Average customer rating:
- Color illustrations would bee an improvement
- Best Resource for Actors and Costumers
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The History of Costume: From Ancient Mesopotamia Through the Twentieth Century
Blanche Payne ,
Geitel Winakor , and
Jane Farrell-Beck
Manufacturer: HarperCollins Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0060471417 |
Customer Reviews:
Color illustrations would bee an improvement.......2002-02-05
This is costume history on the broad line, as the title says. It gives a good overwiev and as a work of reference, not a specialised deepstudy in a short period or a single item, it is a satisfaying book. An improvement could however bee made in the illustrations, I do appreciate the correctness of stating that some pictures are "reedrawn from ..." I have seen other books were it was not stated although I knew it must have been done, but I would have prefered reproductions of the original pictures, and at least some of the illustrations to bee in color. I presume it was a matter of cost. But the book is not inexpensive as it is and there might bee others besides me who would seriuosly consider paying more if the illustrations were informative as to the colors as well. I have had the possibility to see the earlier edition (1960-thies) as well and compare them a bit and even if I can understand the wish to bee serious. There are a few alterations I wish they had not made.Had it for instance been such a problem to keep a photograp of an reconstruction of an ancient egyptian dress when it was so clearly stated that it was a reconstruction? And why on earth eliminate almost everyone of the of the patterns taken from existing pieces of costume. Yeas some of them have been mesured and published in other books as stated in the introduction, but what would have been wrong with the possibility to compare unless there were serious errors in their making? I could not spot any.
Best Resource for Actors and Costumers.......2000-05-21
This new edition of one of the best costume history books I've ever seen is very welcome. This edition has all of the power of the original with an added preface and a further, more detailed chapter on 20th Century dress. I have learned more about period details which have helped me as an actor from this book than from many classes. A necessary and pleasurable resource for the actor, costumer, designer and history buff. Worth the money!
Book Description
The London season is in full fling at the end of the 1920s, but the Honourable Phryne Fisher-she of the green-gray eyes, diamant garters, and outfits that should not be sprung suddenly on those of nervous dispositions-is rapidly tiring of the tedium of arranging flowers, making polite conversations with retired colonels, and dancing with weak-chinned men. Instead, Phryne decides it might be rather amusing to try her hand at being a lady detective in Melbourne, Australia. Almost immediately after she books into the Windsor Hotel, Phryne is embroiled in mystery: poisoned wives, cocaine smuggling rings, corrupt cops, and communism-not to mention erotic encounters with the beautiful Russian dancer, Sasha de Lisse. Will Phryne meet her steamy end in the Turkish baths of Little Lonsdale Street? Praise for the Phryne Fisher Mysteries... "The growing American audience for Phryne Fisher, Australian author Greenwood's independent 1920s female sleuth, will be delighted...." -Publishers Weekly on Cocaine Blues "This series is the best Australian import since Nicole Kidman, and Phryne is the flashiest new female sleuth in the genre." -Booklist starred review of Away With the Fairies
Customer Reviews:
Australian Flapper Folly.......2007-10-05
I was looking forward to discovering a new voice in the period piece mystery genre; but was disappointed in this one. Reviews that I had read implied that Kerry Greenwood was the Australian Agatha Christie. Not so, her flapper sleuth is just a little too self centered and selfish to be attractive. The improbability of the plot stretches credulity, the shallow characterization is unbelievable; and although set in Melbourne, is so lacking in atmosphere that it could be about Chicago. The only authentic Aussie flavor was in the street names and the obvious reversal of the seasons one encounters when going "down under". I will try one more title before I give this author up as a poor substitute for the real thing.
Flapper in the Outback.......2007-06-16
This was a light and breezy mystery as befits the era it portrays. I can't imagine why, but I expected a little more P G Wodehouse flavor.
Another great book. .......2007-06-08
All of Greenwood's books are head and shoulders above others, so when I say this is a strong novel, that's just means I wouldn't put it in her top three. It's still excellent, and you shouldn't miss any of this wonderful series.
Wonderful!.......2006-11-29
The Phyrne Fisher mysteries are an absolute delight. I can't wait to devour every book in the series.
