Research Guides: Fashion Studies: Assignments

IMAGES OF BOOKS ON SUBCULTURE

Research a Subculture

Which keywords to use?

Fashion + Style + Culture + Subculture + Street Style

Example: Name of subculture (Grunge)
Country or region of subculture (United States/American/Seattle/Pacific Northwest)
People or music bands associated with the style (Nirvana)
Name of designer associated with style (Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis)

Think about synonyms and related terms (grunge, nineties, alternative rock)

Encyclopedias

Gale Ebooks This link opens in a new window
Gale Ebooks (formerly Gale Virtual Reference Library) is a database for multidisciplinary research in encyclopedias and general and specialized reference sources in the Arts, Biography, Business, Education, Environment, History, Law, Literature, Medicine, Multicultural Studies, Nation and World, Religion, Science, Social Science, and Technology.
Credo Reference Academic Core This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference helps you start your research with 800+ full-text reference resources, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, subject handbooks, image collections, and videos, on a user-friendly online platform.
Bloomsbury Fashion Central This link opens in a new window
Scholarly resource on fashion encompassing Berg Fashion Library and Bloomsbury Fashion Photography Archive. Find fashion encyclopedias, dictionaries, ebooks, article citations, images, biographies, timelines, videos, and more.

Books

Library Catalog
Currently-enrolled students, faculty, and staff may access our collections, including the online databases (available on-campus or off-campus), using MyNewSchool logins. Search our catalog!
Google Books
Use Google Books as a tool to help you search inside of books. Then copy and paste titles into BobCat, the library catalog.
Amazon
Amazon can be used as a search tool to identify published books on a subject.

Ebook Central This link opens in a new window
An exhaustive selection of authoritative, scholarly e-books that combines ebook databases ebrary and EBL into one platform.

Articles

ProQuest All Subscribed Content This link opens in a new window
All ProQuest databases, ranging from dissertations to newspaper articles to scholarly journals to trade journals to wire services.

Images

WGSN Fashion This link opens in a new window
Global fashion trend forecasting including concepts for color, material, and style across various product categories including accessories, kidswear, menswear, and womenswear. Buyer's intelligence includes strategy guides, product updates, sales-based recommendations, and data-backed reports. Design tools include royalty-free prints, graphics and CADs and color palettes using Pantone, CSI, NCS, CNCS, Coloro and Archroma libraries.

Please note: Users are required to create an account and may need to reactivate their account if they do not use it after 90 days
Vogue Archive (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
A complete searchable archive of American Vogue, from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. Every page, advertisement, cover and fold-out has been included, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by garment type, designer and brand names. The Vogue Archive preserves the work of the world's greatest fashion designers, stylists and photographers and is a unique record of American and international fashion, culture and society from the dawn of the modern era to the present day.

Images for Designers and Art Researchers Guide
Resources for finding and citing online images and printed images.

Chicago Manual of Style

Chicago Manual of Style This link opens in a new window
The online Chicago Manual of Style is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press.

Research a Decade's Fashion

Process

Use these resources to identify a trend, topic, or designer associated with a decade. Once you've identified a research topic, cycle back through the resources using specific keywords. For example, you might read about 90s fashion to find out what topic to focus on, and that might lead you to grunge, rave, hip hop, Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, heroin chic, or various other topics to focus on.

Books

Search BobCat, the library catalog, for books on the fashion of your period. For example: 90s fashion, nineties fashion, 1990s fashion
Browse books on 20th century fashion in GT 596.
View our Guide to Books on Fashion History

Reference Books

Search or Browse Bloomsbury Fashion Library. To Browse, click on Browse, then refine your results by Period and Place. For example: 1990s North America
Go to Gale Virtual Reference Library for books such as Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion. Be sure to look at bibliographies or further readings.

Articles

Fashion Studies Databases
Search these databases individually or multiple databases at the same time.

Images

View the Images page of this guide for suggested resources.

Ebooks

Ebook Central This link opens in a new window
An exhaustive selection of authoritative, scholarly e-books that combines ebook databases ebrary and EBL into one platform.

