Alexander McQueen


Claire Wilcox - 2015
    A true comprehensive study, this catalog is the first in-depth look at McQueen and explores key themes of the exhibition—tailoring, gothic, primitivism, naturalism, and futurism. The book also features previously unseen material as well as groundbreaking essays and feature spreads by multiple authors and leading fashion commentators. This kaleidoscopic approach explores themes central to the designer’s work and his collections, such as the psychology of fashion, natural history, the theatre and spectacle of his shows, and the key creative collaborators during McQueen’s lifetime.Alexander McQueen also offers an encyclopedic survey of McQueen’s catwalk collections, illustrated with striking images by leading fashion photographers, and specially commissioned photographs that capture the breathtaking skill of his designs and awesome theatricality of his shows.

The Rose That Grew from Concrete


Tupac Shakur - 1999
    This collection of more than 100 poems that honestly and artfully confront topics ranging from poverty and motherhood to Van Gogh and Mandela is presented in Tupac Shakur's own handwriting on one side of the page, with a typed version on the opposite side.

Paris Street Style


Isabelle Thomas - 2013
    French fashion writers Isabelle Thomas and Frédérique Veysset break down the “je ne sais quoi” of Paris street style, describing the essential elements that should be in everyone’s wardrobe. Renowned experts on French style—designers, stylists, editors, and celebrities—also chime in to reveal their favorite accessories and how to create multidimensional looks and make affordable clothing appear luxurious. Starring both fashion icons and anonymous women met on the streets of Paris and richly illustrated with hand-drawn sketches and Veysset’s striking photographs, Paris Street Style is an inspirational fashion guide that will allow you, no matter where you are from, to cultivate an everyday style of timeless glamour, careless, easy chic—votre style français.Praise for Paris Street Style:“In this fun new book, a pair of fashion bloggers promise to reveal the secrets of their compatriots’ mysterious and seemingly innate ability to look sophisticated under any circumstances. With the help of hand-drawn illustrations and photos of models, fashionistas and anonymous women met in the street, they dissect the essential elements of les Parisiennes’ deceptively casual, highly individualistic brand of urban chic and offer readers tips galore on creating their own personal style.” —France Magazine

The Truth About Style


Stacy London - 2012
    Now for the first time in print, London turns that expert X-ray insight on herself.Like the women she’s transformed, London has plenty of emotional baggage. At eleven, she suffered from severe psoriasis that left her with permanent physical and mental scars. During college, she became anorexic on a misguided quest for perfection. By the time she joined the staff at Vogue, London’s weight had doubled from binge eating. Although self-esteem and self-consciousness nearly sabotaged a promising career, London learned the hard way that we wear our insecurities every day. It wasn’t until she found the self-confidence to develop a strong personal style that she finally became comfortable in her skin.In The Truth About Style, London shares her own often painful history and her philosophy of the healing power of personal style—illustrating it with  a series of detailed “start-overs” with eight real women, demonstrating how personal style helps them overcome the emotional obstacles we all face. For anyone who has ever despaired of finding the right clothes, or even taking an objective assessment in a full-length mirror, The Truth About Style will be an inspiring, liberating, and often very funny guide to finding the expression of  your truest self.

Chanel: A Woman of Her Own


Axel Madsen - 1990
    The name alone evokes fashion and perfume, emancipation and allure. In this revealing, intimate biography, Axel Madsen brings to life Gabrielle Coco Chanel, who was born an illegitimate pauper and rose to become the reigning queen of fashion who revolutionized women's styles forever.Madsen traces Chanel's extrordinary life, from her beginnings as an orphan, to the first small boutique she opened in 1910, using her lover's financial backing, to the founding of the House of Chanel where she altered the look of fashion entirely, inventing sportswear, the little black dress, costume jewelry, and the perfume that Marilyn Monroe said was all she wore to bed. Although loved by many men, Coco remained wed only to her business, and when she died in 1971, at the age of eighty-eight, she was wealthy, an international celebrity, and utterly alone.Lavishly illustrated with photographs of Coco Chanel and her celebrated circle of friends and lovers, Chanel: A Woman of Her Own is the story of the magnificent woman whose legend lives on.

