How does the manufacture, design, and commodification of costume inform choreography and determine what dancers have worn on stage? How do certain types of costume influence the experience of dance and choreography for the performers, or for the audience? What political or social affects contribute to the impression that dance costumes communicate in movement aesthetics? By answering such questions, Fabrications provides new insights into the connections between twentieth-century American concert dance history, and both visual and fashion culture, while also presenting methods for appreciating how the artefacts of costume in archival collections activate important corporeal and cultural memories.

In the study of material culture, Rachel Fensham draws upon the dialectical image of Walter Benjamin, the fashion system of Roland Barthes, and writings on new materialism as perspectives for interpreting costumes in dance. Focusing on costume as multiplicity, she establishes the syntax of the textile, the silhouette, and the modes of construction as a method for the identification and analysis of typical costumes. Each chapter undertakes a quasi-chronological survey of choreographic works created by leading dancers, choreographers, and designers, including Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Josephine Baker. Illustrated with almost two-hundred full-color photographs of costumes from dance archives and stills from leading dance works in the United States and Europe, Fabrications presents a new and innovative way to think about dance history as material culture, understood through costumes that have stories that extend beyond the stage.