Dana Thomas is the author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano and the New York Times bestseller Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. Thomas began her career writing for the Style section of The Washington Post, and for fifteen years she served as a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She is currently a contributing editor for British Vogue, and a regular contributor to The New York Times Style section and Architectural Digest. She wrote the screenplay for Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, a feature documentary directed by Luca Guadagnino. In 2016, the French Minister of Culture named Thomas a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. She lives in Paris.
By Dana Thomas
An investigation into the damage wrought by the colossal clothing industry and the grassroots, high-tech, international movement fighting to reform it. .
What should I wear? It's one of the fundamental questions we ask ourselves every day. More than ever, we are told it should be something new. Today, the clothing industry churns out 80 billion garments a year and employs every sixth person on Earth. Historically, the apparel trade has exploited labor, the environment, and intellectual property--and in the last three decades, with the simultaneous unfurling of fast fashion, globalization, and the tech revolution, those abuses have multiplied exponentially, primarily out of view. We are in dire need of an entirely new human-scale model. Bestselling journalist Dana Thomas has traveled the globe to discover the visionary designers and companies who are propelling the industry toward that more positive future by reclaiming traditional craft and launching cutting-edge sustainable technologies to produce better fashion.
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By Diana Vreeland
Vreeland begins by telling readers: “The first thing to do is to arrange to be born in Paris. After that, everything follows quite naturally.” And that declaration sets the tone for this delightful, witty monologue, as told to Paris Review editor George Plimpton and originally published in 1984. D.V. makes you laugh out loud, and long for Paris, beauty, and really, really good lingerie.
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By Bettina Ballard
Ballard was the Paris editor for American Vogue between the wars, before returning to New York to help run the glossy. In 1960, she published her memoir, In My Fashion, a wonderful snapshot not only of the fashion industry during the European Modernist era, but also of life as a young single American woman in Paris at its most Paris-y. You don’t have to be a fashion lover to love this book.
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By Alicia Drake
British fashion journalist Drake tackles two of fashion’s giants—Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld—and shows how their lives and careers ran parallel, intersected, intermingled, then split decisively, giving birth to a fervent competition between the two men that upped creativity throughout Paris culture. It’s dishy, decadent, and divine.
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By Bill Cunningham
Photographer Bill Cunningham, who died in 2016 at the age of 87, is best known as the New York Times’ street fashion and party photographer. But he got his start in fashion, at the age of 19, as a milliner in New York. His career was briefly interrupted when he was drafted in the Army in the early 1950s and stationed in France—or so he thought. Cunningham started making hats for the officers’ wives, which allowed him to travel to Paris for materials. His tales of Paris are glorious—oh, how he was charmed by the city, and the French—and the diva moments he observes at fashion shows he attended are simply délicieux. The book proves that Cunningham was as gifted a writer as he was photographer.
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By Stanley Karnow
While not strictly a book on fashion in Paris, it is a wonderful exploration of all things French after World War II, and one of those things was the Christian Dior couture house. Karnow arrived in Paris in 1947 to study, and soon landed a gig writing for Time magazine. One of his assignments was a cover story on Christian Dior, whose company, in less than a decade, had become so successful it was known as the General Motors of Fashion. In the Dior chapter, Karnow beautifully evokes the mechanisms and machinations of a French couture house, and shows how fashion and Paris were deeply intertwined at the time. The rest of the book is a rollicking good read, too.
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