RESEARCH A DESIGNER OR A GARMENT, STYLE OR ERA

Biographies and Reference

• Search Bloomsbury Fashion Central, which has the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and other reference works, as well as e-books and article citations.

• Search Gale Virtual Reference Library to search inside digitized versions of the reference books, Contemporary Fashion edited by Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf and Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion edited by Valerie Steele.

Books

• Search BobCat for books on your designer. If you don't find any books in BobCat, try searching Google Books.

• Search Ebook Central, an e-book database, to search inside complete books that you can print or download.

Articles, Reports, News

• Search fashion databases in the Articles & Databases tab of BobCat for articles. Try these databases:

WWD: Women's Wear Daily This link opens in a new window
Women's Wear Daily brings you breaking news about the fashion industry, designers, celebrity trend setters, and extensive coverage of fashion week. The issues archive goes back to 2002.

Business of Fashion
Founded in 2007 by Imran Amed, a fashion business advisor, writer and digital entrepreneur, BoF has gained a global following as an essential daily resource for fashion creatives, executives and entrepreneurs in over 200 countries.

ProQuest All Subscribed Content This link opens in a new window
All ProQuest databases, ranging from dissertations to newspaper articles to scholarly journals to trade journals to wire services.
Stylus This link opens in a new window
Stylus provides inspirational and informative research and relates it to prevailing consumer trends, acting as a catalyst to push the design industries to new levels.
WGSN Fashion This link opens in a new window
Global fashion trend forecasting including concepts for color, material, and style across various product categories including accessories, kidswear, menswear, and womenswear. Buyer's intelligence includes strategy guides, product updates, sales-based recommendations, and data-backed reports. Design tools include royalty-free prints, graphics and CADs and color palettes using Pantone, CSI, NCS, CNCS, Coloro and Archroma libraries.

Please note: Users are required to create an account and may need to reactivate their account if they do not use it after 90 days

Images

• Look in the online guide Images for Designers and Art Researchers for a list of images resources.

Videos

• See the Video tab of this research guide to learn more.

Primary Sources

Vogue Archive (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
A complete searchable archive of American Vogue, from the first issue in 1892 to the current month, reproduced in high-resolution color page images. Every page, advertisement, cover and fold-out has been included, with rich indexing enabling you to find images by garment type, designer and brand names. The Vogue Archive preserves the work of the world's greatest fashion designers, stylists and photographers and is a unique record of American and international fashion, culture and society from the dawn of the modern era to the present day.

Harper's Bazaar Archive
The Harper’s Bazaar Archive includes the complete run of U.S. Harper’s Bazaar, from 1867 to the present, fully indexed and searchable.

WWD Archive (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
The Women's Wear Daily Archive provides online access to the definitive fashion and retail publication, Women’s Wear Daily (WWD). The entire archive of WWD, previously unavailable in digital form, opens up new opportunities for research. This authoritative record of how the fashion industry developed over the twentieth century provides valuable primary source material for students across the disciplines of fashion, business, and history.

RESEARCH HISTORICAL COSTUME IN A PAINTING

Select a painting

Go to http://metmuseum.org/ and click on "Collection" and "The Collection Online." You can select "Show only artworks on display."

You can also use ARTStor to do an advanced search for a narrow date range.

Reference

• Search Bloomsbury Fashion Central, which has the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion and other reference works, as well as e-books and article citations.

Books

• Search BobCat for books. Use the style, era, and country as keywords. Try multiple searches, both general (europe + costume + history) and specific (Napoleon + costume).

• Search Ebook Central, an e-book database, to search inside complete books that you can print or download.

• Browse the onsite collections in call number GT.

Fashion Studies

IMAGES OF BOOKS ON SUBCULTURE

Research a Subculture

Encyclopedias

Books

Articles

Images

Chicago Manual of Style

Research a Decade's Fashion

Process

Books

Reference Books

Articles

Images

Ebooks

RESEARCH A DESIGNER OR A GARMENT, STYLE OR ERA

Biographies and Reference

Books

Articles, Reports, News

Images

Videos

Primary Sources

RESEARCH HISTORICAL COSTUME IN A PAINTING

Libraries, Collections, & Academic Services

University Resources

Colleges