Discover a stunning celebration of fashion history with this limited-edition volume that showcases the defining designers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Featuring iconic figures such as Azzedine Alaïa, Cristóbal Balenciaga, Coco Chanel, Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent, and Vivienne Westwood, this collection highlights a century’s worth of groundbreaking fashion masterpieces. Drawn from the permanent collection of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the book offers a rich visual and scholarly exploration of over 500 garments, each illuminating the unique contributions of these legendary designers.
Photographs of these remarkable pieces are complemented by insightful texts from curators that explain why each designer is significant in fashion history and what makes the featured garments special. In her introductory essay, director and chief curator Valerie Steele discusses the rise of the fashion museum and the emergence of the fashion exhibition as both a popular and controversial phenomenon. Additionally, Steele and contributor Suzy Menkes provide a comprehensive history of the museum’s role in fashion scholarship and preservation, emphasizing its importance in the fashion world.
Fashion Designers A–Z is available as part of a series of six Designer Editions, with a total of 11,000 copies. Each edition is uniquely bound in a fabric created by one of six renowned designers—Akris, Etro, Stella McCartney, Missoni, Prada, and Diane von Furstenberg—and housed in a sleek Plexiglas box. Every copy is handcrafted at a bindery in Italy, stamped with a unique number, making each volume an instant classic and a truly one-of-a-kind addition to your fashion library.
The Prada Edition, limited to 2,000 numbered copies, features a special selection of fabrics chosen by Miuccia Prada. She reprinted four classic prints from previous collections on cotton: the feminine tiny “hearts,” the Baroque-inspired “bananas,” the abstract geometric “diamonds,” and a floral pattern originally issued for Prada from the 1960 Holliday & Brown archives. Orders placed online will be fulfilled with one of these exclusive Prada fabrics. The edition includes text in English, French, and German, offering a multilingual perspective on this exceptional collection.