Textile & Costume

The Lucky Shopping Manual: Building and Improving Your Wardrobe Piece by Piece

What to wear, how to buy, where and when to spend: These are the topics covered each month by the exceedingly plugged-in staff of Lucky, whose circulation rocketed from 500,000 to 800,000 in just two short years. For Lucky's devoted fans, and anyone devoted to dressing better and shopping smarter, The Lucky Shopping Manual will be the über-find. Finally, there is a book that does away with the inconsequential information in previous fashion books and presents only the most useful tips and imperative information for how to dress better for less. Filled with tips that will appeal to shopaholics and disciplined bargain hunters alike, this enticing guide is packed with over 1,000 full-color photos and illustrations, with a ribbon marker and flexi-cover so women can take it shopping with them.

With great advice on every uniquely designed page, The Lucky Shopping Manual includes features such as:
* Building a wardrobe you love, with cross-referenced sections on everything from skirts, tops, dresses, pants, and suits, to shoes, bags, belts, and what looks best for your body type
* How to spot great finds at the local flea market or the best boutiques
* What to spend your money on and where you can scrimp
* Cool stores coast-to-coast to check out when you're traveling
* Practical tips for fabric care, shoe maintenance, and stain remedies
* Shipping just in time for the holidays, The Lucky Shopping Manual makes a luscious gift-a fantastic shopping spree under the tree.

Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion

Dressing the Man is the definitive guide to what men need to know in order to dress well and look stylish without becoming fashion victims.

Alan Flusser's name is synonymous with taste and style. With his new book, he combines his encyclopedic knowledge of men's clothes with his signature wit and elegance to address the fundamental paradox of modern men's fashion: Why, after men today have spent more money on clothes than in any other period of history, are there fewer well-dressed men than at any time ever before?

According to Flusser, dressing well is not all that difficult, the real challenge lies in being able to acquire the right personalized instruction. Dressing well pivots on two pillars -- proportion and color. Flusser believes that "Permanent Fashionability," both his promise and goal for the reader, starts by being accountable to a personal set of physical trademarks and not to any kind of random, seasonally served-up collection of fashion flashes.

Unlike fashion, which is obliged to change each season, the face's shape, the neck's height, the shoulder's width, the arm's length, the torso's structure, and the foot's size remain fairly constant over time. Once a man learns how to adapt the fundamentals of permanent fashion to his physique and complexion, he's halfway home.

Taking the reader through each major clothing classification step-by-step, this user-friendly guide helps you apply your own specifics to a series of dressing options, from business casual and formalwear to pattern-on-pattern coordination, or how to choose the most flattering clothing silhouette for your body type and shirt collar for your face.

A man's physical traits represent his individual road map, and the quickest route toward forging an enduring style of dress is through exposure to the legendary practitioners of this rare masculine art. Flusser has assembled the largest andmost diverse collection of stylishly mantled men ever found in one book. Many never-before-seen vintage photographs from the era of Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, and Fred Astaire are employed to help illustrate the range and diversity of authentic men's fashion. Dressing the Man's sheer magnitude of options will enable the reader to expand both the grammar and verbiage of his permanent-fashion vocabulary.

For those men hoping to find sartorial fulfillment somewhere down the road, tethering their journey to the mind-set of permanent fashion will deliver them earlier rather than later in life.

Calder Jewelry

The Japanese Tattoo

Figure Drawing for Fashion Design (Pepin Press Design Books)

FIGURE DRAWING FOR FASHION DESIGN offers a concise, topic by topic guide to acquiring and perfecting these skills, concentrating on the female form. The coverage provided means that this book is ideal both for those who want to apply themselves professionally to fashion design, and for all enthusiasts of drawing the human body. Fashion plates are the primary means of visualizing ideas and concepts in costume and fashion design. To give an accurate impression of what is in a designer's mind it is vital to have complete mastery of the rules of figure drawing. Here, realism and anatomical precision are the chief values, whereas for costume and fashion, stylization and exaggeration are ways of adding individuality and verve to a plate, and of focusing attention on specific elements.

Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail

The latest entry in the successful In Detail series is a lavishly illustrated book celebrating 19th-century fashion. Featuring glorious, specially commissioned color photographs of close-up details alongside accurate line drawings that demonstrate the underlying structure of each garment, the bookÂ’s 150 pieces capture the opulence and variety of this fascinating era. From the delicate embroidery on ballgowns to the vibrant synthetic colors of crinolines, the major themes of 19th-century fashion are highlighted as never before in a single volume.

