The book questions Western notions of fashion, investigates the potential of traditional dress cultures to become a «fashion system» (India), looks closer at the new mixture of oriental and occidental perspectives (Bollywood), and asks whether a «third space of fashion» emerges. Orientalizing practices in fashion since the Renaissance are shown as well.

Gertrud Lehnert is Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam. Her research focuses on the theory and history of fashion and on gender history. Gabriele Mentges is Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Material Culture at the department Art and Material Culture, Technical University of Dortmund, research and teaching focus on fashion history, museology, design history, body and gender history.

Contents: Gertrud Lehnert/Gabriele Mentges: Fusion Fashion. Culture beyond Orientalism and Occidentalism – Buyun Chen: Toward a definition of «fashion» in Tang China (618-907 CE) – Gabriele Mentges: Drawing Borders: Perceptions of the Cultural Other in Renaissance Costume Books – Gertrud Lehnert: Orientalism in the 18th and 19th Century Fashion Magazines – Mona Abaza: The Motahajiba in Cairo, Inter-Arab Islamic chic, Adaptation, Hybridity and Globalization – Pravina Shukla: Fashion in the East: Dress in Modern India – Yuniya Kawamura: The Globalization of Japanese Lolita Fashion – Oly Firsching-Tovar: Reviving Kimono: Fashion as Memory at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century – Daniel Devoucoux : Bollywood, ou la réinvention de l´orientalisme et de l´occidentalisme dans le cinéma indien actuel.