Season’s reading: be a style bookworm
If there’s a fashion fan in your life, make their bookshelf as stylish as their wardrobe with this year’s must-have coffee-table designer tomes, says Emily Cronin
WHAT All About Yves by Catherine Örmen, £35, Laurence King
FLIP TO The glassine envelope of paper dolls mounted on page 13
BEST FOR Friends planning getaways to Marrakesh
WHY Yves Saint Laurent’s design legacy is everywhere, from the
“le smoking” tuxedos smart women wear to smart parties, to the peasant dresses we live in all summer long. This book covers all that and much more, with paper dolls and reproductions of letters, sketches and posters that make it a sheer delight. Add it to your reading list before any visit to the new Yves
Saint Laurent museums in Marrakesh and Paris.
WHAT Pierre Cardin by Jean-pascale Hesse, £130, Assouline
FLIP TO Cardin muse
Hiroko Matsumoto shimmying in a cocktail dress on page 88 (and left)
BEST FOR Modern furniture aficionados
WHY When a design from 1950-something still looks futuristic, there’s every chance it’s a Pierre Cardin. Along with his clothes, the prolific designer has spent the past 70 years creating cars (the Cadillac Phaeton), aeroplanes, furniture, jewellery, handbags and more. His swoopy, space-age designs still look like nothing else out there. “It was always my intention to be different,” he says, “because that is the only way to last.”
WHAT Schiaparelli & the Artists
by Andre Leon Talley and Donald Albrecht, £65, Rizzoli FLIP TO La Femme aux Étoiles,
Kees van Dongen’s 1935 illustration, on page 217
BEST FOR Vintage fashion fans WHY Elsa Schiaparelli wasn’t just a darling of the Surrealist set; she was an active collaborator with many of the movement’s highestprofile artists. Besides the Shoe Hat and Lobster Dress she created with Salvador Dali, Schiaparelli worked on magazine shoots with Man Ray and Horst P Horst, commissioned buttons for her couture from Alberto Giacometti and inspired paintings and drawings by Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. And she all but invented hot pink – or, as she would have us call the hue, “shocking”.
WHAT Guy Bourdin: Image Maker by
Matthias Harder, £110, Assouline
FLIP TO The visual index of every spread in the back of the book
BEST FOR Art school students (and shoe fetishists)
WHY This book is not: safe for work. This book is: packed with models in full-on glamazon mode. Whether they’re striding down a hall in strong-shouldered blazers, dangling from acrobatic hoops in green leotards or laying on the floor in fur coats and high heels, these women appear every inch in charge. And Bourdin’s advertising images for French shoe designer Charles Jourdan will make you see shoe adverts in a whole new way.
WHAT Fiorucci, edited by David Owen, with a foreword by Sofia Coppola, £29.95, Rizzoli
FLIP TO Marc Jacobs’ interview on page 168
BEST FOR Denim-customising teens WHY New York’s Fiorucci store was more than just a place to buy the brand’s coveted jeans and crop tops. Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola hung out there as teenagers. Keith Haring painted the walls.
i-d founder Terry Jones designed the imagery. And when Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened Studio 54, they asked founder Elio Fiorucci to host the opening party (he booked an up-and-coming downtown singer named Madonna as entertainment). Just in time for the brand’s relaunch after years of dormancy, this zine-like book seems sure to win over a new generation of fans. WHAT The Story of The Face by Paul Gorman, £34.95, Thames & Hudson
FLIP TO Corinne Day’s “The Daisy Age” shoot starring a young Kate Moss from the July 1990 issue, page 204 BEST FOR Music fans who still have their idols’ The Face covers in storage
WHY Many of the images that have come to feel emblematic of the Eighties and Nineties began in The Face. This book includes the cover of Kate Moss grinning in a feather headdress, and so much more – Oasis, Blur, George Michael, the Spice Girls… Relive it all to a soundtrack of Wham’s Last Christmas. WHAT London Uprising: Fifty Fashion Designers, One City, edited by Tania Fares and Sarah Mower, £69.95, Phaidon
FLIP TO The map of designers’ studios on page 38
BEST FOR Past, present and aspiring fashion students
WHY The definitive resource for British fashion fans. The book contains authoritative interviews with 50 designers working in London today, from fresh-out-ofcentral-saint-martins strivers to industry titans. It’s the closest thing to a studio tour that you can wrap and put under the tree.
WHAT Fashion and Versailles,
Laurence Benaïm, £45, Flammarion FLIP TO Dovima in yellow Balmain, page 69
BEST FOR Francophiles
WHY It’s a good thing the Palace of Versailles is so vast, given the outsized role it plays in the fashion imagination. Versailles has been the birthplace of centuries of fashion innovation: dress codes, pregnancy-concealing dresses and Marie Antoinette’s towering wigs among them. And that’s before the parade of fashion shows and photo shoots that have taken place in its halls and gardens. Flip from pretty page to pretty page with a slice of cake at your elbow for truly multisensory escapism.