Couldn't finish the book.......2006-09-08
Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood did not grab my interest at all. I couldn't finish the book. It was lacking detail, and it felt like the writing was immature. While I've read several good reviews of the Phryne Fisher series, the character seemed flat and uninteresting.
Book Description
Americans began the twentieth century standing in Europe's sartorial shadow, yet ended by outfitting the world in blue jeans, T-shirts and sneakers. How did this come about? What changes in American culture were reflected in fashion? What role did popular culture play? This important overview of American fashion in the twentieth century considers how Americans went from imitating British and French fashion to developing their own sense of style. It examines such influences on dress as class, jazz and hip hop, war, the space race, movies, television and sports. Further, the book shows how gender, psychology, advertising, public policy, shifting family values, the American design movement and expertise in mass production profoundly influenced an American style that has been exported across the globe.
Customer Reviews:
Fun To Flip Through.......2005-12-12
This coffee table style book is organized by decade and full of illustrations and photographs. Because of similar books already in our collection (e.g. HATS by Colin McDowell or HATS IN VOGUE) that were published earlier, this 1999 contribution didn't add much to the genre for us, but if you don't have one of the similar books, this is a good one to collect.
aspiring milliner.......2002-02-09
Nice overall presentation of hat styles, designers. milliners.
Brief, informative bios.
Great photos, great reference book.
Must have for hat enthusiasts as well as hat makers.
Not a source for technique.
A bit chaotic but nice; lots of information.......2001-05-09
The book covers hats, hat-makers and hat-wearers of the 20th century. It does have a chronological order, however, the contents still seem a bit jumbled. There is not much detail, but loads of information - all kinds of little tidbits and short (very short) biographies of milliners, "flashlights" on famous hat-buyers and fashion-leaders and their influence on the hat-styles of their time, little histories on single hat-styles and so forth. If you're looking for specific information - be prepared for despair. You'd have to be either very determined or very lucky to find the information you're looking for. If you want an easy-reader with great pictures, a feeling for the decades of the 20th century, the people and the hats, this is IT. The aspects and number of people and hats covered or featured is amazing. Overall, I'd recommend the book (there are not enough books on hats out there, anyway!) but would advise you to look elsewhere for detailed information.
A must for hat lovers!!!.......2000-09-13
I have always been a lover of hats and I when I picked up this wonderful book I could not put it down. The photographs are absolutly outstanding, colorful and detailed, the text wonderfully written, and a great book to have on your coffee table. Even if you don't collect hats as a hobbie this book is wonderful to cuddle up with on the couch or in front of a cozy fire.
Best book of the year.......2000-07-21
The pictures are great, the text is well written. You learn more about famous milliners like Philip Treacy or Patricia Underwood. I simply love this book.
Amazon.com
Murray Gell-Mann is a leading light in 20th-century physics, yet his name rings bells only for those interested in particle physics. Science writer George Johnson was fortunate enough to develop a friendly relationship with the great scientist, and his biography, Strange Beauty, glows with a rare intimacy gained from a notoriously private and irascible man. From his childhood in New York City to his current scientific elder-statesman status in New Mexico, Johnson explores Gell-Mann's life in glorious detail. A passionate, jealous, and brilliant man, he was capable of both profound insight and bitter lifelong rivalries, but Johnson finds there's much more to the man than these two simple poles; Gell-Mann's volatile family life and deft academic maneuvering also find room in this expansive biography.
The reader finds that Johnson's careful attention to detail shows more than it tells through enlightening stories of Gell-Mann's troubled, romantic, or pretentious dealings with peers, family, and even strangers. Explaining his strange surname means investigating old phone books, scientific legend, and family history, as the scientist is unwilling to shed light on the mystery (it turns out that his father hyphenated it, and Murray dreamed up etymologies as needed--giving rise to the tangled web of myths). Johnson is up to the challenge of recording the life story of a man nearly as strange as the quarks he discovered and named, and Strange Beauty lives up to the promise of its title. --Rob Lightner
Book Description
With a New Afterword
"Our knowledge of fundamental physics contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann."--Richard Feynman
Acclaimed science writer George Johnson brings his formidable reporting skills to the first biography of Nobel Prize-winner Murray Gell-Mann, the brilliant, irascible man who revolutionized modern particle physics with his models of the quark and the Eightfold Way.
