Liberty Style

First published in 1975, Liberty’s is the biography of a shop and its various owners in London. Responding to the social pressures, class patterns, and governmental policies, the developments in the shop mimic the social changes taking place in London. It is affected by war and depressions, by trade booms and enemy bombs, by changes in fashions and taste. Liberty’s not only reflected these changes but also contributed to the artistic movements and the development of fashionable taste. This book will be of interest to students of history, fashion and sociology.

This work focuses on the efforts toward reforming women's dress that took place in Europe and America in the latter half of the 18th century and the first decade of the 20th century, and the types of garments adopted by women to overcome the challenges posed by fashionable dress. It considers the many advocates for reform and examines their motives, their arguments for change, and how they promoted improvements in women's fashion. Though there was no single overarching dress reform movement, it reveals similarities among the arguments posed by diverse groups of reformers, including especially the equation of reform with an ideal image of improved health. Drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources in the USA and Europe - including the popular press, advice books for women, allopathic and alternative medical literature, and books on aesthetics, art, health, and physical education - the text makes a significant contribution to costume studies, social history, and women's studies.

The first volume in the series on Twentieth-Century Decorative and Applied Arts is dedicated to what is known in Italy as 'Stile Liberty', or Liberty style. Flowers, ribbons, garlands, dragonflies, butterflies and graceful young women dancing, followed b

The story of Liberty's is the story of design. The brand has been an international byword for style and innovation since May 1875, when Arthur Lasenby Liberty opened the doors of his Regent Steet shop. The son of a draper, Arthur Liberty (1843-1917) was inspired by the conviction that if he could only raise the capital to open his own shop, he could change the whole look of fashion in dress and interior decoration. He did exactly that. With an impressive ability to spot talent and to promote good, innovative and interesting design, Liberty's shop quickly became the epicentre of London's Aesthetic movement, the place where Oscar Wilde bought Japanese silk. Succesive movements found a home at Liberty's: Arts and Crafts; Art Nouveau; Art Deco; and the Georgian revival. The work of almost all the great designers of the past century in the fields of glass, metalwork, furniture, ceramics, fashion and, above all, textiles has appeared under the Liberty label. In this book Martin Wood tells the story of Liberty's, its design and its designers: from the pewter and silverware of Archibald Knox and the Silver Studio and William DeMorgan's tiles to the fabrics of Lucienne Day, Sonia Delaunay and Bernard Nevill and the furniture of Piero Fornasetti, Vico Magistretti and even Ringo Starr.

A truly inspirational memoir, this is Ed's story: an affecting, candid and wildly funny tale of one man's meteoric rise to the top of the retail and fashion world - from heroin addict to MD of Liberty, one of Britain's most iconic institutions.

The surprising history behind a ubiquitous facet of the United States: the gridded landscape. Seen from an airplane, much of the United States appears to be a gridded land of startling uniformity. Perpendicular streets and rectangular fields, all precisely measured and perfectly aligned, turn both urban and rural America into a checkerboard landscape that stretches from horizon to horizon. In evidence throughout the country, but especially the West, the pattern is a hallmark of American life. One might consider it an administrative convenience--an easy way to divide land and lay down streets--but it is not. The colossal grid carved into the North American continent, argues historian and writer Amir Alexander, is a plan redolent with philosophical and political meaning. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson presented Congress with an audacious scheme to reshape the territory of the young United States. All western lands, he proposed, would be inscribed with a single rectilinear grid, transforming the natural landscape into a mathematical one. Following Isaac Newton and John Locke, he viewed mathematical space as a blank slate on which anything is possible and where new Americans, acting freely, could find liberty. And if the real America, with its diverse landscapes and rich human history, did not match his vision, then it must be made to match it. From the halls of Congress to the open prairies, and from the fight against George III to the Trail of Tears, Liberty's Grid tells the story of the battle between grid makers and their opponents. When Congress endorsed Jefferson's plan, it set off a struggle over American space that has not subsided. Transcendentalists, urban reformers, and conservationists saw the grid not as a place of possibility but as an artificial imposition that crushed the human spirit. Today, the ideas Jefferson associated with the grid still echo through political rhetoric about the country's founding, and competing visions for the nation are visible from Manhattan avenues and Kansan pastures to Yosemite's cliffs and suburbia's cul-de-sacs. An engrossing read, Liberty's Grid offers a powerful look at the ideological conflict written on the landscape.