Books

More than thirty books on art, fashion, and visual culture, written across three decades for major academic and trade publishers.

Georg Lukács Reinvented: Realism in Contemporary Culture
How we see the world through them, and how the world sees us back.
Paint as the medium that both covers and reveals our existence.
Comic-book grammar, quietly rewiring film from the silent era to the blockbuster.
When aesthetics escapes the gallery and turns up in fashion and music video.
Clothes as signs and markers of gender and sexual identity, across history.
Reading graphic novels as literature, with Kirby as the Balzac of comics.
When a work exists across multiple versions and locations, where is it?
Thirty-five years of Chinese video art, told for the first time.
Where art stands now that everything else is also doing its job.
When masculinity stopped being a gender and started being a style.
Fashion and food, the restaurant and the catwalk, since the Middle Ages.
Designers disrupting fashion from within, across identity, class, race, sexuality and gender.
Saint Laurent, above all an artist of synthesis straddling fashion and art.
Libertinism as a form of fashion, from early modernity to the present.
When fashion outgrew the runway and started installing itself, from Worth to Pugh.
Postwar film, TV and comics, and the heroic types they dressed.
How attitudes to fashion changed in the global, digital twenty-first century.
The new orientalism that emerges under globalisation, across art, fashion and film.
Cosplay from sources and sites to performance and play, across global fandom.
A history of fake bodies, from automatons to the 1980s supermodel.
How clothing turns into fashion through the image that represents it.
The Chinese export arts behind one of the Met's most successful exhibitions.
An alternative history of modern and postmodern art, told through fashion.
Three decades of Australian performance art, told by scholars, curators and artists.
Five centuries of cross-traffic, the Orient wasn't only invented in the West.
Two centuries of fashion and art in a competitive love-hate relationship.
Art as ritual, commodity, symptom, agent of change, across Aboriginal and new media.
How theory enriches what we see in art and visual culture.
Mike Parr's 2002 endurance performance, where body, time and collaboration meet.
Australian installation art, gathered in essays both new and previously published.