The Chiffon Trenches


André Leon Talley - 2020
    Propelled into the upper echelons by his knowledge and adoration of fashion, André moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild's Women's Wear Daily, befriending fashion's most important designers (Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta). But as André made friends, he also made enemies. A racially tinged encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of Vogue under Grace Mirabella.There, he eventually became creative director, developing an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour. As she rose to the top of Vogue's masthead, André also ascended, and soon became the most influential man in fashion. The Chiffon Trenches offers a candid look at the who's who of the last fifty years of fashion. At once ruthless and empathetic, this engaging memoir tells with raw honesty the story of how André not only survived the brutal style landscape but thrived--despite racism, illicit rumors, and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry--to become one of the most renowned voices and faces in fashion.Woven throughout the book are also André's own personal struggles that have impacted him over the decades, along with intimate stories of those he has turned to for inspiration (Diana Vreeland, Diane von Férstenberg, Lee Radziwill, to name a few), and of course his Southern roots and ongoing faith, which have guided him since childhood.

Fashion 150 Years Of Courtiers, Designers, Labels


Charlotte Seeling - 2010
    This book is devoted to the legendary world of fashion, from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the present. Which social, historical, and cultural developments coalesced to allow fashion to become what it is today? Which designers had especially significant impact on their fashion era with extensive portraits of the ground-breaking fashion icons and countless expressive photographs. The result is a comprehensive portrayal of the rapid development of fashion from the liberation of women from the corset all the way to the minimalist and luxurious, playful and sober, conservative and revolutionary creations of modern designers.

Death Punch'd: Surviving Five Finger Death Punch's Metal Mayhem


Jeremy Spencer - 2014
    In this high-energy memoir, Jeremy Spencer, the band’s cofounder and drummer, takes us onstage and behind the scenes, on tour and into the studio to tell the band’s story and his own. Death Punch’d is a detailed in-depth account of the group’s origins and influences, as well as the infighting and tensions that, when channeled properly, result in the music fans love. It is also the hard-charging, laugh-out-loud tale of how a mischievous boy rose from small-town Indiana to rock royalty—and how he nearly destroyed it all for a good time.Told in his unique, self-deprecating voice, filled with his twisted and humorous take on living the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll dream turned nightmare, and including dozens of photos, Death Punch’d is a lively, no-holds-barred ride and an inspiring cautionary tale that offers lessons for us all.

Make Up: Your Life Guide to Beauty, Style, and Success--Online and Off


Michelle Phan - 2014
    When she looked in the mirror and saw a transformed version of herself looking back, she fell in love with the sense of confidence that makeup could give her. Ever since she posted her first makeup tutorial on YouTube, she has dedicated herself to inspire millions by using makeup as a tool for transformation and self expression. Now, Michelle has compiled all of her best wisdom into Make Up: Your Life Guide to Beauty, Style, and Success--Online and Off. From creating a gorgeous smoky eye to understanding contouring to developing an online persona, Michelle has advice to help you transform every facet of your life. Make Up is packed with Michelle’s trademark beauty and style tutorials, stories and pictures from her own life, and advice on the topics she is asked about most, including etiquette, career, entrepreneurship, and creativity. From the everyday (such as how to get glowing skin) to the big picture (such as how to turn your passion into a profession), Make Up is a practical and empowering resource to help anyone put their best face forward.

Some of Me


Isabella Rossellini - 1997
    The model and actress describes life with her famed parents, Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, her acting and modeling careers, the men in her life, and other personal relationships.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis


Timothy Egan - 2011
    He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent’s original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.An Indiana Jones with a camera, Curtis spent the next three decades traveling from the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the Acoma on a high mesa in New Mexico to the Salish in the rugged Northwest rain forest, documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. It took tremendous perseverance - ten years alone to persuade the Hopi to allow him into their Snake Dance ceremony. And the undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. Eventually Curtis took more than 40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings, and is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. In the process, the charming rogue with the grade school education created the most definitive archive of the American Indian. His most powerful backer was Theodore Roosevelt, and his patron was J. P. Morgan. Despite the friends in high places, he was always broke and often disparaged as an upstart in pursuit of an impossible dream. He completed his masterwork in 1930, when he published the last of the twenty volumes. A nation in the grips of the Depression ignored it. But today rare Curtis photogravures bring high prices at auction, and he is hailed as a visionary. In the end he fulfilled his promise: He made the Indians live forever.

