Perfection is in the detail- decorative seams, exquisite stitching, knife sharp pleats and voluptuous drapery feature alongside more unusual techniques such as stamping, pinking and slashing. Many of the skills displayed have been lost to the modern world- such labour-intensive handwork is no longer done and these effects cannot be replicated by machine. Yet many fashion designers take their inspiration from the past, adapting ideas to a more contemporary idiom. Containing a gallery of exquisite photographs, accompanied by clear line drawings showing the construction of the complete garment, this book will appeal to anyone interested in historical costume and textile history, from cut and construction to fabrics and trimmings. Above all, its elegant design makes it an inspirational gift for lovers of fashion.

You'll find answers to these questions in Fashion Through the Ages. This stylish oversized gift book includes twelve lavish full-color interactive spreads that present fashion's highlights. From the Roman Empire to the 1960s, each of the twelve spreads feature: -- A man, a woman, a boy, and a girl dressed in outfits of the era.-- Lift-up flaps revealing all the layers of clothing beneath (each with a tiny caption).-- A gatefold page with a historical overview and a fashion overview of the era.-- NMargin illustrations showing accessories, such as shoes, hats, hairstyles, and jewelry.Chock-full of fashion history and stunning costumes by an award winning illustrator, Fashion Through the Ages is a "must-have" for every budding trend setter.

Tracing the evolution of fashion-from the early draped fabrics of ancient times to the catwalk couture of today, Fashion: The Definitive History of Costume and Style is a stunningly illustrated guide to more than three thousand years of shifting trends and innovative developments in the world of clothing. With a wealth of breathtaking spreads-from ancient Egyptian dress to Space Age Fashion and Grunge-and information on icons like Marie Antoinette, Clara Bow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Alexander McQueen, Fashion will captivate anyone interested in style-whether it's the fashion-mad teen in Tokyo, the wannabe designer in college, or the fashionista intrigued by the violent origins of the stiletto and the birth of bling.

A glorious companion volume to Historical Fashion in Detail- The 17th and 18th Centuries and Modern Fashion in Detail, this book captures the opulence and variety of nineteenth-century fashion through an authoritative text, exquisite colour photography and line drawings of the complete garments. From the delicate embroidery on neoclassical gowns to the vibrant colours of crinolines and the elegant tailoring of men's coats, the richness of the period is revealed in breathtaking detail. The garments showcased here, drawn from the V&A Museum's world famous collection, were at the height of fashion in their time. They display a remarkable range of colours, materials and construction details- from the intricate boning on women's corsets to the patterned silk of men's waistcoats. Seen in close-up for the first time and further illuminated by detailed commentary and line drawings that show the ingenuity of the underlying construction, these carefully chosen garments illustrate some of the major themes of nineteenth-century dress.

Stays and Corsets: Historical Patterns Translated for the Modern Body goes a step beyond traditional historical costuming texts by not only providing you with historical pattern diagrams and information, but by showing you how to adapt these patterns to the contemporary body shape. Using her original pattern-drafting system, author Mandy Barrington will show you how to draft a historical pattern for a modern body shape, while still retaining an accurate historical silhouette. Each pattern has been generated from an original stay, corset, or pattern taken from a historical garment. The instructions to follow these new patterns are designed to accommodate any size of female figure, allowing you to avoid extremely difficult, time consuming, and inaccurate historical pattern re-sizing Requiring only basic prior knowledge of pattern drafting, all calculations have been worked out for the costume maker and are provided in simple tables accompanied by easy-to-read, step-by-step diagrams that clearly show how the historical pattern is plotted onto the female basic block, coupled with photographs of the constructed stays and corsets.

In Historical Style, Timothy Campbell argues that the eighteenth-century fashion press shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past and a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood.

No one interested in the history of dress, from art historians to stage designers, from museum curators to teachers of fashion and costume, can function effectively without Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion series, published by Macmillan since 1964. Since her untimely death in 1998, admirers of her work have been waiting, with increasing impatience, for the promised volume devoted to the linen clothes of the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, a companion to her previous volume on tailored clothes of the same era. Planned and partly prepared by Janet herself, and completed by Jenny Tiramani, Janet's last pupil, no other book exists that is dedicated to the linen clothes that covered the body from the skin outwards. It contains full colour portraits and photographs of details of garments in the explanatory section as well as patterns for 86 items of linen clothing which range from men's shirts and women's smocks, from superb ruffs and collars to boot hose and children's stomachers. Beautifully produced, it is an invaluable guide to both the history and the recreation of these wonderful garments.