The sixteen essays in this collection explore the surface as a site where complex forces meet, thorugh a wide range of subjects including avante garde fashion, the faking of antiques, postmodern architecture and design, and film costume. The book provides insights into the whole lifecycle of objects, not just their condition when new.

Glenn Adamson and Victoria Kelley: Introduction1. Victoria Kelley: A superficial guide to the deeper meanings of surface2. Lesley Millar: Surface and practiceTime, work3. Christine Guth: Layering: materiality, time and touch in Japanese lacquer4. Manuel Charpy: Patina and the bourgeoisie: the appearance of the past in nineteenth-century Paris5. Myriem Naji: A falsification of temporality: carpet distressing in Morocco6. Margaret Ponsonby: Textiles and time: conservation and public response7. Victor Buchli: Surface engagements at AstanaTextiles, skin8. Mary Brooks: 'No less dangerous to use than that of a Basilisk': skin and seventeenth century English embroideries9. Charlotte Nicklas: Colour, language and light in mid-nineteenth century women's fashion10. Rebecca Arnold: Wifedressing: designing femininity in 1950s American fashion11. Sarah Gilligan: Long coats, flowing fabrics: fashioning masculinity and desire in film and television12. Ulrich Lehmann: Surface as material, material into surface: dialectic in C.C.P.Depth, im/permeability13. Alice Barnaby: Surface recognition: light and reflection in mid nineteenth-century drawing rooms14. Stephen Knott: A theory of the paint-by-number surface15. Steve Brown: The materiality of print16. Glenn Adamson: Substance abuse: the postmodern surfaceIndex