Born into a Jewish immigrant family on New York's Lower East Side, Gell-Mann's prodigious talent was evident from an early age--he entered Yale at 15, completed his Ph.D. at 21, and was soon identifying the structures of the world's smallest components and illuminating the elegant symmetries of the universe.
Beautifully balanced in its portrayal of an extraordinary and difficult man, interpreting the concepts of advanced physics with scrupulous clarity and simplicity,
Strange Beauty is a tour-de-force of both science writing and biography.
Customer Reviews:
Some strange guys live in Aspin.......2006-09-12
Murray Gell-Mann was a child prodigy from Manhattan who became one of the outstanding physicists of the 20th century -- the man who revealed the "Eightfold Way" of classifying subatomic particles, and coined the name "quark" for the most fundamental building block of matter. If you are looking for "crystallized mathematics" in this shell game of ever-evolving theories, this well-written book may leave you unenlightened -- the "standard model" of subatomic physics is never explained in much detail. However, if you are interested in psychology, you will be fascinated by Johnson's portrayal of a compulsive and sometimes tortured personality who never seemed able to live up to his own expectations. And how original were his achievements? The pattern of the Eightfold Way was first discovered by an Ne'enam -- an Israeli colonel who developed the theory in his spare time when he wasn't buying submarines for the Israeli army. The ideas behind quarks may have been inadvertently lifted from Zweig. Was there possibly a ironic undertone to Feynmans famous quote? -- "Our knowledge of fundumental physicis contains not one fruitful idea that does not carry the name of Murray Gell-Mann." He was not above buying stolen goods -- Gell-Mann missed the funeral services for his arch rival Caltech colleague Richard Feynman when he was arrested in an FBI sting operation trying to purchase smuggled Peruvian artifacts. The multilingual Gell-Mann was able to deliver his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in perfect Swedish, but he was so paralyzed by writer's block that he stands alone as the only Nobel Prize winner who refused to submit an official lecture, and his solitary book "The Quark and the Jaguar" was renamed "The Jerk and the Quagmire" by frustrated publishers who could never get Gell-Mann to meet a deadline. Ultimately, Gell-Mann's difficult personality alienated him from his colleagues and even his biographers. Was this genius too disciplined -- or not disciplined enough? By the end of the book I found myself wondering if the key to Gell-Mann's legendary self-frustration was that something was lost in the search-light glare of his brilliant mind -- a muse.
--Auralgo
Dear George Johnson, esq........2004-02-28
I have this book of March 4, 2003.
I ask you about its edition in Russia?
vavivlad-rvc@mtu-net.ru
This is strange beauty for a popular science.......2003-07-06
The author intrigues and grasps the reader by the stories about physics of 21 century. It is physics of a particle and only particles. The author makes it do benevolently to allow human reason to penetrate in salt of a science and to open for itself new.
Further it can directly flash in a good pleasant society, with the friends or before the heads on a service. So!
It is not population of a science. It is introduction far in a cult of individuality, doing elementary particles huge as our life and a science.
The author comes off in this book as the devoted theorist and passionate man, but also and as the real man.
The search of this "new" particles it are always jumps on a hippodrome. In synhro-, fazo- and so on -tron, the same circle for run and same human passions.
The reader can want to ignore some material of the author and to not read all¸ in succession.
However, to tell the truth, it is an excellent and well readable material for any educated man and woman, especially, if they are Americans, moreover and lives in USA.
Powerful biography of a powerful physicist.......2001-01-23
This is an easy 5. George Johnson took care of the writing and left the physics to Murray. I have always felt an uneasy awe when hearing of the "next" Gell-Mann concept as I grew up hoping to someday become a scientist.
Johnson's book exposes the raw energy of scientific creation in a man so obsessed with "doing it all". It reveals personal traits of a driven human spirit. Based on the prose, Murray must have been something to deal with; but of course, wasn't it well worth it. I know I haven't; but I feel I have met the physicist that orchestrated the rag-tag "particle zoo" of Opie to perform its siren songs.
