#FashionVictim


Book Description

Heathers meets The Devil Wears Prada in this “sick and vicious and funny” thriller set in the cut-throat world of fashion (Caroline Kepnes, New York Times–bestselling author of You) Fashion editor Anya St. Clair is on the verge of greatness. A to-die-for wardrobe. Killer social media numbers. And the path behind her is littered with the bodies of anyone who got in her way. She’s worked hard to get where she is, but she doesn’t have everything. Not like Sarah Taft. Anya’s obsession sits one desk away. Beautiful, stylish, and rich, Sarah’s a natural fashion icon. From her beach-wave blonde hair to her on-trend nail art, she’s a walking editorial spread. Anya wants to be her friend. Her best friend. Her only friend. When Sarah becomes her top competition for a promotion, Anya’s plan to win her friendship goes into overdrive. In order to beat Sarah, she’ll have to become her. Friendly competition may turn fatal, but as they say in fashion: One day you’re in, and the next day you’re dead. “As awesome as it sounds . . . welcome to the cruel world of fashion where women’s looks, weight, and youth is the only thing to value.” —Book Riot




Fashion Victims


Book Description

From insidious murder weapons to blaze-igniting crinolines, clothing has been the cause of death, disease and madness throughout history, by accident and design. Clothing is designed to protect, shield and comfort us, yet lurking amongst seemingly innocuous garments we find hats laced with mercury, frocks laden with arsenic and literally 'drop-dead gorgeous' gowns. Fabulously gory and gruesome, Fashion Victims takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the lethal history of women's, men's and children's dress, in myth and reality. Drawing upon surviving fashion objects and numerous visual and textual sources, encompassing louse-ridden military uniforms, accounts of the fiery deaths of Oscar Wilde's half-sisters and dancer Isadora Duncan's accidental strangulation by entangled scarf; the book explores how garments have tormented those who made and wore them, and harmed animals and the environment in the process. Vividly chronicling evidence from Greek mythology to the present day, Matthews David puts everyday apparel under the microscope and unpicks the dark side of fashion. Fashion Victims is lavishly illustrated with over 125 images and is a remarkable resource for everyone from scholars and students to fashion enthusiasts.




Fashion Victims


Book Description

A thoughtful, lavishly illustrated, and highly readable account of the fabulous French fashion world in the pre-Revolutionary period This engrossing book chronicles one of the most exciting, controversial, and extravagant periods in the history of fashion: the reign of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette in 18th-century France. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell offers a carefully researched glimpse into the turbulent era's sophisticated and largely female-dominated fashion industry, which produced courtly finery as well as promoted a thriving secondhand clothing market outside the royal circle. She discusses in depth the exceptionally imaginative and uninhibited styles of the period immediately before the French Revolution, and also explores fashion's surprising influence on the course of the Revolution itself. The absorbing narrative demonstrates fashion's crucial role as a visible and versatile medium for social commentary, and shows the glittering surface of 18th-century high society as well as its seedy underbelly. Fashion Victims presents a compelling anthology of trends, manners, and personalities from the era, accompanied by gorgeous fashion plates, portraits, and photographs of rare surviving garments. Drawing upon documentary evidence, previously unpublished archival sources, and new information about aristocrats, politicians, and celebrities, this book is an unmatched study of French fashion in the late 18th century, providing astonishing insight, a gripping story, and stylish inspiration.




Fashion Victim


Book Description

A Dallas O'Connor mystery.




Fashion Victim


Book Description

Texas fashion stylist Dallas O'Connor arrives in the Caribbean to shoot a music video with a hot new girl band, but when the girls are tormented by terrifying practical jokes, voodoo curses, and a brutal murder, Dallas tries to unmask a killer. Reprint.




Fashion Victim


Book Description

A riveting look inside the fashion world that exposes the truth about shopaholics, sweatshops, and celebrity closets. Fashion—from the $1500 Prada bag to the $30 Kate Spade knock-off sold on the sidewalk—has been transformed from a commodity reserved for the elite to a powerful presence in mass market culture. As a society, we are obsessed with fashion and style, racking up credit card debt to support compulsive shopping habits, scouring magazines for the latest trends to buy, and focusing more on who’s wearing what at the Oscars than on who’s winning. In Fashion Victim, award-winning journalist Michelle Lee blows the lid off the fashion industry, and spotlights the fascinating—and often disturbing--ways in which it is morphing our culture, our economy and our values. Dishing on the lords of the label, including designers like Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Kenneth Cole, Fashion Victim reveals a world that is sometimes grotesque, sometimes glitzy, but constantly intriguing. From bear hides to the Victorian bustle, Lee traces the role of fashion through the ages, taking us from the dawn of ready-to-wear in 1865 to the modern trend cycles that incite us to clamor after leg warmers, bumster trousers, and Manolo Blahniks. She details the birth of “Speed Chic”—the hamster wheel of style that keeps us stuck in an endless cycle of consumption and has become the crack-cocaine of fashion, providing us with a temporary high until we spot the next trend and reach for our wallets. She also explores the phenomenon of “McFashion,” the uncanny proliferation of retailers like the Gap and Old Navy that are creeping into every town in America and stripping us—and the designers they knock off--of individuality and innovation. And she ultimately probes the human cost of fashion’s decadence, including the distorted perceptions of beauty fueled by high-end designers, the dangers of dry cleaning, and the ugly financial disparity between those who make the clothes and those who buy them. An unprecedented look behind the runway at the forces and personalities driving this $200 billion dollar industry, Fashion Victim is a stylish, provocative and highly entertaining contribution to the analysis of American popular culture.




Queen of Fashion


Book Description

In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen, a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinette's bold attempts to reshape royal fashion changed the future of France Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queen's tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Weber's queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion—the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs—was also the means of her undoing. Weber's book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of history's most controversial figures.




Killer Hair


Book Description

"Crimes of Fashion" columnist Lacey Smithsonian delves into her latest mystery when hot new stylist Angie Woods supposedly commits suicide, but Lacey believes otherwise and teams up with a gorgeous ex-cop to find the truth, an investigation that leads her to a congressional staffer. Original.




FashionEast


Book Description

A richly illustrated, comprehensive study of fashion under socialism, from state-sponsored prototypes to unofficial imitations of Paris fashion. The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism—which cast fashion as frivolous and anti-revolutionary—eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past. The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores—mythical images of smart and luxurious dresses that symbolized the economic progress that socialist regimes dreamed of. Everyday fashion, starting in the 1950s, was an unofficial, do-it-yourself enterprise: Western fashions obtained through semiclandestine channels or sewn at home. The state tolerated the demand for Western fashion, promising the burgeoning middle class consumer goods in exchange for political loyalty. Bartlett traces the progress of socialist fashion in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia, drawing on state-sponsored socialist women's magazines, etiquette books, socialist manuals on dress, private archives, and her own interviews with designers, fashion editors, and other key figures. Fashion, she suggests, with all its ephemerality and dynamism, was in perpetual conflict with the socialist regimes' fear of change and need for control. It was, to echo the famous first sentence from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunted socialism until the end.




Worst Fashions


Book Description

The author presents her view of the questionable pieces of fashion from the last fifty years.