The Man Who … and Other Drawings by H. M. Bateman (review)

340 Books the historical approach to his subject: ‘It is not our intention to trace the development of fashion. ..that is a task that has been tackled many times before.’ He justifies the scant treatment that he gives to the technology of Fashion by adding ‘we do not wish to repeat what can be read at greater detail in any book on the history of textiles’. But in his eagerness to avoid writing yet another history of ‘elitist’ Fashions, or of the clothing industry, Konig goes to the opposite extreme and the result does not make for easy reading. For example, in his chapters on specific sociological themes, he skips from period to period, from society to society, without any immediately apparent logic and this tends to obscure the point that he ismaking. His version of European social history is at best thin, at worst irritatingly schematic-I lost count of the times he refers to ‘theaverage man’, the ‘typical poor man’ and ‘the great masses’ (a favourite phrase). And, among all Konig’s many references to the clothes that people wear, there is not one to the people who were responsible for /nuki/tgthose clothes. This aggressively ahistorical approach gives the central thesis of the book a curiously disembodied look. Konig is at his best when making accessible and discussing the contributions of other sociologists (many of which have not been available to English readers before). But he does not provide any basic materials for the much-needed reassessment of the ‘classic’ histories of Fashion. Indeed, he seems to suggest that these histories are quite adequate for the purpose of identifying general ‘laws’. At times, Konig makes a few concessions to the nonspecialist reader: ‘The analyst of fashion is not obliged to be fashionable himself.’ Tom Wolfe does not appear to be of the same opinion. His Introduction to The Resrless Image (an exercise in ‘newjournalism’) is as ‘chic’ a piece of verbal self-abuse as Wolfe has written in recent years and seems to have little connection with the main body of the work. Perhaps Konig (following Freud) is right about the psychological basis of Fashion. It is auto-erotic. No one could accuse Geoffrey Squire, who works for the Education Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, of being too ‘chic’. His Dress Arf arid Society, based on a lecture course, solidly surveys the relationship between changes in artistic style and parallel shifts in Fashion, using the post-Renaissanceperiod as a ‘model’. Some of the connections that Squire makes are vague and uncritical : ‘Between 1536 and 1541 Michelangelo was painting his ‘Last Judgement’ on the end wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Was it coincidence alone, or some community of spirit, that accounts for the fact that while those vast muscular colossi were being created, an aggressive masculinity was also evident in fashionable European dress? This kind of vagueness is hardly surprising in a book that attempts to cover 400 years of history in 90 pages of text. References to the ‘spirit of the age’ abound, and Squire seems to be under the impression that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Fashion news correspondent. Nevertheless, his book is good on the relationship between weaver and wearer and on the difficult question of how clothes were actually IVOYII. There are some magnificent illustrations and Squire’s own sketches, showing how the clothes of a given period were put together, are among the most effective. Posada’s Popular Mexican Prints. Roberto Berdecio and Stanley Appelbaum, eds. Dover, New York, 1972. 156 pp., illus. Paper, $3.50. Reviewed by Enrique C. G. Sebastian* Some artists have left written testimonies of their work; Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) did not. It is necessary therefore to try to penetrate his inner being through his prints. He was a mirror reflecting the sentiments and the thoughts of the Mexican people before World War 11. He made more than 20,000 engravings, which range from a prayer leaflet, to local news events, to an international war. *Cda. Protasio Tagle 33, Mexico City, 18 D.F., Mexico. The book simply and briefly exposes the reader to prevailing ideas and historical events that permit Posada...