From the birds that he knew, and thru languages he expressed himself of which math was only one, Gell-Mann would have fit well in the Renaissance. Johnson also exposes Murray's personal life, its beauty, its tragedy, its strangeness.
Though a biography, Johnson's book is also an excellant account of the competition to paint a picture of the physical world. There is little physics, but the events and descriptions of the breakthrus are a must read for any serious physicist.
I hope to hear more from Johnson and more from Murray Gell-Mann.
Success and Frailties of a Nobel-Prize Physicist.......2000-09-15
George Johnson beautifully describes the life and work of the Nobel-Prize physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the revolutionary history of elementary particle physics. In addition to how the important discoveries of the Eightfold Way and quarks were made, we learn Gell-Mann's diverse interests in linguistics, ornithology, archaeology, environmental problems and complex phenomena. The author writes not only about the physicist's brilliance and success but also his human frailties such as his experiences of writer's block and procrastination and his brooding temper, thus making the biography complete as viewed from every side. This is a good book for laypersons as well as for physicists.
Average customer rating:
- Venus Come Forth!
- The Sublime Gone Wrong
- The Good, the Bad, and the Whiner
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Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-century Art
Wendy Steiner
Manufacturer: Free Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0684857812 |
Book Description
Whereas previous eras had celebrated beauty as the central aim of art, the modernist avant-garde were deeply suspicious of beauty and its perennial symbols, woman and ornament, preferring instead the thrill and alienation of the sublime. They rejected harmony, empathy, and femininity in a denial still reverberating through art and social relations today. Exploring this casting of Venus, with all her charms, into exile, Wendy Steiner's brilliant, ambitious, and provocative analysis explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty.
Tracing this strange and damaging history, starting from Kant's aesthetics and Mary Shelley's horrified response in Frankenstein, Steiner untangles the complex attitudes of modernists toward both beauty and the female subject in art. She argues that the avant-garde set out to replace the impurity of woman and ornament with form -- the new arch-symbol of artistic beauty. However, in the process of controlling desire and pleasure in this way, artists admitted the exotic fetish objects of "primitive" cultures -- someone else's power and allure that surely would not overmaster the sophisticated modernist. A century of pornography, shock, and alienation followed, and this rejection of feminine and bourgeois values -- domesticity, intimacy, charm -- kept the female subject an impossible and remote symbol. Ironically, as Steiner reveals, the feminist hostility to the "beauty myth" had a parallel result, leaving Western society alienated from desire and pleasure on all sides.
In the course of this elegantly constructed and accessibly written argument, Steiner explores the cultural history of the century just ended, from Dada to Futurism, T. S. Eliot's Wasteland and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to Pumping Iron II: The Women and Deep Throat, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Outsider Art, Naomi Wolf and Cindy Sherman, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, ranging across art and architecture, poetry and the novel, feminist writing and pornography.
Only in recent years, Steiner demonstrates, has our culture begun to see a way out of this damaging impasse, revising the reputations of neglected artists such as Pierre Bonnard, and celebrating pleasure and charm in the arts of the present. By disentangling beauty from a misogynistic view of femininity -- as passive, narcissistic, sentimental, inefficacious -- Western culture now seems ready to return to the female subject and ornament in art, and to accept male beauty as a possibility to explore and celebrate as well. Steiner finds hints of these developments in the work of figures as varied as the painter Marlene Dumas, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, and the choreographer Mark Morris as she leads us to a rediscovery and a reclamation of beauty in the Western world.
From one of our most thoughtful and ambitious cultural critics, this important and thought-provoking work not only provides us with a searching analysis of where we have been in the last century but reveals the promise of where we might be going in the coming one.
Download Description
The author of "The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism" now takes an ambitious and provocative new look at the evolving definition of "beauty" in our culture, from Manet to Mapplethorpe, Mary Shelley to Martha Stewart.
