Miss Harriet Peabody dreams of the day she can open up a shop selling refashioned gowns to independent working women like herself. Unfortunately, when an errand for her millinery shop job goes sadly awry due to a difficult customer, she finds herself out of an income. Mr. Oliver Addleshaw is on the verge of his biggest business deal yet when he learns his potential partner prefers to deal with men who are settled down and wed. When Oliver witnesses his ex not-quite-fiance cause the hapless Harriet to lose her job, he tries to make it up to her by enlisting her help in making a good impression on his business partner. Harriet quickly finds her love of fashion can't make her fashionable. She'll never truly fit into Oliver's world, but just as she's ready to call off the fake relationship, fancy dinners, and elegant balls, a threat from her past forces both Oliver and Harriet to discover that love can come in the most surprising packages.
After a Fashion covers medieval through Art Deco styles, for men and women. It guides readers through each stage of a reproduction project planning, designing, choosing materials, and constructing. It advises them on all aspects of collecting vintage clothes buying, restoring, altering, and wearing. The pattern-making and sewing instructions are useful to sewers at any experience level. Directions have been added for using the Internet to buy and sell, research styles, and contact costumers and collectors. An updated, expanded appendix lists over 600 sources (on-line and otherwise) for supplies, vintage clothes, and information.
From the rise of the Fashion Café to the phenomenon of the supermodel, from "House of Style" to "Unzipped," the world of fashion has taken center stage in contemporary culture, for better or for worse. In turn, although the idea of fashion has been in circulation since time immemorial, not until recently has its profound and variegated effects–on economic activity, on social and sexual mores, and on aesthetic and psychological formulations–been fully considered. With delicacy and wit, Fashion: An Introduction investigates the different sides of recent debates over the production, marketing, and consumption of fashion. Drawing on economics, art, psychology, commerce, history, and the everyday, Joanne Finkelstein considers fashion in its various guises–as body decoration and costume, as a language and a form of display, as an expression of sexuality and as part of the urban experience. In so doing, she has given us the perfect introduction to fashion's social, economic, and aesthetic impact on the way we think and act.
A look at style and urbanism, offering a reconsideration of the role of fashion in city life and filling in overlooked gaps in the history of London and modern design.
These days, not even a new wardrobe can keep fashionista Rita Jewel from feeling blue. Perhaps the cure is a cooking class with a celebrity chef! But her appetite is ruined when murder becomes the main course… As a salesgirl at Dolce’s, a chic boutique outfitting San Francisco’s wealthiest women, Rita has the world’s greatest job. So why does she feel like last season’s Christian Louboutin stilettos—worn and out of style? Maybe it’s because her love life needs a makeover ASAP. From carrots to caviar, Guido Torcelli is the celebrity chef du jour. Perhaps signing up for his cooking class will serve as a much-needed distraction for Rita. But when Guido’s shot to death, Rita knows she’ll soon top the list of suspects. Guido was killed at his culinary school the same night she scrawled her phone number on a menu and handed it to him. Now she’s got to find the murderer before she’s forced to take all her meals in the prison cafeteria…
This meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated book charts the history of street fashion from its origins in high couture to its appearance on the streets. Beginning in the post-war period and largely picture-led, its accompanying text also examines the social roots of what we wear and what it expresses about ourselves and the times we live in. Fashion trends, together with their influences, are tracked and illustrated alongside the changing attitudes and accessibility that made fashion a part of daily life.
This book presents, above all, a study of the establishment and development of the Soviet organization and system of fashion industry and design as it gradually evolved in the years after the Second World War in the Soviet Union, which was, in the understanding of its leaders, reaching the mature or last stage of socialism when the country was firmly set on the straight trajectory to its final goal, Communism. What was typical of this complex and extensive system of fashion was that it was always loyally subservient to the principles of the planned socialist economy. This did not by any means indicate that everything the designers and other fashion professionals did was dictated entirely from above by the central planning agencies. Neither did it mean that their professional judgment would have been only secondary to ideological and political standards set by the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, as our study shows, the Soviet fashion professionals had a lot of autonomy. They were eager and willing to exercise their own judgment in matters of taste and to set the agenda of beauty and style for Soviet citizens. The present book is the first comprehensive and systematic history of the development of fashion and fashion institutions in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Our study makes use of rich empirical and historical material that has been made available for the first time for scientific analysis and discussion. The main sources for our study came from the state, party and departmental archives of the former Soviet Union. We also make extensive use of oral history and the writings published in Soviet popular and professional press.
The New York Times bestseller “[An] obscenely enjoyable romp.” —The New York Times Book Review The untold story of a New York City legend's education in creativity and style For Bill Cunningham, New York City was the land of freedom, glamour, and, above all, style. Growing up in a lace-curtain Irish suburb of Boston, secretly trying on his sister's dresses and spending his evenings after school in the city's chicest boutiques, Bill dreamed of a life dedicated to fashion. But his desires were a source of shame for his family, and after dropping out of Harvard, he had to fight them tooth-and-nail to pursue his love. When he arrived in New York, he reveled in people-watching. He spent his nights at opera openings and gate-crashing extravagant balls, where he would take note of the styles, new and old, watching how the gowns moved, how the jewels hung, how the hair laid on each head. This was his education, and the birth of the democratic and exuberant taste that he came to be famous for as a photographer for The New York Times. After two style mavens took Bill under their wing, his creativity thrived and he made a name for himself as a designer. Taking on the alias William J.--because designing under his family's name would have been a disgrace to his parents--Bill became one of the era's most outlandish and celebrated hat designers, catering to movie stars, heiresses, and artists alike. Bill's mission was to bring happiness to the world by making women an inspiration to themselves and everyone who saw them. These were halcyon days when fashion was all he ate and drank. When he was broke and hungry he'd stroll past the store windows on Fifth Avenue and feed himself on beautiful things. Fashion Climbing is the story of a young man striving to be the person he was born to be: a true original. But although he was one of the city's most recognized and treasured figures, Bill was also one of its most guarded. Written with his infectious joy and one-of-a-kind voice, this memoir was polished, neatly typewritten, and safely stored away in his lifetime. He held off on sharing it--and himself--until his passing. Between these covers, is an education in style, an effervescent tale of a bohemian world as it once was, and a final gift to the readers of one of New York's great characters.
Reveals how the creative genius behind the hit style platform @WeWoreWhat became one of the most recognizable names in fashion by trusting her gut, knowing when to take risks, and fighting to get what she wants in life.
This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the sixteenth century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress – seemingly both ephemeral and trivial – is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and every day culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.
