Books like In Vogue by Georgina Howell

290 p. : 25 cm

Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, this book traces the evolution of fashion exhibitions and their gala celebrations, featuring iconic shows, Vogue collaborations, and celebrity moments from 2001 to 2014.

Christian Dior’s autobiography reveals the rise of the ‘New Look,’ the workings of a Paris haute couture house, and the private life of the famed designer.

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

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

In this forthright, anecdotal memoir, Grace Mirabella describes her journey through the exciting and treacherous worlds of fashion, glossy magazines, and high society. Apprenticed to the outrageous Diana Vreeland, she put up with the temper tantrums and fits of pique and genius of some of the most sought-after creative minds of the era. She also saw everything she thought was wrong with fashion magazines: the distance from reality, the disinterest in real women and their lives, the disregard for money. When she succeeded Vreeland as Vogue's editor in chief in the 1970s, Mirabella redesigned and redefined the magazine. By the end of her seventeen-year term with Vogue, its readership had tripled. But in the 1980s, Grace was very publicly fired. Displaying the strength, grace, and sheer style for which she has come to be known, within months she had taken the helm of a brand-new magazine, the national award-winning Mirabella.

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.

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.

Originally born in Algeria, Yves Saint Laurent moved to Paris when he was 18, and only three years later he was handpicked by Christian Dior to take the reins as designer of his fashion house. Over time, Saint Laurent resur- rected haute couture from the casual mores that predominated in the 1960s, but also offered chic cachet to ready-to-wear clothing. He was among the earliest of designers to incorporate non- European references into his work, and in 1983 he became the first living designer to be feted with a solo exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Vogue on Yves Saint Laurent is a stellar volume in the series from the editors of British Vogue, featuring 20,000 words of original biography and history and studded with more than 80 images from their unique archive of images taken by leading photographers.

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.