Fashion Crimes

In both revealing and concealing the body, fashionable clothing is an excellent communicator of a person's identity, which in turn can assume social and moral significance in coding someone as 'respectable' or as an outsider; as deviant. This book explores the relationship between fashion and criminality. It sets out to develop from interdisciplinary perspectives, new ways of seeing everyday dress and the individual body in the public space. It focuses on specific garments and their individual or group wearers - the Hoodie and the trench-coat, knitted Norwegian Lustkoffe sweaters and low-slung trousers, branded sportswear and Hip Hop styling, the fashion model - innocuous in themselves, but which have been coded as deviant socially and in the media. It questions the point at which morality as a form of social control meets criminality and demonstrates how such established dress codes and terms as 'suitability' or 'glamour' can be renegotiated through the exploration of what people wear every day in response to notions of criminality.