Customer Reviews:
One of the basic must-have items in any fashion researcher's library.......2007-04-28
I'd go so far, in fact, as to say that if you don't have _20,000 Years of Fashion_ in your library, or if you don't have ready access to a library that has this book, your credentials as a serious student of fashion would have to be called somewhat into question. This massive 440-page-plus tome could serve as a college text in costume history; and I make no doubt that, at some schools, it has filled just that role. Do bear in mind that this book covers fashion only up to about 1965 (that, however, may be no great hardship to those who believe that there hasn't really been any great couture since the last time Hubert de Givenchy designed something for Audrey Hepburn :) ). There is a truly staggering amount of illustrations in the book - over 1100, of which some 350 are full-color - and the array includes reproductions of many famous paintings and other artworks showcasing especially notable costumes. Every item of costume and couture is covered in detail, from head (hats) to feet (shoes) and in between. In contrast to some other pictorial works of fashion I've reviewed, there is a very extensive and detailed text, though, as another reviewer has noted, it was originally written in French and has been translated to English, with the possible loss of some nuances and idioms in the process.
Overall, I repeat my initial judgment: this is a mandatory item for anyone seriously interested in the history of costume to have in their library.
Essential Reference Book for any Costume Design Student.......2007-01-04
I would never have passed any of my Costume Design classes in college without this book and even now find it to be ridiculously useful when it comes to double-checking period dress I see in shows or movies. You wouldn't believe how many people get the costumes wrong!!!
Prepare to be WOWED!.......2006-03-25
I recently purchased 8 different books on the history of costume, and I am pleased to say that this book seems to be, by FAR, the best book, while also being the lowest priced work that I purchased! I purchased the books with the intention of using them to assist in dating eighteenth and nineteenth century portraits, and this book is PERFECT for the task. When you open this book and flip through the pages, you can't help but think that it is exactly what you were seeking. It is just bursting with text and images, all on quality glossy paper that makes the images easy to see. Many of the fashion books I have examined seemed to have either too much text at the expense of images, or too many images with no additional information to assist. This book offers substantial helpings of both! I have to disagree with the reviewers who say the text is hard to follow or that the pictures are too small.... The pictures are quite easy to see, and the only ones in black and white are of origiinal works that happen to be in black and white, so I don't think this was a fair criticism. The text seems logically presented, with easy-to-follow section headings. I would never say that this book could serve as the "only" book you need if you are serious about obtaining specialist knowledge on the history of costume. However, I would certainly name it as the best "all-in-one" to start with. This book combines drawings of fashions, photographs of actual period clothing in museum settings, and plenty of examples of painted works depicting fashion trends. Being the critical person that I am, I cannot help but point out what I see as the one flaw: this book has extremely sparse information on military uniforms, so if you are interested in militaria you will need to seek a more specialized book. If you are interested in SEWING period clothing, I recommend Norah Waugh's works, "The Cut of Men's Clothing" and "The Cut of Women's Clothing". If you are interested in identifying period fashion trends, especially in small details such as accessories, hairstyles, buttons, etc. I HIGHLY recommend this book. I can honestly say that if it cost three times as much, I would still be recommending it as the best one I've seen yet. If it were an option, I would have given this book SIX STARS!
A book for every fashion history lover.......2006-01-22
I really debated between giving this 4 or 5 stars. This is a book I reference when I need a little more in-depth info about a certain period or style. As some of the other reviewers have said it is not an easy or engaging read. However, the text is very scholarly and deals a lot with political and economic factors that influenced the world of fashion (many books simply describe the developments in the garments without dealing much with the "why"). There are many images to show the progression of fashion changes and Boucher includes photos of extant garments (where possible), statues, accessories, etc. alongside reproductions of paintings. Each period is introduced by a general overview of the European world of the time (politics, economy, etc.) and then divided into sections such as Spanish Costume, or Military Costume. If you need a general overview of the complete history of (Western) fashion with a lot of scholarly text to back it up, look no further.
Good pictures, bad text.......2005-07-28
This book is a great source for pictures but the text is not as useful. It is more anthropological than historical and has been translated from French so is sometimes unclear.
Customer Reviews:
Awesome Pictures!.......2005-05-01
I have to admit I really haven't read much of the book, but I don't really need to because the pictures more than speak for themselves. This is a great book for any costume history buff or really anyone who enjoys fashion.
