Bending the Rules – Camille Benda

Bending the Rules is a fascinating, provocative, and highly entertaining visual exploration of identity and gender through fashion.

Celebrated costume designer Camille Benda seamlessly weaves together the cutting-edge and the historical–spanning high fashion, dress in film, trendsetting brands, art history, and more–showing that gender and fashion have always been intertwined. Brought to life with a dazzling array of more than 160 images, Bending the Rules combines short essays and interviews with creative professionals to offer snapshots of fashion and gender expression across cultures, places, and time.

This unique portrait of fashion and identity explores how clothing can be serious and playful, limiting or liberating, express joy or longing, fear or fun, and much more. Readers will find captivating examples as wide-ranging as gender-confirming underwear line Urbody to Buddhist monastic life, Brad Pitt’s red-carpet skirt to gay cowboys and codpieces, Playboy and bustiers to Native American Two-Spirit beings. For anyone fascinated by fashion or the sociology of clothing, identity, and gender, this book offers a one-of-a-kind immersive experience.

More than 160 visuals include illustrations by Gwyn Conaway, a costume designer, fashion historian, and culture specialist, as well as archival and contemporary photography, self-portraits, magazine covers, embroidery, and more.

Through illustrated timelines, custom graphics, and content crafted with a sense of humor, playfulness, and curiosity, this artful social science book is accessible for newcomers and experienced fashion enthusiasts, from tweens exploring their own newly forming identity to cool aunts and switched-on grandparents.

From an 18th-century French chevalier to Japanese kimonos, medieval alchemical manuscripts to 15th-century Flemish paintings, African Ndebele aprons to Scottish tartans, this deeply researched exploration spans time, cultures, and geography.