When a fashionista’s tastes would blow your gift budget, a book on the subject saves the day. With bookstore shelves bulging this time of year, there’s a title to suit every recipient’s taste. Here are a few of my favorites.
Best all-around
“Halston: Inventing American Fashion” by Lesley Frowick, foreword by Liza Minnelli (Rizzoli, $75): The day that Jacqueline Kennedy wore a pillbox hat designed by Roy Halston Frowick to her husband’s 1961 inauguration, two fashion legends were launched. Focusing on the latter, Halston’s niece and confidante has assembled a spellbinding photo album, scrapbook and biography that tracks Halston from his hat-making beginnings in Chicago to Bergdorf Goodman’s millinery department in New York and beyond.
Halston would go on to launch his own clothing line, defining the disco era’s sexy look with dresses that were virtually a prerequisite for priority entry into Studio 54. He held court there too, his movie-star looks as magnetic as his clients’.
Alas, licensing deals — notably the Halston women’s line for J.C. Penney — proved his undoing. High-end retailers dropped him as new corporate owners swooped into his company and pushed him out. He died of AIDS in 1990. This book breathes fresh vitality into his legacy.
For the cognoscenti
“W: Stories” by Stefano Tonchi, foreword by Miuccia Prada (Abrams, $75): Books dedicated to one brand often amount to little more than promotional materials. But this one, brimming with photos from W magazine’s famously avant-garde centerpieces, sets itself apart from the first pages, in which Miuccia Prada argues for fashion’s image of superficiality to be put to rest.
“Fashion not only mirrors our time — it is also a language that society speaks, full of accents, dialects and hidden meanings,” she writes. “Fashion might seem fleeting and perpetually on the brink of extinction, but its temporary nature is precisely what makes it last forever. Today’s fashion is archaeological material for future historians.”
We can imagine their puzzlement unearthing the “Planet Tilda” spread, in which Tim Walker shoots actress Tilda Swinton as an otherworldly creature against a lunarlike Icelandic landscape, at times wearing a flesh skullcap that renders her as bald as Captain Picard.
On that spread and four others, special codes provide online access to short films shot on the sets of that particular story. Bonus!
For logo lovers
“Louis Vuitton: Fashion Photography” (Rizzoli, $85): The photos reprinted here, dating to 1954, remind us that Louis Vuitton’s foray into ready-to-wear is relatively recent. In magazine spreads until 1997, Louis Vuitton’s luggage functioned mostly as luxurious props to models wearing someone else’s clothing.
Even so, the sum of the photos shot by titans such as Helmut Newton and Patrick Demarchelier chart the evolution not just of a single brand but of feminine ideals, from the gloved models wearing nipped-waist skirt suits in the ’50s to the caftans and beads of the late ’60s, progressing from the back of the book forward.
For recovering shopaholics
In the pocketbook-sized “A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy” (Penguin, $18), blogger Sarah Lazarovic offers a witty take on the resolve required to reform her shopping habits. “The time I used to spend running my fingers across fabrics is now apportioned to other activities,” she writes in script alongside one of her charming illustrations. “Valuable activities like tweeting. And making fun of Twitter.”
For style seekers
It can be risky to gift what could be construed as a self-help book. But Rachel Zoe’s “Living in Style: Inspiration and Advice for Everyday Glamour” (Grand Central Publishing, $28) combines the celebrity appeal of a Hollywood stylist with the relatability of someone who mostly has worked behind the scenes.
Memoirs and more fashionable fodder
These fashion titles, which I’ve touched on previously, remain favorites:
*”I’ll Drink to That” (Penguin Press, $27.95) is a memoir by Betty Halbreich, the head personal shopper for Bergdorf Goodman, but it reads like historical fiction — with a few fashion tips dispensed at no extra charge. http://trib.in/1uL6C5B
*”Yves Saint Laurent: A Moroccan Passion” by Pierre Berge (Abrams, $35), mesmerizes with its exotic imagery and the intimate memories of its author, Saint Laurent’s lifelong partner. http://trib.in/1wT71jp
*”Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the ’90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion” by Maureen Callahan (Touchstone, $26): Those who intend only to skim will get hooked by the heartbreak, humor and scandal. http://trib.in/1wT71jp
*”Tory Burch In Color” (Abrams, $50) might trigger envy with its sunny imagery of places, people, music and memories that inspire Burch’s designs — but it might also inspire a dreamy January vacation. http://trib.in/1qlpdW5
