A luxe and definitive guide to 400 luxury handbags by the world’s leading fashion designers and couture houses

Luxury handbags account for almost a third of global luxury sales alone, and are both an aspiration and addiction for many. From Hermés’s priceless Birkin bag to Chanel’s coveted flap bags that have been prevalent since the 1950s, to Fendi’s instantly recognizable Baguette bag, it is no surprise why these incredible purses are often considered symbols of luxury and status due to their high-quality craftsmanship.

The Handbag Book: 400 Essential Designer Bags is a look back at 400 of the most famous handbags designed by the greatest names in fashion. With stunning spreads, photographs of the handbags, and introductory text for each style, it is the authority on high-end fashion. In addition, this tome also includes backgrounds on the designers, stories of how certain styles became cemented into the fashion lexicon, tips on how to identify a counterfeit, a look at the increasing popularity of second-hand bags, and even behind-the-scenes looks into how these handbags are made.

Featured designers: Acne Studios – Alaïa – Alexander Mcqueen – Ami –Anya Hindmarch – A.P.C.

About the Author:

Fashion journalist Sophie Gachet has traveled the world’s fashion weeks for ELLE magazine from 1998 to 2019. She is a co-author with Inès de la Fressange of the bestselling book La Parisienne, the last edition of which sold more than 15,000 copies in France alone. She has written five books with la Fressange published by Flammarion. Her expert eye has allowed her to select 400 essential models to produce this exceptional book.

The first extraordinary art book created through promtography. The artist and author has created the images, not with paint and brush but with AI.

This is an incredible selection of images, created through promtography. The artist Annika Nordenskiöld has used AI as a tool to portray her dreams and inner fantasies. None of the places, people or creatures in this book exist in the physical realm. Instead, they are conjured from the sum of human experience in our deep collective well. “I press enter and four versions of an image start appearing in the darkness. I have prompted deliberately, starting with characters and themes, the mood, and what matters most. Adding lesser details towards the end. I do not reference any existing work or artist, but I am specific with the time and setting. Slowly layers are added, and shapes are taking form.” The result is a book that is both beautiful and intriguing.

About the Author:

Annika Nordenskiöld is an established painter and sculptor in Sweden, that has chosen to use digital tools to create her art. She has had numerous exhibitions throughout the years, but the biggest exhibition success has been with the images presented in this book. In October 2023, Annika won the world’s first artificial intelligence art award, 'Prompted Peculiar' at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, Australia.

Timeless, evocative and hauntingly beautiful: a retrospective monograph by a truly innovative image maker whose female gaze transformed fashion photography.

American photographer Deborah Turbeville defies classification. She belongs to no school or movement. Her unique visual signature has been recognizable since her emergence as a major talent in the 1970s. Her images are evocative, difficult to date at first glance, and seem dreamlike to our 21st-century eyes. Turbeville stands apart from her male contemporaries, whose hard-edged, highly sexualized photographs of women now seem to be of their time in comparison with Turbeville’s very different representation of beauty.

This book focuses on the area of Turbeville’s practice where her genius as an artist can be found: photocollage. In contrast to her contemporaries in fashion photography, she was deliberately playful with her images: xeroxing, cutting, scraping and pinning prints together, writing in the margins and creating narrative sequences. Her work is located far from single, glossy images. It inhabits a liminal zone between art and commerce.

Built upon extensive research in the Deborah Turbeville archive, the work shown spans commercial and personal projects, with many images published for the first time. With texts by Vince Aletti, Anna Tellgren and Felix Hoffmann, this book brings into the spotlight the ways in which Turbeville redefined fashion photography, moving away from the sexual provocation and stereotypes assigned by male photographers to an idea of femininity on her terms. Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage will be an essential publication with modern relevance for all with a passion for fashion photography.

About the Author:

Nathalie Herschdorfer is Director of Photo Elysee-Museum of Photography in Lausanne. Her previous books include Coming into Fashion, Afterwards: Contemporary Photography Confronting the Past and Body: The Photography Book. Deborah Turbeville (1934–2013) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her fashion photography featured in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Nova and The New York Times and for fashion labels including Commes des Garcons, Guy Laroche and Charles Jordan. Her archive is held by The MUUS Collection.

