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Bring order to your wardrobe, love your clothes again, and get dressed in an instant with the help of the Practical Princess. In Practical Princess Perfect Wardrobe, organizational whizz and wardrobe expert Elika Gibbs shares the secrets of her unique three-step process, putting the luxury of a complete wardrobe makeover within everyone’s reach. Elika starts with a wardrobe assessment that’s designed to help you dress for the life you lead, and offers plenty of hand-holding as you clear out your closet. Once you’ve decided what to keep and what needs to go, the next step is to reorganize, rehang and colour coordinate your wardrobe. Finally, Elika focuses on savvy and successful shopping to fill the inevitable gaps. The result? A hard-working, streamlined wardrobe that makes it easy to get dressed and easy to feel confident about yourself.
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In the 1830s an Irishman named James F. O’Connell acquired a full-body tattoo while living as a castaway in the Pacific. The tattoo featured traditional patterns that, to native Pohnpeians, defined O’Connell’s life; they made him wholly human. Yet upon traveling to New York, these markings singled him out as a freak. His tattoos frightened women and children, and ministers warned their congregations that viewing O’Connell’s markings would cause the ink to transfer to the skin of their unborn children. In many ways, O’Connell’s story exemplifies the unique history of the modern tattoo, which began in the Pacific and then spread throughout the world. No matter what form it has taken, the tattoo has always embodied social standing, aesthetics, ethics, culture, gender, and sexuality. Tattoos are personal and corporate, private and public. They mark the profane and the sacred, the extravagant and the essential, the playful and the political. From the Pacific islands to the world at large, tattoos are a symbolic and often provocative form of expression and communication.

Tattooing the World is the first book on tattoo literature and culture. Juniper Ellis traces the origins and significance of modern tattoo in the works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, travelers, missionaries, scientists, and such writers as Herman Melville, Margaret Mead, Albert Wendt, and Sia Figiel. Traditional Pacific tattoo patterns are formed using an array of well-defined motifs. They place the individual in a particular community and often convey genealogy and ideas of the sacred. However, outside of the Pacific, those who wear and view tattoos determine their meaning and interpret their design differently. Reading indigenous historiography alongside Western travelogue and other writings, Ellis paints a surprising portrait of how culture has been etched both on the human form and on a body of literature.

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Michel Pastoureau’s lively study of stripes offers a unique and engaging perspective on the evolution of fashion, taste, and visual codes in Western culture.

The Devil’s Cloth begins with a medieval scandal. When the first Carmelites arrived in France from the Holy Land, the religious order required its members to wear striped habits, prompting turmoil and denunciations in the West that lasted fifty years until the order was forced to accept a quiet, solid color. The medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from a foreground disturbing. Thus, striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order — jugglers and prostitutes, for example — and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often depicted wearing stripes. The West has long continued to dress its slaves and servants, its crewmen and convicts in stripes.

But in the last two centuries, stripes have also taken on new, positive meanings, connoting freedom, youth, playfulness, and pleasure. Witness the revolutionary stripes on the French and United States flags. In a wide-ranging discussion that touches on zebras, awnings, and pajamas, augmented by illustrative plates, the author shows us how stripes have become chic, and even, in the case of bankers’ pin stripes, a symbol of taste and status. However, make the stripes too wide, and you have a gangster’s suit — the devil’s cloth indeed!

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