Word: fashionability
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...handful of men and women who have succeeded for more than a few seasons in the total-risk business of high fashion are a caste apart. Surely the most richly rewarded artisans in the world, they are natural celebrities and dictators of taste and fads. Rare indeed is the designer who is not surefire copy for the press. So it comes as something of a surprise that Caroline Rennolds Milbank's Couture fills a real need. Very little of substance has been written about couturiers. Most of the best commentary on their work is squirreled away in novels: Proust...
...department at Sotheby's auction house and realized that there was no single useful reference work. Couture certainly is that, but it is also highly entertaining social history. Milbank is gifted at writing appreciations, often the hardest kind of criticism to do convincingly. But there is something of the fashion dictator in her as well. Armani is described with appropriate accuracy and awe, but he is the only Milanese included. Ignored as well are whole ranks of French headliners, including Claude Montana and Jean-Paul Gaultier, and the British radical Vivienne Westwood, a perennial darling of the fashion press...
...book like Couture is irresistible to an amateur fashion handicapper. The author gushes a bit over Karl Lagerfeld, a cheeky, fluent idea man, and finds nearly invisible depth in the creations of Hardy Amies, a reliable but stodgy British tailor. The book is hobbled by rather arbitrary categories she imposes to organize her designers: artists (Fortuny, Mary McFadden), purists (Chanel, Vionnet), architects (Balenciaga, Charles James), realists (Norman Norell and Miyake, of all people). Also, although it may be patrician not to talk about money, the vast fortunes made by the likes of Saint Laurent and Lauren go unrecorded, making...
There are several entries on fashion's sublime kooks. Elsa Schiaparelli, a blithe and irreverent spirit, jazzed up the '30s with her whimsical lambchop hats and red-apple purses. Roberto Capucci still does what he has always insisted on doing, creating one outrageously intricate gown and never replicating it. Charles James, the most brilliant American designer ever, was shackled by paranoia and notorious business dealings. He died broke and nearly forgotten in 1978, but the influence of his fabulous ball gowns remains, whether they are executed in a Paris atelier or a Hollywood costume department...
...charts, and her current eight-city U.S. tour is sold out. She has also been named one of the world's ten most elegant women by Elle magazine. Pretty good for someone who got into singing only to earn a few pounds while struggling to make it as a fashion designer...