Books like The Complete History of Costume & Fashion by Bronwyn Cosgrave

Survey of Historic Costume, 6th Edition, is a comprehensive, visual guide to Western dress from antiquity to the present, highlighting social, cultural, and artistic influences and the continuing impact of historic styles on contemporary fashion.

290 p. : 25 cm

Explore eight centuries of western costume with Joan Nunn’s illustrated survey, detailing garments, styles, fabrics, and social context from 1200 to 2000.

An authoritative study of Vogue magazine’s 75-year journey, examining couture, designers, and clothing within the broader social and cultural shifts of the twentieth century.

Gilles Lipovetsky explores how fashion—from elite privilege to mass culture—has shaped social identity, democratic values, and personal expression over two millennia.

An in‑depth exploration of the history of clothing and dress, tracing the evolution of costume and fashion through different eras and cultures.

A comprehensive survey of twentieth‑century fashion, charting its stylistic phases, key designers, and influential personalities.

Valerie Steele chronicles how world events, social change, and politics shaped global fashion from the post‑War era to the 1990s, highlighting shifts from ateliers to conglomerates, Cold War gender norms, youth rebellion, and the rise of iconic designers.

A pictorial survey of international 1960s fashion, exploring how style mirrored the era’s social customs and youth culture across the globe.

What Herbert Blau suggests, in Nothing in Itself, is that fashion itself, today, has been anticipating and redefining, in the dazzle on the runway, or even in ready-to-wear, the terms in which it is critiqued, while sometimes giving the impression that it is inseparable from critique; in short, there is little to be said of fashion that is not somehow visible in fashion, though even in the mainstream we may call it antifashion. Which is all the more reason to look at the clothes. The book does so copiously, with a fastidious eye to style, as if nothing could be said of a garment, no appropriate fabric of thought, without the felt sensation. Meanwhile, if the theatricality of fashion, or the "fashion system," is now belabored in cultural studies, there are other seductive issues--recurring in history and, like the rise and fall of the hemline, approaching the metaphysical--that come with dress in its fascination-effect. As Blau sees it, this will inevitably return us to the validities, artful vanities, and deceits of appearance. No more than appearance, "nothing in itself," that fashion has substance, complex and elusive substance, is the thematic of this book, which puts another complexion on the subject, the look, and the look that incites the look, in high style, street style, classical elegance or fetishistic chic, from farthingale and corset to drop-dead glamour, power suits, waifishness, and grunge.

Fetish explores how changing attitudes toward sex and gender have shaped fashion, drawing on history, psychology, and interviews to examine the rise of fetish garments and their role in identity and power.