All My Life for Sale


John D. Freyer - 2002
    He invited his friends over to tag all the possessions in his apartment, and he systematically put them up for sale on eBay. An unopened box of taco shells, half a bottle of mouthwash, almost all of his clothes, his favorite records, his sideburns (in a plastic bag), his family's Christmas presents (not yet given), furniture: John didn't let sentiment or utility stand in his way. Soon his belongings were sold all over the world, with a bag of Porky's BBQ Pork Skins making its way to Japan, and a chair ending up in the Museum of Modern Art. With almost all the objects in his life now gone, he started the second phase of his journey: to go visit his one-time possessions in their new surroundings.All My Life for Sale is an extraordinary book that functions as an autobiography, a travel narrative, and a meditation on what the objects we surround ourselves with actually mean to us and what happens when we set them free. Designed by the author himself, it is visually striking, surprisingly moving, and will change the way you look at the things that surround you.

Attempting Normal


Marc Maron - 2013
    But instead he woke up one day to find himself fired from his radio job, surrounded by feral cats, and emotionally and financially annihilated by a divorce from a woman he thought he loved. He tried to heal his broken heart through whatever means he could find—minor-league hoarding, Viagra addiction, accidental racial profiling, cat fancying, flying airplanes with his mind—but nothing seemed to work. It was only when he was stripped down to nothing that he found his way back.Attempting Normal is Marc Maron’s journey through the wilderness of his own mind, a collection of explosively, painfully, addictively funny stories that add up to a moving tale of hope and hopelessness, of failing, flailing, and finding a way. From standup to television to his outrageously popular podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, Marc has always been a genuine original, a disarmingly honest, intensely smart, brutally open comic who finds wisdom in the strangest places. This is his story of the winding, potholed road from madness and obsession and failure to something like normal, the thrillingly comic journey of a sympathetic f***up who’s trying really hard to do better without making a bigger mess. Most of us will relate.

Everyday Fashions of the Thirties As Pictured in Sears Catalogs


Stella Blum - 1986
    An ambitious marketing operation, it could not afford to take chances on haute couture; its fashions were geared as closely as possible to the prevailing tastes of the American people. For this historically accurate sampling of authentic 1930s fashion, Stella Blum, former Curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, selected for reproduction 133 representative pages from rare Sears catalogs of the period (fall and spring catalog for each year from 1930 to 1939). Hundreds of illustrations record what men, women, and children were actually wearing in the 1930s when, as a copyline from the Fall 1930 catalog proclaimed: "Thrift is the spirit of the day. Reckless spending is a thing of the past."You'll see here how simpler women's fashion designs — of more traditional, affordable material — recaptured the feminine form with a more natural waistline and lower hemlines than seen in the twenties. For evening wear, longer dresses replaced flamboyant beaded short gowns while cloche hats, another twenties trademark, were replaced by berets, pillboxes, and turbans. The seriousness of the accessories and dresses endorsed by such Hollywood legends as Loretta Young, Claudette Colbert, and Fay Wray.For historians of costume, nostalgia buffs and casual browsers, these pages afford a rare picture of how the average American really dressed during the thirties. It is an essential resource for study of the clothing of an important era which designers cannot afford to be without.

All In Good Taste


kate spade new york - 2015
      filled with how-tos, personal essays, anecdotes, recipes, and a liberal dash of style, all in good taste will transform you into the hostess everyone wants an invitation from. the book covers the essential lost arts—how to shuck an oyster, curate a vibrant guest list, guide a dinner-table discussion—right alongside modern conundrums such as Instagram etiquette at dinner. whether you entertain a little or a lot, or just love being the person everyone wants to sit next to at dinner, all in good taste is the modern classic you’ll treasure for years.