Saturday, August 23, 2008

These are the books on fashion (or related to the subject) that I own:

The Art of Lee Miller by Mark Haworth-Booth. This is a very informative coffee table book with 5 colour plates and 175 duotone illustrations.

Big Book of Fashion Illustration by Martin Dawber. You can take a look at some of the pages inside this book on Amazon. It is very comprehensive and was a present. I wanted to grasp more about external parts of the industry and one of the ways of doing this is checking out the different types of illustration available.

Nineteenth Century Fashion in Detail by Lucy Johnston. Reading this and examining the pictures was a good way of grasping how clothes were made pre-industrialisation. It's also a good book for nineteenth century trends.

Historic Costuming by Nevil Truman has description of dress through different historical periods including the Romans (509BC to 324 AD) and George II (1727-60). If I have a sudden urge to understand Tudor daywear in court I look it up here.

Couture Culture by Nancy Troy.
This book is basically about modernity and the beginning of the commodity culture. It's very interesting and begins with a section on Poiret who is a designer that everyone has an extreme stance on.

Adorned in Dreams by Elizabeth Wilson is probably the staple. If you're interested in fashion history and theory and haven't read it then you probably need to go and get hold of a copy.

The Empire of Fashion by Gilles Lipovetsky. A book about the industry and culture rather than clothes. Ready to Wear as democratic revolution, advertising on the offensive, this book is about clothing as a cultural weapon and it gave me a good understanding of the complications of clothes.

London - after a fashion by Alistair O'Neill. This book examines the relationship between nineteenth and twentieth century London and fashion. It's incredible for fine detail, full of surprising little facts.

Fashion Dictionary by Guido Vergani. This literally is a current fashion dictionary.

The Fashioned Body by Joanna Entwistle. This is a lovely book that was incredibly helpful to me when I first started reading about this subject and it's summed up very well in the first chapter, the social world is a world of dressed bodies.

The History of Underclothes by C. Willet and Phillis Cunnington is a good education if you're interested in everything that people wear.

The Fashion Book. I forgot that I even had this but it sits alongside the Fashion Dictionary very well as a reference guide.

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