Abstract

Los Angeles is undergoing a makeover. Leaving behind its image as all freeways and suburbs, sunshine and noir, it is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a walkable, pedestrian-friendly, ecologically healthy, and global urban hotspot of fashion and style, while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core, public spaces and ethnic neighbourhoods. By providing a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing, museums and designers as well as through readings of contemporary film, literature and new media, L.A. Chic provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes, urban processes, desires and politics that inform how the good life is being re-imagined in Los Angeles.
“As a techno-aesthetic text linking L.A. pasts to New Urbanist future possibilities within and beyond the sheen and screen of ‘prismatic’ postmodernity, this study is multidimensional, thickly textured and researched, combining critical theory, literary filmic density, and material-commercial observation like some kind of new cyber-urban ethnography of location cum figuration.”
ob Wilson, University of California, Santa Cruz
Susan Ingram is associate professor and Markus Reisenleitner is professor in the Department of Humanities at York University.