Customer Reviews:
Venus Come Forth!.......2004-03-15
I bought this book and was thoroughly pleased. Steiner is a great writer and has consistently written good work. I do agree that her agenda is a little heavy, but if you care to read her other work you will see that she is qualified in making the pronouncements she does. It is the privilege of anyone who has worked this long in the field. I would recommend reading her "Pictures of Romance" for a deeper treatment of aesthetics. It is a great book as well. This book however, is correct in the thesis it sets out to trace. Steiner locates the demise of the concept of beauty in Kantian aesthetics, specifically the "Critique of Judgment". I especially appreciate the way she makes Kant's arguments come alive by comparing them to Shelley's Frankenstein. In the end Kant trades places with Frankenstein...the doctor and the monster. Steiner works out her feminism by removing the locus of intellectual value from Kant, and placing it with Mary Shelley. That's good feminism, subtle and unmistakeable. Some people may not like Steiner because her feminism is not of the usual kind. I mean, she is not a "beauty myth" kind of feminist. Don't think she's not a feminist though, her message is loud and clear. I recommend this book strongly.
The Sublime Gone Wrong.......2001-12-23
Steiner recasts the thread of 20th century art as the search for the sublime gone wrong. The Kantian definition of the sublime as that which inspires awe and disinterested interest has lead to a dehumanization of art. According to her,this has come about because in the search for the eternal values that are associated with the sublime, the merely lovely has come to be associated with transience. Beauty has also been implicated, certainly as it applies to female subjects in art, since human beauty fades and turns to its opposite, it cannot be a fit subject for the search for the sublime. The process has led to a sterility driven by the replacement of life perpetuating emotions with formal issues. The course of art in the past century has thus followed a path through ever greater alienation. Artists have felt compelled to tackle ever more emotion laden and controversial subjects, confronting and challenging the public to see beyond the shock value to the formal issues that the artist purports to be elevating to the level of sublime.
As an artist who has been wrestling with these issues for over a quarter century, I really enjoyed Steiner's lucid exposition of the Zeitgeist which forms the backdrop for most thinking artist's work. Artist and public both, I believe dance rather unconsciously around the issues she is writing about. We know on an instinctual level what is going on, but it is really enlightening to read someone's thoughtful analysis. I found her writing enjoyable to read and quite accessible.
Her focus is primarily on the depiction of women in art as subjects for the contemplation of beauty. She shows how the images of women in the last 100 years or so have reflected the rejection of life perpetuating human emotions as unfit for high art. She sees signs of change. We are no longer requiring a sacrifice of what makes us human in the name of art. She sees a time "when beauty, pleasure, and freedom again become the domain of aesthetic experience and art offers a worthy ideal for life."
I highly recommend this book to artist and art appreciator alike, anyone who has wondered why avant garde art always seems so ugly.
The Good, the Bad, and the Whiner.......2001-11-28
In a sense, Wendy Steiner finds little to distinguish appearance from reality. In Venus in Exile, The rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art, for example, Steiner equates the 'beauty' of a woman as person with the 'beauty' of that woman's depiction. Ironically, Steiner borrows this universalizing view from the same philosopher that she identifies as anathema to beauty. Following Kant, Steiner links natural to artistic beauty, and, hence, holds an aesthetic view that overrides ontological categories. Thus, in the world according to Stiener Beauty equals Woman equals Art. The snake in the garden, however, is Kant's idea of the sublime. The sublime appeals, she claims, to the self-erasing thrill of a brush with death. In contrast, the allure of beauty promotes interest in life. In fact, Steiner recommends that viewers and artwork interact after the model of Cupid and Psyche. (Imagine, for example, a chummy interaction of diner and bed with Notre Dame or a piano concerto.) Moreover, the desire to experience the thrill of the sublime explains the denial of Beauty/Woman that characterizes the art of the 20th century. In addition to the distortions (i.e. pornographic imagery) or avoidance (i.e. non-representational shapes) of female figuration, 20t-century art also excludes or diminishes domestic subjects. Together the exclusions of beauty and woman and the 'good' or the non-aesthetic value of domesticity show, Steiner argues, the misogyny of the artists and, thereby, their hatred of life, love, and so on.
