It seems that the publishing houses have spread the word: at the end of the year several works of the same genre are coming out – detailed and well put together – on brands, designers or trends, or sometimes all three at the same time. Enough to become an expert on fashion.
Review your classics
Starting from the principle that “our clothes tell our intimate landscapes, but also our social, political, cultural and economic stories”, and we ultimately don’t know much about them, Hayley Edwards-Dujardin has launched a fashion anthology listing 78 timeless clothes and accessories, 60 iconic brand creations and 22 emblematic styles. This historian, a graduate of the Ecole du Louvre and the London College of Fashion, is interested in both basic jeans and the men’s skirt by Jean Paul Gaultier. And summarizes in one or two pages rich in photos, graphs and diagrams everything you need to know on the subject.
Thus, we learn that the down jacket, which we generally associate with Uniqlo, Moncler or rap videos, was born thanks to a certain Eddie Bauer, who, after almost dying of hypothermia, imagined a quilted coat garnished with goose down over its entire surface, patented in 1936. Two years later, the American fashion designer Charles James created the first “couture” down jacket by imagining an ivory evening jacket, with the same manufacturing technique as an eiderdown, and nicknamed “pneumatic jacket”.
Timelessby Hayley Edwards-Dujardin (Editions du Chêne, 288 pages, 39.90 euros).
Once upon a time…
It’s been a few months since we saw these little books in English well placed in the fashion sections of bookstores, they are now translated into French, in a version that is a little longer and more documented than the original. Initially released by the British publisher Welbeck, these “Little Books of” tell the story of a brand in a very educational and factual way. And with lots of captioned illustrations that will allow the neophyte to understand what it’s all about.
To tell the story of the singularity of Prada, for example, the authors return to the color associations sometimes perceived as strange (mustard yellow, olive green and pastel blue for a print that evokes formica in the spring-summer 1996 collection) or recount the research of modernity by detailing the composition of a leather, rope and rubber sole. Chanel, Dior, Hermès, Vuitton, Prada, Saint Laurent have already appeared. Gucci and Versace will be added to the collection in February 2024.
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