Pictures galore.......2001-11-16
This book, published outside of the US as "A history of fashion in the west" is a must for anyone interested in clothing and its developement throught history. All the pictures are primary and the text is helpful and informative. my only regret is that it stops in the 1980's and has not alot on the 1950's. It is quite general but even so is a wonderful book.
Average customer rating:
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305 Authentic Art Nouveau Jewelry Designs
Maurice Dufrene
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
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Art Nouveau Jewelry
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Authentic Art Deco Jewelry Designs
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The Master Jewelers
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Jewelry: From Antiquity to the Present (World of Art)
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Bedazzled: 5000 Years of Jewelry--The Walters Art Museum
ASIN: 0486249042 |
Book Description
Over 300 spectacular pendants, combs, buckles, rings, bracelets, brooches, umbrella handles, penknives, buttons, clasps, and scissors in detailed photographs reprinted from rare, turn-of-the-century folio. Elegant, copyright-free illustrations exquisitely detailed with flower, foliage and butterfly motifs. Readily adaptable to any design use.
Customer Reviews:
Great for tattoos.......2005-02-10
I LOVE this book, and have turned many of these designs into tattoos. Never seen anything like it on any other person, either.
Book Description
Features art deco jewellery with a French look, made in Germany and exported world wide.
Customer Reviews:
Berlin chic of the 1930's.......2004-09-22
Probably the dawn of art deco fashion jewelry was the 16-28 May 1927 machine-age exposition in New York. This exposition showed how modern technology could be fused with the arts, bringing German bauhaus design to America's attention.
The prior year, 1926, saw the release of the silent film "Metropolis," Fritz Lang's anxious vision of a world demanding conformity in which "the masses" are controlled by machines and their owners. This film's art direction makes use of many art deco design elements which find their way into mainstream costume jewelry design. Geometric shapes and simplicity dominate costume jewelry in which new, inexpensive materials, such as bakelite and corolite could be incorporated, adding translucent and opaque color.
Fashion jewelry components in the 1930's were manufactured primarily in Bohemia so, when Jewish owners lost their factories in 1938, art deco costume jewelry also vanished from the fashion scene. This book gathers -- and preserves in photographs -- much of art deco jewelry's beauty within its pages.
Average customer rating:
- The Designs of the Paris Salon Brought to You
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Art Deco Jewelry Designs in Full Color (Dover Pictorial Archive Series)
Dover Publications Inc , and
Idees
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0486276945 |
Customer Reviews:
The Designs of the Paris Salon Brought to You.......2005-08-05
A typical Dover reprint of public domain material, but in this case well done. Original drawings from the Le plus bel album du monde pur les industries de luxe published in Paris at the height of the Art Deco period. These are the design drawings, not pictures of the finished pieces. There is a brief publishers note, but no other commentary to put the designs in perspective.
A good resource for crafts inspirations, but not a book of patterns or designs. Since these are drawings it is not always apparent what the finished piece, if it was ever created, would look like, but perhaps that is all to the better as an inspirational source.
I am confused by Dover's restrictive copyright since the material is public domain, but if you are interested in copying the designs for your own projects you should have no problem.
Overall a fine example of the art deco sensibility expressed in jewelry.
Average customer rating:
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Art Deco Fashion and Jewelry (Centuries of Style)
Inc. Book Sales
Manufacturer: Book Sales
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0785809872 |
Amazon.com
There can't be many people who haven't heard of Wonder Woman, arguably the first female superhero and one of the "big three" (the others being Batman and Superman). She was created by Dr. William Moulton Marston, who also invented the lie detector, as an antidote to masculine comic book adventures, drenched in violent testosterone-fueled imagery and portraying women as helpless weaklings who had to rely on the men to untie them from the train tracks in the nick of time. Wonder Woman was certainly no weakling. Dressed in stars and stripes, armed with bullet-deflecting bracelets and a magical lasso, and flying around in an invisible jet, she had no qualms about saving her boyfriend Steve Trevor from certain doom each issue while dealing a swift blow to the odd Nazi soldier as well. However, most people who aren't die-hard comic fans will have only memories of the camp and kitschy 1970s TV show, starring the leggy and beautiful Lynda Carter (who also contributes the book's foreword). As compelling and faithful as this small-screen adaptation was, there is so much more to the WW mythology than that, as Les Daniels admirably proves in this gorgeous hardback volume. It features lots of covers and extracted scenes from the comic books, from her earliest appearance to her latest 1990s image changes, and plenty of photographs of the plethora of WW merchandise created over the years. And for those of you old enough to remember the TV show, the lyrics of the infamous theme song are also here in all their star-spangled glory. This is a wonderful, nostalgic journey through the life and times of the first lady of superheroes and a real appreciation of WW's staying power and campy cult status. Beautifully packaged, absorbingly written, and wonderfully illustrated, this is a must-have for comic fans. --Jonathan Weir, Amazon.co.uk
Book Description
The super-powered trilogy that captured the world's greatest superhero triumvirate of all time is now available in paperback. Relive the adventures of Krypton's favorite son inside and outside the comic book world in Superman: The Complete History. Uncover the Caped Crusader's mysterious real-world origin and his evolution into a hugely successful TV and movie franchise in Batman: The Complete History. Follow the Amazon Princess as she evolves from curiosity to feminist icon in the Eisner Award winning Wonder Woman: The Complete History. Each book is filled with enough archival comic book art, photographs, and in-depth history to satisfy the most demanding fan—and is now priced to appeal to the most casual reader.
Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and all related characters, names, and indicia are trademarks of DC Comics 2004.
Customer Reviews:
Les Daniels is no fan of Wonder Woman.......2005-11-22
I have always enjoyed Les Daniels and his carefully researched books of comics history, but everyone has a blind spot. Wonder Woman is obviously his. This book, beautifully designed as it is, fails to capture what has made Wonder Woman such an enduring character and icon. It's clear on almost every page, Daniels is unimpressed by her. It's fine if he doesn't like her -- no one character can be everyone's favorite -- but it does make for a frustrating read at times when one wishes to celebrate Wonder Woman's unique place in comics history. His fascination with her creator is evident to the point that it seems clear Daniels would much rather write about Marston than Diana. His heavy emphasis on the bondage subtext of the Golden Age incarnation undercuts the more postive surface elements of those stories. Indeed, he sneers at Gloria Steinem's endorsement of those early years, casting great disbelief that there could be anything of substance taken from them.
Also, as another reviewer points out, Daniels gives short shrift to George Perez's post-Crisis revamp. Widely acknowledged by fans as the high point of her modern career, it's strange to see Daniels blandly note the support Perez got from female collegues in overhauling Wonder Woman's character and deride it by calling the later issues akin to ADVENTURES OF MENOPAUSAL MOM (I'm paraphrasing but only slightly). Daniels here suffers from the same fanboy syndrome that infuses the industry these days -- the idea that if HE doesn't appreciate it, it must be terrible. Meanwhile, Mike Deodato's art is viewed favorably, despite that being universely considered a lower point in the post-Crisis stories.
At the end of the book, it really seems as if Daniels only reluctantly churned it out because of a contractual obligation. His Superman and Batman books are excellent and filled with total respect for the characters and their appeal. If only he could've retained enough objectivity for the Wonder Woman assignment. Despite it all, it is a beautiful book and the history is thorough and still fascinating if somewhat subjective. Good for historical nuts, not so good for WW fans.
Mostly Wonderful.......2005-11-17
Les Daniels' Wonder Woman: The Complete History is the third book in a 3-volume series (the first two addressed Superman and Batman). While not without its flaws, it's overall a well-researched and enjoyable treatment of the character.
Wonder Woman first appeared in 1941, the brainchild of Dr. William Moulton Marston (writing under the pen name Charles Moulton), by any standard a bit of a weirdo who's remembered today for two things: (1) he invented the polygraph, (2) Wonder Woman, of course.
I could pick a few nits with Daniels' text. In places he does reveal an ignorance on certain topics. For instance, when speaking of Marston's World War I U.S. Army service, he states Marston "rose to the rank of second lieutenant." False. No officer (and I can't imagine someone of Marston's high educational level ever being an enlisted man) "rises" to Second Lieutenant because that's the absolute lowest officer rank.
Daniels is extremely opinionated. How much space is allocated to any of Wonder Woman's creative teams over the decades is very much controlled by how much Daniels likes their work. Obviously the Marston stories, with artwork by Harry G. Peters, are his favorites thus receive the most attention, though he devotes surprising time and positive comment to the generally despised stories written by Robert Kanigher. This is fine. Half the fun of a book like this is getting the writer's likes and dislikes on the character and her creators. Where I part company with Daniels is his low opinion of the George Perez stories of the mid-1980s thru early '90s. Daniels devotes an entire chapter to Kanigher's creation of such fascinating (hah!) characters as Glop (a "shapeless mass of grinning goo from outer space [which] absorbed everything in its path including 100 rock 'n' roll records"), Wonder Tot ("Mommy be proud to see me now!"), and Egg Fu (a Chinese Communist agent inexplicably shaped like an egg the size of a house, who used his mustaches as weapons and had a Charlie Chan speech pattern). After that, it was more than a little disappointing to have the Perez stories, considered by many Wonder Woman fans including myself the character's finest hour (especially the stories on which Perez did the artwork in addition to scripting) dealt with in a mere seven text pages, much of that explaining how they weren't really all that hot.
