Vogue on: Christian Dior

In 1947, Christian Dior stunned the fashion world with his first collection; his &#39;New Look&#39; featured designs that transformed the way women dressed.Dior continued to send shockwaves with his later shows, significantly altering the fashion landscape during the ten years of his career as a couturier. This book recounts Dior&#39;s search for the perfect line and how his unique vision of women&#39;s ideal silhouette developed. More than any designer before him, Dior embraced the dual aspects of creativity and commerce, becoming the first couturier to license his products in 1949.He became one of the most famous designers of the twentieth century, and his name still fronts one of the most successful haute couture fashion houses. As portrayed in the pages of Vogue by photographers such as Horst and Irving Penn and artists like Christian Berard, the book offers a unique insight into Dior&#39;s contribution to design, his dramatic impact on the landscape of 40s and 50s fashion and his personal legacy.Vogue, the international fashion bible, has charted the careers of designers through the decades. Its unique archive of photographs, taken by the leading photographers of the day from Cecil Beaton to Mario Testino, and original illustrations, together with its stable of highly respected fashion writers, make Vogue the most authoritative and prestigious source of reference on fashion. With a circulation of over 160,000 and a readership of over 1,400,000, no brand is better positioned to present a library on the great fashion designers of the modern age.

Charlotte Sinclair is a Contributing Editor to Vogue and a writer on the arts, fashion and travel for The Independent, The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, Cond&eacute; Nast Traveller and Australian Vogue.

Charlotte Sinclair

Gianni Versace created a fashion house that, as British Vogue declared, defined late twentieth-century glamour, invented the supermodel and sanctioned in the public consciousness a supremely self-assured feminine sexuality.&#39;His debut line in 1978 was instantly successful; in the Eighties, his extravagant designs and his vision of powerful women defined the era, and culminated in the Nineties with the supermodel phenomenon - his designs worn by those glamazons who featured on every Vogue cover. Vogue on: Gianni Versace explores how his childhood spent in his mother&#39;s dressmaker&#39;s shops, his Italian hometown of Reggio Calabria, and his family, particularly his younger sister, Donatella, influenced not only the designer he became - the insistent sensuality, vivid colours, classical motifs, clashing prints and daring cuts - but also the way he constructed his business: family first. The book reveals how the more brazen elements of his design - the jewelled embroidery, the bondage straps, the safety-pin gowns - were predicated on supremely skilled tailoring, deft use of materials and innovative techniques. Alongside are Vogue&#39;s eye-witness accounts of the Versace lifestyle - the palazzos and parties, the art, the celebrity friends. Vogue on: Gianni Versace is a celebration of a designer and a house that, in only 19 years, came to dominate the catwalk and the red carpet.

Charlotte Sinclair

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