After A Fashion

Miss Harriet Peabody dreams of the day she can open up a shop selling refashioned gowns to independent working women like herself. Unfortunately, when an errand for her millinery shop job goes sadly awry due to a difficult customer, she finds herself out of an income. Mr. Oliver Addleshaw is on the verge of his biggest business deal yet when he learns his potential partner prefers to deal with men who are settled down and wed. When Oliver witnesses his ex not-quite-fiance cause the hapless Harriet to lose her job, he tries to make it up to her by enlisting her help in making a good impression on his business partner. Harriet quickly finds her love of fashion can't make her fashionable. She'll never truly fit into Oliver's world, but just as she's ready to call off the fake relationship, fancy dinners, and elegant balls, a threat from her past forces both Oliver and Harriet to discover that love can come in the most surprising packages.

After a Fashion covers medieval through Art Deco styles, for men and women. It guides readers through each stage of a reproduction project planning, designing, choosing materials, and constructing. It advises them on all aspects of collecting vintage clothes buying, restoring, altering, and wearing. The pattern-making and sewing instructions are useful to sewers at any experience level. Directions have been added for using the Internet to buy and sell, research styles, and contact costumers and collectors. An updated, expanded appendix lists over 600 sources (on-line and otherwise) for supplies, vintage clothes, and information.

From the rise of the Fashion Café to the phenomenon of the supermodel, from "House of Style" to "Unzipped," the world of fashion has taken center stage in contemporary culture, for better or for worse. In turn, although the idea of fashion has been in circulation since time immemorial, not until recently has its profound and variegated effects–on economic activity, on social and sexual mores, and on aesthetic and psychological formulations–been fully considered. With delicacy and wit, Fashion: An Introduction investigates the different sides of recent debates over the production, marketing, and consumption of fashion. Drawing on economics, art, psychology, commerce, history, and the everyday, Joanne Finkelstein considers fashion in its various guises–as body decoration and costume, as a language and a form of display, as an expression of sexuality and as part of the urban experience. In so doing, she has given us the perfect introduction to fashion's social, economic, and aesthetic impact on the way we think and act.

A look at style and urbanism, offering a reconsideration of the role of fashion in city life and filling in overlooked gaps in the history of London and modern design.

These days, not even a new wardrobe can keep fashionista Rita Jewel from feeling blue. Perhaps the cure is a cooking class with a celebrity chef! But her appetite is ruined when murder becomes the main course… As a salesgirl at Dolce’s, a chic boutique outfitting San Francisco’s wealthiest women, Rita has the world’s greatest job. So why does she feel like last season’s Christian Louboutin stilettos—worn and out of style? Maybe it’s because her love life needs a makeover ASAP. From carrots to caviar, Guido Torcelli is the celebrity chef du jour. Perhaps signing up for his cooking class will serve as a much-needed distraction for Rita. But when Guido’s shot to death, Rita knows she’ll soon top the list of suspects. Guido was killed at his culinary school the same night she scrawled her phone number on a menu and handed it to him. Now she’s got to find the murderer before she’s forced to take all her meals in the prison cafeteria…

With epigrams from Genesis to Oscar Wilde, Finkelstein examines the historical, social, psychological, and economic seams of haute couture fashion as reflected in the wide-ranging index entries: anthropology, Barbie doll, cinema, feminism, globalization, Lauren (Ralph), psychoanalysis, upward mobility, and zoot suits. Originally published by Melbourne U. Press, 1996. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated book charts the history of street fashion from its origins in high couture to its appearance on the streets. Beginning in the post-war period and largely picture-led, its accompanying text also examines the social roots of what we wear and what it expresses about ourselves and the times we live in. Fashion trends, together with their influences, are tracked and illustrated alongside the changing attitudes and accessibility that made fashion a part of daily life.

This book presents, above all, a study of the establishment and development of the Soviet organization and system of fashion industry and design as it gradually evolved in the years after the Second World War in the Soviet Union, which was, in the understanding of its leaders, reaching the mature or last stage of socialism when the country was firmly set on the straight trajectory to its final goal, Communism. What was typical of this complex and extensive system of fashion was that it was always loyally subservient to the principles of the planned socialist economy. This did not by any means indicate that everything the designers and other fashion professionals did was dictated entirely from above by the central planning agencies. Neither did it mean that their professional judgment would have been only secondary to ideological and political standards set by the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, as our study shows, the Soviet fashion professionals had a lot of autonomy. They were eager and willing to exercise their own judgment in matters of taste and to set the agenda of beauty and style for Soviet citizens. The present book is the first comprehensive and systematic history of the development of fashion and fashion institutions in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Our study makes use of rich empirical and historical material that has been made available for the first time for scientific analysis and discussion. The main sources for our study came from the state, party and departmental archives of the former Soviet Union. We also make extensive use of oral history and the writings published in Soviet popular and professional press.

Growing up in a lace-curtain Irish suburb of Boston, secretly trying on his sister's dresses and spending his evenings after school in the city's chicest boutiques, Cunningham dreamed of a life dedicated to fashion. When he arrived in New York in 1948, he reveled in people-watching. He became a photographer for The New York Times, and after two style mavens took Cunningham under their wing he made a name for himself as a designer. Taking on the alias William J.-- because designing under his family's name would have been a disgrace to his parents--he became one of the era's most outlandish and celebrated hat designers, catering to movie stars, heiresses, and artists alike. Written with his infectious joy and one-of-a-kind voice, this memoir was polished, neatly typewritten, and safely stored away until after his death in 2016 -- adapted from jacket.

The unanimously acclaimed portrait of a bittersweet girlhood, capturing the glamour and cruelty of New York's fashion world in the middle of the century. Exquisitely written and painfully observant, Mommy Dressing tells the story of self-made fashion star Jo Copeland, and the daughter who struggled to please her. Lois Gould paints a mesmerizing picture of the kingdom of movie stars, fashion shows, and steamer trunks her mother ruled, from the viewpoint of an isolated girl acutely conscious that she would never enter that glittering domain. Featuring full-page period illustrations, including original sketches and designs by Jo Copeland, Mommy Dressing is "a sidelong tribute from one survivor to another, written in a brisk, fluid style... [Gould's] memories--half stardust, half ashes--underscore the fact that glamour is not a child-friendly business" (Daphne Merkin, "The New Yorker).