Fashion Game Changers: Reinventing the 20th-Century Silhouette

Description

Fashion Game Changers traces radical innovations in Western fashion design from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. Challenging the traditional silhouettes of their day, fashion designers such as Madeleine Vionnet and Cristobal Balenciaga began to liberate the female body from the close-fitting hourglass forms which dominated European and American fashion, instead enveloping bodies in more autonomous garments which often took inspiration from beyond the West. As the century progressed, new generations of avant-garde designers from Rei Kawakubo to Martin Margiela further developed the ideas instigated by their predecessors to defy established notions of femininity in dress, creating space between body and garment. This way, a new relationship between body and dress emerged for the 21st century. With over 200 images and commentaries from an international range of leading fashion curators and historians, this beautifully illustrated book showcases some of the most revolutionary silhouettes and innovative designs of over 100 years of fashion.

Karen Van Godtsenhoven is Exhibitions Curator at MoMu fashion museum in Antwerp, Belgium. Miren Arzalluz is a fashion historian, freelance fashion curator and former head of collections at the Cristobal Balenciaga Foundation. Kaat Debo is Director of MoMu fashion museum in Antwerp, Belgium.

Let the dynamic and bright photographs in Fashion Game Changers guide you through the world of the 20th-century silhouette ... A whistlestop tour through 100 years of fashion. * Daily Mail * A great resource for those who are inspired by the experimental side of fashion. * The Independent * [Images] bring each designer's work vividly to life, and make the book engaging for casual readers and academics alike ... An invaluable visual record of a group of designers, spread across decades and continents, who embody a new way of dressing the female form. In exploring designers who seek formal perfection over body modification, and who place the wearer at the centre of their practice, the book also stands as a record of women's place in the world at this point in history. * The Journal of Dress History * This book is a tribute to those designers who radically transformed the female silhouette in the 20th century and created alternatives to the hour-glass silhouette that had dominated women's fashion for centuries. * Vintage Made Magazine * Fashion Game Changers is the kind of book I relish: both academic and captivating in its observations. It contextualises fashion and its designers, and illustrates just how significant clothing has been in documenting social history. * The Hon. Daphne Guinness * Fashion Game Changers is an innovative and important book with extraordinary images and intelligent essays devoted to the designers who have radically transformed fashion's relationship with the body. * Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator, The Museum at FIT, New York * Fashion Game Changers is a fascinating and intelligent take on the designers of the mid 20th century, whose experiments with form and shape have changed attitudes towards the female body and femininity itself. * Frances Corner OBE, Head of London College of Fashion and Pro Vice-Chancellor, University of the Arts London * Before designers like Coco Chanel and Madeleine Vionnet, hourglass silhouettes dominated Western fashion, constricting waists and restricting women's movements. That started to change in the 20th century with innovations ranging from Chanel's gamine jackets to Cristobal Balenciaga's cascading dresses. The book Fashion Game Changers, out April 21 from Bloomsbury Visual Arts, traces the evolution of fashion designers creating freer, looser-fitting forms. With these radical, avant-garde designs, women were finally able to breathe. -- Catie L'Heureux * NYMag.com * The writing is as exhilarating as the photographs ... Especially interesting are short pieces called "The Insider View," in which individuals give a personal testimony to what it means to wear clothes from Comme des Garcons, Martin Margiela and Miyake, not for a few fleeting catwalk minutes, but in real life. I simply cannot praise this accessible, enlightening book highly enough. -- Colin McDowell, author of The Business of Fashion