and Reisenleitner provide a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing, museums, designers, and readings of contemporary film, literature and new media. Their book provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes, urban processes, desires and politics that inform how the good life is being reimagined in Los Angeles.
Throughout the book, the authors dig up submerged and marginalized elements of the city’s cultural history, but also tap into the global circuits of urban affect that are being mobilized for promoting L.A. as an example for the global, multi-ethnic city of the future. The book features numerous photographs.
This book launch is part of the Urban Chic series, which is premised on the fact that a new wave of urban change is afoot. The series is comprised of several books about major metropolitan cities and focuses on the locational histories of cities’ fashion that shows the interplay, in the unique spaces of specific cities, between fashion and its art historical understanding as clothing or dress, on one hand, and fashion more broadly conceived as social change, on the other.