Fashion historian Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is the author of Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Worn on This Day: The Clothes That Made History, and The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion. She is working on a biography of designer Chester Weinberg.
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The Way We Wed: A Global History of Wedding Fashion
The Way We Wed: A History of Wedding Fashion presents styles and stories from the Renaissance to the present day, chronicling evolving fashions, classes, and expectations. And because all wedding attire has a tale to tell, The Way We Wed also reveals fascinating personal stories of those who wore it.
The youthful bromance between Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent reads like an especially juicy novel. Friends turned fashion rivals, the two very different designers partied and peacocked their way through Paris in the decadent 60s and 70s, with all the drugs, love affairs, models, muses, and assorted Eurotrash that implies. In the wrong hands, The Beautiful Fall would read like mere gossip; Drake elevates it to a Shakespearean morality play, without losing any of the page-turning thrills.
In 1950s Paris, Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld were friends, the rising stars of the fashion world. But by the late sixties, the city was invaded by a new mood of liberation and hedonism, and dominated by intrigue, infidelities, addiction and parties. Each designer created his own mesmerizing world, so vivid and seductive that people were drawn to the power, charisma and fame, and it was to make them bitter rivals. "The Beautiful Fall" is a dazzling expose of an era and the story of the two men who were its essence and who remain its most singular survivors.
This began as an authorized biography, but Westwood proved such a slippery subject that journalist Mulvagh wisely decided to proceed without the designer’s cooperation. The result is a warts-and-all portrait of the important, eccentric, and often infuriating designer, from her scrappy, sloppy punk roots to her current status as the kooky grande dame of British fashion. She’s surrounded by an equally chaotic and colorful cast of feckless boyfriends, gurus, and musicians; London in the 70s and 80s is a character in its own right. Westwood’s raw talent shines through a litany of bad decisions, controversies, and copycats.
The acclaimed biography of one of England's great eccentrics and leading fashion designers, reissued in an updated edition to coincide with a major exhibition of Westwood's work at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
For three decades, Vivienne Westwood has been Britain's most consistently original, outrageous, eccentric and controversial designer. In that time she has evolved from an iconoclastic outsider to an internationally revered figure, with two British Designer of the Year awards, an OBE, her own successful fashion label and an unrivalled reputation for leading where other designers follow.
Her lifestyle could scarcely be in greater contrast to the opulence…
There have been so many biographies of Coco Chanel, good and bad, that it must be hard to find anything new (or nice) to say about her. This capsule history offers fresh insights into her lifestyle, inspirations, and obsessions. At La Pausa—her entirely beige bolt-hole on the French Riviera—Chanel waited out World War II alongside the likes of Colette, Igor Stravinsky, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley, Jean Cocteau, Wallis Simpson, and Somerset Maugham, who famously called the Riviera “a sunny place for shady people.” That reputation is certainly borne out by de Courcy’s book, which paints Chanel and her circle as being blissfully, willfully ignorant of the stealth war between the Nazis and the French Resistance raging around them.
In this captivating narrative, Chanel’s Riviera explores the fascinating world of the Cote d’Azur during a period that saw the deepest extremes of luxury and terror in the twentieth century.
The Cote d’Azur in 1938 was a world of wealth, luxury, and extravagance, inhabited by a sparkling cast of characters including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Joseph P. Kennedy, Gloria Swanson, Colette, the Mitfords, Picasso, Cecil Beaton, and Somerset Maugham. The elite flocked to the Riviera each year to swim, gamble, and escape from the turbulence plaguing the rest of Europe. At the glittering center of it all was…
The subject of this colorful miniature coffee table book has a resumé that stretches from Christian Dior in the 1960s to Stuart Weitzman in the 2020s. Baghsarian’s whimsical, sculptural shoes have a timeless charm; most of them could be worn today, with pleasure. But she remains largely unknown, even though her elastic and leather 5050 boot—created 30 years ago—is still a bestseller. Verin reminds us that long before Blahnik, Choo, and Louboutin, women like Baghsarian, Beth Levine, and Mabel Julianelli dominated the American footwear scene.
One of the most important shoe designers of the mid- to late twentieth century, Arsho Baghsarian spent more than four decades working behind the scenes for prestigious companies with men's names on the label, including Christian Dior, Andrew Geller, I. Miller, and Stuart Weitzman, as well as Shoe Biz. Her creative genius is illustrated in this photographic collection of full-page sketches, prototypes, and production pairs that she donated to the Fashion Institute of Technology. Known for her sculptural heels and the use of exotic materials such as snakeskin, crystal, and Lucite, Baghsarian's extraordinary journey spans from a childhood in Turkey…
Like any art form, fashion has its share of tortured geniuses. Perhaps none combined genius and torture with as much panache as Charles James, who dressed celebrities and socialites only to die in poverty. Vogue editor Bettina Ballard remembered that “he was constantly cutting and perfecting” his toiles, “which he turned, very occasionally, into actual dresses.” A personality as complex and demanding as his sculptural evening gowns, James knew everybody and got along with nobody—and you’ll understand why after reading Klein’s biography, which draws on recently discovered, unfiltered tapes James made for a planned autobiography that, like so many of his creations, he never he finished.
Christian Dior described him as the inspiration for the New Look. Salvador Dali called his work soft sculpture, and Virginia Woolf exclaimed, He is a genius. As George Bernard Shaw tells us, only unreasonable men change the world. This portrait of the life and times of Charles James winner of two Coty awards, and the subject of a 2014 Metropolitan Museum of Art show draws on the glamour of Europe in the 1930s, and the dazzle of New York City from the 40s through the 70s as it travels with James from his birth to privilege in England in 1906…
A spy school for girls amidst Jane Austen’s high society.
Daughters of the Beau Monde who don’t fit London society’s strict mold are banished to Stranje House, where the headmistress trains these unusually gifted girls to enter the dangerous world of spies in the Napoleonic wars. #1 NYT bestselling author Meg Cabot calls this exciting historical series "completely original and totally engrossing."
A School for Unusual Girls is the first captivating installment in the Stranje House series for young adults by award-winning author Kathleen Baldwin. #1 New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot calls this romantic Regency adventure "completely original and totally engrossing."
It's 1814. Napoleon is exiled on Elba. Europe is in shambles. Britain is at war on four fronts. And Stranje House, a School for Unusual Girls, has become one of Regency England's dark little secrets. The daughters of the beau monde who don't fit high society's constrictive mold are banished to Stranje House to be reformed into marriageable young…
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