The only truly major flaw in this book involves its layout. These days, book publishers are terrified of the Internet. And well they should be. However, instead of focusing their efforts on what books do better that the 'net - provide one, continuous, uninterrupted stream of information - publishers' response has been to make their book pages look as much as possible like web pages. Lots of bright colors, lots of sidebars. I hate sidebars. I don't appreciate having to flip back and forth between pages, sometimes reading blocks of text in four or five different locations, to get all the info. More to the point in this particular book, choice of color on some of the sidebars is extremely poor, so much so it's difficult to read the text. Black lettering against a dark blue or dark red background just doesn't make it.
With those few negatives out of the way, this book is a delight. It's all here: a biography of Marston, on to the creation of Wonder Woman, all the creative teams of note and their storylines up til this book's publication date (2000), the Cathy Lee Crosby made-for-television movie, the Lynda Carter TV show, Wonder Woman merchandise, her appearance on the cover of Ms. magazine's first issue, etc. This book is a must-have for fans of one of the 20th/21st Century's most fascinating fictional creations.
Fun book but a couple mistakes..........2004-05-07
First off, loved the book. It was nice to read the comments from Lynda Carter and see the multitude of changes that WW has gone through. But I did notice two things, the actress that played Wonder Woman's mother in that tiny demo in the 60's was named Maudie Pricket and the photo of Ms. Carter's costume says it is from the first season and it's not, it's from the CBS years as are the bracelets and tiara on the following page. I know Ms. Carter preferred the CBS years updated costume but the original on worn while fighting Nazis in the more humorous years will always be my absolute favorite! Thanx...
Excellent and enlightening.......2003-09-04
Wonder Woman: The Complete History is a delightful book for fans of the character, even if you only know her from the old TV show. The background of her creation by a clinical psychologist was very enlightening.
The illustrations throughout are excellent and all in all, it's terrific book, exceptionally well written by Les Daniels.
Book AND Figurine!!! Heaven!.......2003-06-25
Not only do you get hte nostalgic book with the history of this heroine, you get the figurine that you can display and become the envy of all your friends! The statue is of classic Wonder Woman, the one from the 50's. She's still wearing the skirt.
This is truly rare. It's fantastic for all collectors and a MUST-HAVE for all die-hard fans!
Customer Reviews:
Great collection.......2003-06-14
Anyone not familiar with Lewis Grizzard ought to be in for a treat reading these books. I grew up reading Grizzard in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and I remember laughing out loud at the breakfast table so, so many times. Grizzard was a terrifically funny man, southern to the core and wrote basically about what he knew best- life in the south. Grizzard was more than just a funny guy, however, he was a real writer, a true talent. This collection makes me realize how much I miss him. You don't have to be southern to appreciate Grizzard, however, no more than you'd have to be from the Midwest to like Garrison Keillor. This is Grizzard at his best.
Solid Gold Grizzard.......2001-04-10
Lewis Grizzard is to southern humor what Elvis is to rock n roll, a legend that will live in our hearts forever. "Down Home Grizzard" is an excellent read as well as a beautiful memory to the late king of southern humor. The man is just plain funny.
Book Description
A bag full of golf humor from one of America's best-loved humorists. Did Lewis Grizzard love golf? Does a wild bear chip in the woods?
Books:
- A Brief History Of The Smile
- A Good Friend: How to Make One, How to Be One (Boys Town Teens and Relationships, V. 1)
- Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes
- Aernout Mik: Refraction
- African Art in Transit (Cambridge Studies in Social & Cultural Anthropology)
- Albert Speer: Conversations With Hitler's Architect
- All About Techniques in Pastel (All About Techniques Art Series)
- Anselm Kiefer: The Heavenly Palaces, Merkabah
- Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, AD 600-800: A Poetics of Line
- Arte Povera (Themes and Movements)
Books Index
Books Home
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- Starting and Building Your Own Accounting Business, Third Edition
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Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries
A History of Costume
A Dictionary of Costume and Fashion: Historic and Modern
Costume and Fashion: A Concise History (World of Art)
The Complete History of Costume & Fashion: From Ancient Egypt to the Present Day