Given Steiner's credentials, the intellectual sloppiness that informs Venus in Exile is disappointing. In addition to her uncritical acceptance of art defined as aesthetic effect, her opinions betray Freud -images in art as in dream point to external causes-as the father of her psycho - utopian love child called Venus in Exile. Moreover, why the sudden, slap dash treatment of modern dance and the tiresome swipe at ballet in the last three pages of the book? That addition did little more than demean the art forms. Art forms, moreover, dominated by women. Finally, the hyperbole that demonized Kant and reduced the artwork of an entire century to the status of thrill distracted from rather than expanded on the topics of art, aesthetics, and woman as subject.
Book Description
From the turn-of-the-century S-bend silhouette to the bumster and bustier of today, this comprehensive survey explores all the significant developments in fashion in a century that has witnessed a growing preoccupation with personal appearance and clothing. Written by two experts in costume from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it explores movements and innovations in style for both men and women through the work of the most original and influential designers and couturiers. Organized around crucial shifts in style and major world events, the book places exciting, even revolutionary, developments in fashion within their socioeconomic, political, and cultural contexts. International in scope, it encompasses the century's most important designers and metropolitan fashion centers, including developments in accessories, hairstyles, and make-up. The importance of mass production, advances in man-made fibers, the growth of ready-to-wear, and the major influences of postwar subcultures on contemporary fashion are also discussed. A reference section includes an extensive bibliography and a glossary of designers.
Customer Reviews:
Good review of 20th century fashion in relation to history of the time.......2006-01-15
I bought this book for my daughter who is studying Fashion Design as a freshman in high school. I think I may enmjoy the book more than she, especially the part about the 60s! The section on WWII is very interesting; did you know the reason men lost their turnups on trousers was due to rationing of fabric? I finally found out what utility fabric was and saw a picture of a demob suit! Not loads of pictures but those that there are are good and illustrate the text well.
Customer Reviews:
VERY GOOD.......2007-01-03
This is a very good reference book to have if you are working in the film/TV industrie or even Theatre or any other fashion area. it gives you a very good overview of every period for men, women, and children (which is very rare to find). it even shows accessories, hats gloves etc.
Some strengths, but some serious weaknesses.......2006-08-19
I am very disappointed with this item. I bought it on the strength of Peacock's Shoes: the Complete Sourcebook, and the fact that Thames & Hudson was the publisher (another reputation bites the dust). One problem that both books share is that the title doesn't really convey the scope. I realize that it is hard to define vague areas, but this is more or less Western European and American fashion, it is only about women's clothing, not even the 2003 reprint covers the entire 20th century (it's 1900-1990), and "complete sourcebook" is a bit of an exaggeration. Christian Lacroix claims in the Preface that the fashions of the 1990s are too diverse to be covered. How "fashion" is defined is one of the chief problems with the book.
The basic plan is a good one: fashions for various occasions along with their associated underwear and accessories. The book is broken up into sections covering 5 years (e.g.,1900-1904) Each section has a page each of haute couture, accessories (usually shoes, purses, hats, wraps, and oddly enough, tops such as blouses and sweaters), leisure wear, underwear, evening wear, bridal fashions and two pages of day wear. Coats, jewelry, wigs, gloves, etc., are covered only sporadically. All are illustrated in color by 1100 drawings of a number of garments with dates; only the haute couture are attributed to specific designers. Apparently in order to save pages, the keys to the illustrations, with detailed information about the items, are grouped together in 10 year increments. I find this a bit annoying, but I understand the motive. This is followed by a very useful section with silhouettes for the beginning and ending of each five year period, with description of typical details: e.g. fabrics, trimmings, necklines. This is followed by brief vitas of designers and a bibliography.
There are some oddities in this admirable plan. I was born in 1953, so I remember several decades. Slips start vanishing from the illustrations in the 1960s, even though Peacock still shows plenty of dresses, and are pretty much absent in the 1980s. I suspect more women wore slips later: dresses and skirts were actually more popular than a decade earlier. Contrary to the impression conveyed in the drawings, women did not stop carrying purses in 1970-1974 and 1985-1990.
Worse, Peacock has ignored some of the major trends in 20th century clothing: blue jeans and denim; the decline of hats; and the rise of the woman's business suit. Even given that a book of this size can't really be "complete" this is a major failing.