Stefan Sagmeister’s newest project encourages long-term thinking and reminds us that many things in the world are improving.

Initially conceived in 2020 as the world entered pandemic lockdown, Stefan Sagmeister has created a book that looks at the state of the world today, illuminating, through collected data, how far we’ve come, and encouraging us to think about where we can go from here.

Statistics are vividly brought to life, as numbers are transformed into graphs, inlaid into nineteenth-century paintings, embroidered canvases, lenticular prints, and hand-painted water glasses. 

The book includes a foreword from psychologist and leading authority on language and the mind, Steven Pinker; a featured essay by graphic designer and historian Steven Heller; and a conversation between Sagmeister and Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator and artistic director of Serpentine Galleries in London and will appeal to all visually minded readers, providing a positive reaction to the tumultuous news cycle of recent years.

Published in softcover with flaps Now is Better is contained within a die-cut slipcase and accompanied by a lenticular print designed by Sagmeister. Now is Better is an intriguing and thoughtful visual meditation on our daily lives.

About the Authors:

Stefan Sagmeister formed the New York-based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed for clients as diverse as the Guggenheim Museum, the Rolling Stones, and HBO. His work is in museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York.

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and the author of many books on language, mind, and human nature, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Rationality.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of the Serpentine in London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 350 shows.

Steven Heller is co-chair of the SVA MFA Design program. He is the author, co-author, and/or editor of 200 books on design, illustration, and visual culture. For 33 years he was an art director at the New York Times for the OpEd page and the Book Review section. He has contributed to many magazines including The Atlantic, Wired, EYE, Baseline, and PRINT, where he has written The Daily Heller online for over a decade.

An in-depth overview of Ukrainian art from the dawn of Modernism in the late nineteenth century to the start of the Russian invasion in Spring 2022.

This new volume in the World of Art series provides an overview of Ukrainian art, artists and art movements from the dawn of Modernism and the 1900s to the Soviet period, to post-Soviet times and the beginning of the war with Russia in February 2022. Ukrainian art and artists are discussed within historical and political contexts as well as how they have contributed to, and interacted with, Ukrainian culture and identity. Filled with rich illustrations, each chapter explores a different art period or movement.

We are at a historical moment where Ukraine and its cultural identity are in grave danger, and author Alisa Lozhkina offers a powerful opportunity to connect curious and empathetic readers with the Ukrainian art tradition.

About the Author:

Alisa Lozhkina is a leading art historian, critic, and curator. She was the editor-in-chief of the major Ukrainian art magazine Art Ukraine and served as a deputy director and chief curator of Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, the largest museum and exhibition complex in Ukraine. Lozhkina has curated numerous art projects in Ukrainian and international museums and art centers, and published several books. She has contributed to numerous publications including Texte zur Kunst, The Art Newspaper, ARTnews, Etudes sur L'histoire de l'art, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She is also an artist.

Mark Ryden’s Yakalina Secrets is the wondrous second installment in the artist’s incredible gallery of creatures.

In his Pacific Northwest studio during the isolation of COVID-19, Mark Ryden began a series of his iconic half-animal, half-plush creatures that further explored his reverence for these beings, who are guides through a landscape of the unknown. The figures in these paintings are neither human nor animal, they are spiritual entities that create a bridge between the human and animal worlds in which so much disharmony exists.

This book features all of the original portraits of Ryden’s mysterious and mythical creatures. The resulting gallery of enchanted characters embodies the artist’s meticulously realized signature blend of archetype, kitsch, and narrative mysticism.

Mark Ryden’sYakalina Secrets features works from two of the artist’s exhibitions, organized in collaboration with Emmanuel Perrotin and Kasmin Gallery: Animal Secrets in Paris and Yakalina 9 in Tokyo.

Foreword by Takashi Murakami

About the Author:

Blending pop culture themes with techniques reminiscent of the old masters, Mark Ryden has created a singular style that blurs the traditional boundaries between high and low art. His work first garnered attention in the 1990s when he ushered in a new genre of painting, “pop surrealism,” dragging a host of followers in his wake. Ryden has trumped the initial surrealist strategies by choosing topics loaded with cultural connotation.

