September 2013 Notable review Fashion Design Referenced

Alicia Kennedy

Emily Banis Stoehrer

Jay Calderin

Fashion Design, Referenced

By Alicia Kennedy and Emily Banis Stoehrer, with Jay Calderin
Rockport Publishers (February 2013)
Buy the book

Reviewer: Book Board member Norman Weinstein (ArchNewsNow.com)

Fashion Design, Referenced by Alicia Kennedy and Emily Banis Stoehrer, with Jay Calderin, 2013 (Rockport Publishers)

No general book on fashion design in recent years has so successfully reorganized how to think about the field as Fashion Design, Referenced. It has accomplished this goal through reformulating lively features of website design and infusing electrifying graphics with erudite cross-disciplinary commentary. As Alicia Kennedy writes in her astute foreword, “Our book approaches fashion design from the perspective of connectivity. It unfolds how fashion is imagined, produced, and disseminated within larger social, economic, and cultural systems.”

Through over 1,000 well-reproduced photographs and drawings, and through scores of judiciously and passionately written brief articles—Wiki or blog length—readers are encouraged through the book’s mandala-like organization to imaginatively follow rich trails of cross-disciplinary association in a non-linear fashion. That said, it is just as pleasurable to read the book conventionally from opening page to last, enjoying a sprawling multi-dimensional text on fashion design, moving from an overview of the profession, to a primer on how bare-bone ideas materialize into finished products, to avenues through which fashion reaches its audience, and finally as a critical examination of innovative practices of the major movers and shakers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Particularly striking are the many parallels established between architectural and fashion design, as well as the ties between pop music and fashion trends. This is that rare fashion overview that even designers outside of fashion can find constantly inspirational.

Interior spread from Fashion Design, Referenced. Courtesy of Rockport Publishers

Interior spread from Fashion Design, Referenced. Courtesy of Rockport Publishers

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