“ Perfect for those who want an authentic take on the latest Victorian trend.” –In Style

Shop Your Closet: The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your Closet with Style

Just when you feared your overstuffed, eyesore of a closet was a lost cause, here's the antidote to all your closet woes. Closet expert and style maven Melanie Charlton Fascitelli is here to help you whip your closet into shape, refreshing your wardrobe and saving you time along the way.

With this accessible, stylish guide, you'll find out how to redo your closet and organize your clothes so that you can, yes, go shopping there—sort through shirts, pants, skirts, dresses, scarves, and shoes, all in perfect condition and ready to go.

From the first closet face-off to long-term maintenance, Charlton Fascitelli takes you step by step through the entire process of turning your closet into a "safe haven" for your clothes.

Learn how to:

Face your inner packrat and clean out your closet

Shop for and pick items that flatter your body

Craft the best wardrobe for your lifestyle

Create space in your closet by reworking it logistically

Store your clothes and shoes so they last longer

Charlton Fascitelli also covers consigning or donating all your old stuff; keeping your closet clean and tidy; packing smartly and efficiently; storing your linens; and organizing other areas of your home, including your medicine cabinet, pantry, or CD collection.

Clearing clutter, organizing clothes, and remaking your wardrobe has never been so easy or attainable. Shop Your Closet is your go-to source for closet nirvana.

More Fabric Savvy: A Quick Resource Guide to Selecting and Sewing Fabric Completely Revised and Updated

America's best-selling quick guide to selecting and sewing fabrics is now completely revised and updated. More Fabric Savvy brings over 100 new tips, over 400 new color photos and drawings, the latest new fabrics, and entirely new and useful features, including a handy guide to stain removal. From Sandra Betzina, the dynamic host of HGTV's Sew Perfect, this easy-to-use reference belongs on every sewer's bookshelf.

The Apron Book: Making, Wearing, and Sharing a Bit of Cloth and Comfort

Vintage aprons and modern designs are turning up in movies, magazine spreads, upscale shops, and hip retail venues like Anthropologie, whose trendy line of aprons is selling as fast as they can stock them. The Apron Book is an infectiously enthusiastic guide to aprons, old and new, that are suddenly everywhere.

Aprons take us back to our favorite placeome. Vintage aprons help us remember home and family the way they used to be, while bright and sassy contemporary aprons confirm that nesting is all the rage. Actress and trendsetter Julia Roberts has a closetful of vintage aprons. Celebrity custom-made apron auctions have become an annual event for several popular charities in the past few years.

The Apron Book provides full-color photos of new and vintage aprons from the author's collection, patterns for four basic apron styles and myriad variations, recipes, tips on collecting and preserving vintage aprons, and heart-tugging stories from the author's traveling apron exhibit. The book also explores the heyday of aprons and looks at the various roles aprons still play when worn in the kitchen, around the house, by the backyard grill, on the job, and for special occasions.

Warm and inviting¿but like an apron quite practical!¿this book is a celebration of a great American icon and reminds us of what we loved about the people who wore them.

Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa

An unprecedented series of images showing the Omo people's imaginative body decoration and embellishments.

The scene of tribal conflicts and guerrilla incursions, Ethiopia's Omo Valley is also home to fascinating rites and traditions that have survived for thousands of years. The nomadic peoples who inhabit this valley share a gift for body painting and elaborate adornments borrowed from nature, and Hans Silvester has captured the results in a series of photographs made over the course of numerous trips.

In this region of East Africa, the rivers that run through the dry savannas are home to abundant flowers, papyrus, and wild fruit trees, and this luxuriance becomes an invitation to creativity and spectacle. Within hand's reach, a multitude of plants inspire fanciful and ephemeral self-decoration, and the Omo react spontaneously: a leaf, root, seed pod, or flower is quickly transformed into an accessory. As in the West one might don a hat, people create caps from tufts of grass. As one would knot a tie or scarf, they ornament themselves with banana leaves or a stem laden with flowers. These decorations are embellished with butterfly wings, buffalo horns, boar's teeth, colorful feathers, and the like, and are further enhanced by body painting with pigments made from powdered stone, plants, berries, and river mud.

Here is a priceless record of a unique and increasingly fragile way of life, one threatened by conflict, climate change, and tourism. 160 color illustrations.