CULTURE WATCH

From Azzedine Alaïa, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and Coco Chanel, to Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent, and Vivienne Westwood, the greatest fashion designers of the 20th and 21st centuries are featured in the permanent collection of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology—and in this book from Assouline, Fashion Designers A–Z. The curators of America's premier fashion museum have selected 500 masterpieces of the art of fashion, and organized them by designer, from A to Z.

Photographs of selected garments from the Museum's permanent collection illuminate each of the featured designers, while texts by the curators explain why each designer is important in fashion history and what is special about the individual pieces featured. In her introductory essay, director and chief curator Valerie Steele writes about the rise of the fashion museum, and the emergence of the fashion exhibition as a popular and controversial phenomenon; and both Steele and contributor Suzy Menkes provide a history of this museum’s role in the world of fashion scholarship and preservation.

Fashion Designers A–Z is available as a series of six Designer Editions. Each edition (a total of 11,000 copies) is bound in a fabric created by one of six designers—Akris, Etro, Stella McCartney, Missoni, Prada, and Diane von Furstenberg—and comes in a Plexiglas box. Crafted by hand at a bindery in the heart of Italy, and stamped with a unique number, every copy is an instant classic, and an addition to your fashion library that is truly one-of-a-kind.

For the Prada Edition of 2,000 numbered copies, Miuccia Prada selected four classic prints from previous collections and re-printed them on cotton the feminine tiny “hearts,” the Baroque-inspired “bananas,” the abstract geometric “diamonds,” and a floral reissued for Prada from the 1960 Holliday & Brown archives.