A who’s who of Italian fashion photographers, from Vogue favorites to rising stars

This glamorous, 400-plus-page encyclopedic publication celebrates the innovative legacy of Italian fashion photography, showcasing a broad selection of work from some of the foremost contemporary players in the field. Curated by photographer Pablo Arroyo and organized alphabetically, Panorama of Contemporary Italian Fashion Photography gathers imagery from over 90 artists both upcoming and established. From high-concept haute couture and lo-fi portraits to candid street scenes and magazine editorials, this compendium is an astonishing collection of cutting-edge photography emblematic of a country that has set the gold standard for fashion and style. 

Panorama of Contemporary Fashion Photography is an invaluable reference tool for creatives and industry enthusiasts alike.

Photographers include: Arianna Genghini, Carlotta Manaigo, Emanuele Ferrari, Giampaolo Sgura, Illaria Orsini, Letizia Ragno, Marcello Junior Dino, Maurizio Annese, Paolo Zambaldi, Stefano Galuzzi.

About the Editor:

Pablo Arroyo, creative, art director and photographer, was born in 1975 in Mexico City, where he studied history of art, silkscreen, etching. He moved to Italy in the early 1990s where he studied graphic design, photography and history of art at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan. After a short period as a graphic designer for Italian Vogue, he started working as a full time photographer, contributing with Italian and international magazines, developing catalogues and campaigns for brands such as Alexander Mc Queen, Gucci, Trussardi, Valentino to name a few. In 2009 he developed and launched his first independent magazine/project in Paris, before starting working as an art director, helping brands develop their image. Photographer since 1998, he was Creative Director/Editor in Chief of L’Officiel Hommes Paris (2015-2019) and of L’Officiel Hommes Italia (2011-2015).

This first complete investigation into Karl Lagerfeld’s (1933–2019) artistry explores his extraordinary 65-year career, from the designs for Chloé and Fendi in the 1960s and 1970s to his celebrated leadership in the 1980s and beyond at Chanel and with his own label. Inspired by the “line of beauty” theorized by eighteenth-century English painter William Hogarth, this dazzling publication pursues the straight and serpentine “lines” and their intersections in Lagerfeld’s work as a means of understanding his unique creative process.

The book’s elegant parchment and cloth cover, emulating an artist’s portfolio, opens onto a pageant of stunning new photography by Julia Hetta of Lagerfeld’s fashion alongside the designer’s original sketches. The juxtaposition of drawings with finished pieces offers a window into Lagerfeld’s creative brilliance. Texts include personal reflections from Lagerfeld’s premières d’ateliers — the seamstresses behind his extraordinary creations — as well as Anna Wintour, Patrick Hourcade, Amanda Harlech, and Tadao Ando. Not only a lavish objet but also an important resource on Lagerfeld, the book concludes with an illustrated timeline of the designer’s long and illustrious career.

About the Author:

Andrew Bolton is the Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Пролистать книгу Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty на Google Books

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Видео о книге Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty

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Видео о выставке Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty — Exhibition Tour with Andrew Bolton

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“Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty invites the public into Karl’s world and reveals the dualities within his work.”—FENDI

“This catalogue is a guide to the man and his work, a guide that Karl—even Karl—would have loved.”—Anna Wintour

“The intersection of a serpentine line with a straight line . . . cross, overlap, and crush against each other, creating tension and expansion . . . offering a glimpse into the introspective world of Karl Lagerfeld.”—Tadao Ando

“[Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty] sheds light on the work of a designer of genius who marked the history of fashion . . . forever.”—CHANEL

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A resplendent celebration of the spectacular fashion designs of Guo Pei, China’s first and preeminent couturier

Guo Pei: Couture Fantasy is a journey into the imaginative world of Guo Pei, China’s first couturier and one of the world’s most innovative fashion designers. Guo Pei has astonished fashion audiences from Beijing to Paris for over 20 years and made headlines in the U.S. as the designer of Rihanna’s trailing yellow gown at the 2015 Met Gala. Known for dazzling designs which make the implausible possible, Guo Pei takes inspiration from sources as varied as China’s imperial heritage, European architecture, and the botanical world; she has been sought for commissions by celebrities, royalty, and the Olympics.