The industrial revolution made clothing relatively cheap: even the poor could afford new clothing and affect designs. As Christian Lacroix says in the Preface: "... the more the century progresses, the greater the gulf between magazine images of fashion and what is actually being worn on the street." Peacock seems to ignore this. Lacroix continues less accurately: "There is no risk of that with this book ... the every day is ... side by side with fashion's idealized images."
Peacock himself says: "As dictated by the couturier, fashionable dress represents an ideal which few women attain but to which many aspire." He states that this book is his impression of the "ideal". I question defining fashion as strictly determined by couturiers or designers. They are a phenomenon of only the last couple of centuries; fashion existed long before they did. Historically, fashionable clothing was available only to the fairly wealthy and was an indication of their status. Now more people can afford designer clothes, but choose not to wear them. Bell-bottom jeans were as much a fashion of the 1960s-1970s as mini-skirts. Further, jeans were later created by some of the fashion designers that Peacock lists.
There are only hints that hats were pretty much abandoned except for cold weather and, in some cases, religious venues. Someone once described this as the greatest revolution in Western costume! When I was young, most women would never have gone to church or anything other than the most casual event without gloves and a hat. If they didn't have a hat, many put a handkerchief on their head. Now it is very common for women to be bare-headed.
Lastly, the business suit, particularly the knee-length versions that have probably been the most common, are virtually ignored.
The variety of types of garments are a major strength of this book, and some people may want it for that reason. I think it is a very poor representation of how people, even those consciously following some fashion, actually dressed. I suspect that many people with a great interest in the fashion of these years have this information already, and it is questionable as a sole, basic source. Certainly I wouldn't suggest that a novelist, say, rely on this as a representation of clothing in the last half of the century at least.
Historical Documentation of Fashion.......2003-12-29
This is a nice book. I want to be a fashion design so my mom thought this would be a nice book,...it wasn't what I was hoping for but it helps if I ever have 'designer's block.' You can look at some of the designs and certain trends and work them into a peice of clothing. And since I've had a bit of trouble drawing my design with people and poses this gives me an idea of what it needs to look like but it doesn't help you draw better. All in all it's a pretty nice book, but not the kind I would have bought but I'm glad my mom did because it's given me lots of ideas.
great "handbook".......2003-03-19
I'm a vintage clothing dealer and use this book constantly. Not as a reference for myself (there are many better books on this subject) but as a guide to show customers a general guide to the "look" of a certain period. The picture outline format is great for just illustrating trends in outfits from the time. I show them how you can capture a look with certain styles or accessories that may or even may not be period. It is a wonderful tool that I have used many, many times. I may not recommend it as a comprehensive guide to vintage, but as a visual tool for a quick education at a glance, you can't beat it.
Like a book of paper doll cutouts.......2000-10-05
The book is filled with illustrations which are very nice, but I wasn't too impressed. Had I not bought it through Amazon, and was able to flip through it beforehand, I probably would not have bought it. Still, it looks pretty good on a coffee table.
Average customer rating:
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The Art of Fashion Accessories: A Twentieth Century Retrospective
Joanne Dubbs Balls ,
Dorothy Hehl Torem , and
Joanne Dubbs Ball
Manufacturer: Schiffer Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Fashion Design
| Commercial
| Graphic Design
| Design & Decorative Arts
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
Textile & Costume
| Design & Decorative Arts
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Fashion
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Beauty & Fashion
| Health, Mind & Body
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Antiques & Collectibles
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
Textiles & Costume
| Antiques & Collectibles
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
Textile Arts
| Crafts & Hobbies
| Home & Garden
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0887404618 |
Book Description
This gorgeous work takes a sentimental journey through 100 years of fashion accessories that have added individuality to each "new look." Hundreds of hats, shoes, gloves, scarves, jewelry, handbags, and more are presented in a decade-by-decade progression of fashion styles. The 478 glorious color photographs, original drawings, and extensive text bring the century to life-for "what" people wore reflects the tenor of the times that tells us "why!" This book is nostalgic, informative and a feast for the eyes. Collectors of vintage clothing will covet the information and outstandingly beautiful illustrations.
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