Professor Christopher Breward is a leading cultural historian. Appointed Principal of ECA in September 2011, he is also Vice Principal for the Creative Industries and Performing Arts and Professor of Cultural History at the University of Edinburgh. His publications and exhibitions have considered the cultural history of fashion in the West, the history and status of London and other cities as global capitals of fashion, men as consumers of dress and related histories of dandyism, and ideas of fashion, modernity and memory. He has worked on major collaborative curatorial projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Christopher studied at the Courtauld Institute and the Royal College of Art. Prior to joining ECA as the new College’s first Principal, he held posts at Manchester Metropolitan University, the Royal College of Art, London College of Fashion (University of the Arts London) and the Victoria & Albert Museum. He is a Governor of the Pasold Institute and a Trustee of the National Museums of Scotland. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the RCA, an Honorary Research Fellow at the V&A and a Fellow of the RSA.

In 2012, Christopher co-curated the V&A’s Olympic season exhibition British Design: Innovation in the Modern Age 1948-2012. He has contributed catalogue essays to V&A exhibitions on Quilts, Couture, Sport and Fashion, Aestheticism, Postmodernism, David Bowie and post-war Italian Fashion, and to catalogues for the exhibitions Artist, Rebel, Dandy at the Rhode Island School of Design and Ivy Style and A Queer History of Fashion at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. He sits on editorial and advisory boards for journals including Fashion Theory, Costume, The Happy Hypocrite, Visual Culture in Britain and Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture and is series editor for Manchester University Press’s Studies in Design. He is currently working on the cultural history of the suit and supervising PhD students in fashion and design/decorative arts history.

http://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/eca-home/chris-breward

This lively survey of 150 years of fashion covers everything from Haute Couture to the High Street, and developing fabric technology from silk to fleece. From Coco Chanel to Armani and Alexander McQueen, Breward explores fashion as a cultural phenomenon.

Breward examines the glamorous world of Vogue and advertising, the relationship between fashion and film, and fashion as a business, and goes beyond the surface to consider our interaction with fashion. How have our ideas about hygiene and comfort influenced the direction of style? How does our dress create our identity and status? Details of dandies, flappers, and punks are contained within a clear overview of the period which will make you look at your clothes in a different light.