Four Hundred Years of Fashion

The story of men's and women's fashionable dress through the ages, right up to the 1990's. It has a wide general audience as well as appealing to students and serious scholars.

Four hundred years of fashion

Arts & Photography

Mendes, Valerie D.

Hart, Avril

ROTHSTEIN, Natalie

GINSBURG, Madeleine

Graphic Design

Victoria and Albert Museum in association with W. Collins

Featuring a new format, design, and garments, this revised and expanded guide is an inspiring resource for those fascinated by modern fashion and the world of haute couture. 
20th-Century Fashion in Detail reveals the elaborate embroidery, intricate pleats, and daring cuts that make up some of the most beautiful garments in the twentieth- century fashion collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the world’s top fashion and design museums. Authors Claire Wilcox and Valerie D. Mendes, leading fashion experts from the V&amp;A, have written a book that will be an invaluable resource for students, collectors, and designers.
Including exquisite haute-couture pieces, from sequined Chanel ensembles to embellished Dior evening gowns, this revised and expanded edition features more than 30 new garments. Each piece is accompanied by detail photography and line drawings showing its complete construction. An extraordinary exploration of the techniques used by couturiers, 20th-Century Fashion in Detail will delight all followers of fashion. 115 illustrations in color with 170 line drawings

20th-Century Fashion in Detail (V&A Fashion in Detail, 1)

Lister, Jenny

Cullen, Oriole

Wilcox, Claire

Stanfill, Sonnet

Thames&Hudson

The black dress has inspired designers the world over to create some of their best work. This retrospective features specially commissioned photographs of the featured dresses, revealing their magnificent craftsmanship, exquisite detail, and fine fabrics.

Dressed in Black

V&A Publishing

Lavishly illustrated, this book shows how the Aschers united elements from the complex worlds of fabrics, art and fashion, providing fashion designers with a constant flow of inventive textiles from the immediate post-war years until today.

Ascher: Fabric-Art-Fashion (Victoria and Albert Museum)

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Faber&Faber

In the early 20th century, Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon (1863-1935), was an international fashion sensation. She created some of the most lavish, provocative, and controversial fashions of the Edwardian era, lingerie, tea-gowns and evening-wear that attracted famous beauties like Lillie Langtry and Mary Pickford. A flamboyant and eccentric character who survived the sinking of the Titanic, wrote a column for Hearst newspapers, and designed costumes for the Ziegfeld Follies, Lucile also trained the first professional fashion models, staged the first runway shows, and introduced revolutionary elements to women's dress such as lower necklines, slit skirts, and less-restrictive corsets. This fascinating and long-overdue study of Lucile's work includes a remarkable facsimile of her Fall 1905 fashion album, printed on special paper, and featuring over 60 watercolor illustrations and reproductions of luxurious fabric samples and trimmings. The book also draws on Lucile's own autobiography, Discretions and Indiscretions, a captivating window into the rarefied world of high Edwardian society and the extraordinary mind of one its most notable characters.

Lucile: London, Paris, New York and Chicago

De LA Haye, Amy

With a gorgeous new cover, this extensively illustrated book is a celebration of the V&amp;A's magnificent collection of 20th-century fashion. The latest title in the highly successful Fashion in Detail series, this book offers a detailed look at some of the most stunning garments in the collection. In meticulous detail, the book features line drawings of each garment's structure and specially commissioned close-up photographs of each item's most impressive aspects: fastenings, necklines, cuffs, hemlines, fringes, and more. Arranged thematically, the authors provide information about everything from seams, buttons and collars, to beads, tucks, and pleats. The result is a visual banquet of textures, patterns, and craftsmanship and an eye-opening testament to the variety and creativity of modern dress. An essential visual reference for designers, students, and fashionistas everywhere.

Twentieth-Century Fashion in Detail

The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is the world’s greatest museum of art and design, with a vast collection that been an unparalleled resource for designers for 150 years. This new series of pattern books presents the range of the V&amp;A’s superb collections. Beautifully designed, accessible, and informative– perhaps a little quirky – they are a repository of ideas for designers of all kinds, but also a collection of desirable gift books. Included in each volume is a CD of all the images shown within--to be redrawn, reworked, or even licensed for further use. The books are available individually or in a beautiful decorative slipcase. Novelty Patterns showcases the innovative and fanciful decoration employed for lightweight fabrics made between the early 1920s and the late 1940s. Approximately 60 color illustrations show off the varied witty and attractive patterns.

V&A Pattern: Novelty Patterns: (Hardcover with CD)

Decorative Arts & Design

Victoria & Albert Museum

Legendary British-born designer Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), with enormous talent for design and promotion, built his fashion house into an empire during the last quarter of the 19th century―the first business of its kind with global reach. His company, through his heirs, endured until 1952, when his great-grandson retired. Profusely illustrated, this astonishing book explores Worth’s success in the realm of haute couture after 1890. Hundreds of photographs selected from the V&amp;A’s unique archive of more than 7,000 official house records capture the Worth style and offer valuable insights into the daily routine at Maison Worth in Paris. Images and text tell the intriguing story of these creations, providing historical context and describing Worth’s international clientele of elegant women of wealth and power.

The House of Worth: Portrait of an Archive

On Reflection

In this lavishly illustrated book, Jonathan Miler investigates the efforts of painters to represent the effects of light on various reflective surfaces. Discussing a selection of works from artists as diverse as Rembrandt and Rockwell, he shows that the depiction of reflections has challenged painters for centuries.

Miller, Jonathan

National Gallery Great Britain

History & Criticism

Natl Gallery England

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Books by Mendes, Valerie D.