Body Styles

BEAUTY - ADORNMENT - MODESTY - EROTICISM - STYLE & FASHION You upload your brain into a super computer. Are you still you? Anthropologist Ted Polhemus suggests not - meaning, communication and identity derive from the dynamic interface of mind and body. To be is to be incorporated. An anthropology professor once urged Ted Polhemus to study a 'serious' subject rather than 'fashion'. For more than four decades he has sought to prove this professor wrong - exploring how, far from frivolous, the decoration, modification and dress of the body has always and will always be fundamental and essential to what it means to be human. In Body Styles Ted Polhemus brings together all the varied strands of his explorations of the one and only Decorated Ape. Body Styles was first published in 1988. This new version updates and revises its research and text to bring into the 21st century. Also by Ted Polhemus: Fashion & Anti-fashion, Streetstyle, BOOM - a baby boomer memoir, 1947 - 2022