Product Description

Following the format of "The Art Book", this volume looks at the fashion world and the people who created and inspired it. The book contains an A-Z guide to the 500 most important names in fashion since the 1860s, including clothes and accessory designers, photographers, models and iconic individuals who instigated or symbolize a fashion movement. Designers represented include Paul Poiret, Christian Dior, Balenciaga, John Galliano, Coco Chanel, Pierre Balmain, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Jeanne Lanvin and Issey Miyake. The book provides a survey of fashion photography with work from Cecil Beaton, David Bailey, Guy Bourdin, Irving Penn, Steven Meisel, Nan Goldin, Eve Arnold, Craig McDean, Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton. The book is arranged alphabetically, and a cross-reference system and glossary explain collaborations and techniques used in fashion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4483 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 520 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
James Abbe, a 1920s fashion photographer, and Zoran, the designer whose simple, monochromatic clothes were extremely popular in the 1970s, anchor the 500 entries in this massive encyclopedia of fashion. Each designer, photographer, model or icon gets a page with a large photo and informative but short caption. This has the wonderful effect of weighting each entry equally, thereby devoting the same amount of space to Charles Revson, creator of the Revlon cosmetics empire and relative makeup newcomer François Nars, pioneering clothing designer Mariano Fortuny and contemporary favourite Tom Ford.

Clearly, a good set of eyes edited this book. It's a tall order to choose just one image to define the many facets of a designer, model, or photographer. The choices made here are excellent and often surprising. The indomitable Coco Chanel demonstrates the ease of movement her designs afforded women by briskly swinging her arm out to one side, while Kate Moss is shown at the height of her waifdom, likely the mode in which she will best be remembered. Model Linda Evangelista is pictured with curly locks of hair. It's obvious, too, that the editors employed the haphazard juxtaposition created by the alphabetical organization. Facing entries, no matter how seemingly incongruous, are united by a visual theme to spectacular effect. The ovals made by the either screaming or yawning mouths of Kurt Cobain and his infant daughter are mirrored in a 1937 Jean Cocteau illustration of an Elsa Schiaparelli design. A model in a 1930s outfit by John-Frederics faces a portrait of post-punk design queen Betsey Johnson, whose floral outfit echoes the flowery silhouette behind the model. A troika of Robert Lee Morris bracelets matches the arcs of a bombed-out London building in a 1941 Cecil Beaton photo of a Digby Morton design. The vibrant prints of Emilio Pucci and Lilly Pulitzer fall together naturally. The reams of fabulous images and the inventive design alone make The Fashion Book a treat at any cost, but the low price-to-size ratio (like its cousins The Art Book and The Photography Book) makes it a real bargain.

Review
The Fashion Book's production quality is a glossy-magazine junkie's dream - heavy, shiny white paper and graphically designed to within an inch of its life. And its content lives up to the way it looks - something of a rarity in the way of fashion books. It's essentially an A-Z of 500 movers and shakers in the fashion world, from Richard Avedon to Zoran, Balmain to Yamamoto. Its alphabetical format cuts through narrow categories and places models next to photographers, designers and fashion icons - where else would you find the late rock star Kurt Cobain next to Jean Cocteau? Enough pictures (one on every page) to be sumptuous, enough text (and glossaries and listings) to be informative - what more could you ask for? (Kirkus UK)

Customer Reviews

Perfect synopsis of the fashion world...
This a fantastic little book to dip in and out of - it covers a huge range of fashion icons from models to designers to photographers to milliners to.. etc etc. There is one page for each fashion icon, with photos and information about their background and what they are most renowned for. It does not go into great detail, but is a great introduction to discover people, brands and facts you did not know. It's one of those books that every time I pick up I discover something new! A must for anyone interested in fashion.

Amazing Fashion book A-Z
An amazing good Fashion book! A-Z of fashion icons, photographers, models, designers, etc. Everyone that is in the fashion world well known! I loved looking through the book as I didn't know every single person mentioned in it! It's a must buy if you are interested/in to fashion!

The Most Ambitious Fashion Summary Ever
This is the Reader's Digest Condensed version of the history of fashion over the last 150 years. Unlike Reader's Digest, this book succeeds in capturing the essence in amazing kernals of elegance, curve, design, and motion. Everyone who loves fashion should have this book. There is simply no substitute for it, and you will have many hours of pleasure looking at its exciting images and reading the descriptions. The book is a great value for its price, as well, which will help make it available to more people.

The book is in an unusual format, one page each for 500 icons, models, fashion and accessory designers, make-up artists, hairdressers, retailers, illustrators, and photographers done in alphabetical order. Each page typically has one person (a few have two), with one image, and one brief textual summary of the person's work.

It is an amazing challenge to capture all of a person's work in one image, and some great successes occurred. Some of my favorites were Madonna, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Harry Winston, Naomi Campbell, Coco Chanel, Noel Coward, and Rudi Gernreich.

On the other hand, some of the old black and white images did not reproduce well. Some of the worst examples are Antoine (a hairdresser with a photograph of Josephine Baker's hair), Maria-Louise Bruyere (a designer), Christian Dior, Max Factor, Barbara Goalen (a model), Gucci, and Hermes. In many cases, these choices appear to have been influenced by the desire to have the facing pages converse with one another. So you will see echoes of design, line, and style in these ways. I appreciate that effort (which is often quite eloquent), but it should not slight the individual whose work is being portrayed. I graded the book down one star for the compromises made here not working well in too many cases.

After you have finished reading and enjoying this book many times, I suggest that you think about where else it would be helpful to have a similar work in your life. Perhaps a scrapbook containing photographs of all of your friends who have something in common would be a possibility. You could write a brief text about each. This could greatly add to your pleasure in remembering these friends, and perhaps expand their interaction when they see how you have put them together.

Keep to the essence, but be bold!