With more than 200 color illustrations highlighting 60 of her exquisite creations, this sumptuous volume showcases the garments’ consummate craftsmanship, lavish embroidery, and unconventional dressmaking techniques, all of which are hallmarks of Guo Pei’s work. In addition to its visual splendor, the book features a Q&A with the designer, a facsimile sketchbook, and a chronology tracing her career from its start at the Beijing Industrial School of Design to celebrated couturier.

About the Author:

Jill D’Alessandro is curator in charge of costume and textile arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

A journey for the senses across five continents, A Perfume Atlas traces the origins of the precious essences that create Louis Vuitton's exclusive perfumes

Louis Vuitton: A Perfume Atlas offers a rare look at the time-honoured crafts of the perfumer, with specially commissioned illustrations, photographs and texts revealing the stories of the precious natural elements that form the basis of the house’s unique perfumes.

With exclusive, first-hand access to Louis Vuitton’s master perfumer Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud, A Perfume Atlas explores how the flowers are cultivated, the growing seasons and techniques used to harvest the blossoms, and how essential oils are extracted, distilled and composed to create new and complex fragrances. From Chinese magnolia and osmanthus to India’s tuberose and jasmine, each seed pod, berry, woody stem, fruit, leaf and flower opens a world that evokes the thrill of far-off places and names, trade routes, sea journeys and the rhythms of the seasons.

A poetic celebration of a most mysterious art, Louis Vuitton: A Perfume Atlas is the perfect gift for lovers of nature, luxury, travel and beauty.

About the Authors:

Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud is Louis Vuitton’s master perfumer, and the creator of several award-winning perfumes. Lionel Paillès is a perfume journalist based in Paris. He is the author of Esprit de synthèse: Du parfum, des molecules, Chanel: The Art of Creating Fragrance: Flowers of the French Riviera and Petit lexique des amateurs épris d’odeurs et de parfums. Aurore de la Morinerie is a Paris-based fashion illustrator. She is a regular contributor to Le Monde, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, and collaborates with a number of prestigious fashion houses, such as Hermès, Maison Margiela and Cartier.

Brushwork and poetry – the great awakening of Venetian painting around 1500.

In the Venice of the Renaissance, master artists like Bellini, Giorgione, Palma Vecchio and Titian explored the essence of mankind and nature and their relationship to each other with an unprecedented intensity. This attractive volume shows through important portraits and landscape representations the pioneering innovations of Venetian painting, which continued to leave their mark right up to the modern age.

The painting of the city on the lagoon captivates us not only through the wealth of colours and the nuances of the light, but also through the exceptional sensitivity with which the artists focused on their works. They created sophisticated portraits, seductive idealised likenesses and history paintings whose principal character is the atmospheric landscape. The publication examines the masterpieces in depth with regard to their remarkable innovative strength, the context in which they were produced, and contemporary interpretations.

About the Author:

Andreas Schumacher is the Director of Collections at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

The most thorough Caspar David Friedrich retrospective in many years, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the artist's birth

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) is renowned as the Romantic painter par excellence, his works icons of an age of major social upheaval. His landscape paintings and drawings broke with traditional patterns of representation, and paved new ways of both experiencing and reflecting on the ambivalent relationship between humankind and nature.

Accompanying the most comprehensive Friedrich retrospective in many years, this catalogue re-examines the artist’s groundbreaking work in light of the urgent challenges in a time of climate crisis and postcolonial reflection. It centres on more than sixty paintings, among them many major iconic works, and about 100 drawings. Selected works by Friedrich’s colleagues, notably August Heinrich, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Ernst Ferdinand Oehme and Johann Alexander Thiele are also featured. The second part of the book focuses on the contemporary reception of his work. In contributions ranging from video and photography to installations, some twenty artists working across a variety of genres and media explore the Romantic era, its attitude to nature and the art of Caspar David Friedrich. The participants include Alex Grein, Swaantje Güntzel, Jochen Hein, Johanna Karlsson, Hiroyuki Masuyama, Loudmila Milanova, Mariele Neudecker, Ulrike Rosenbach, Susan Schuppli, Santeri Tuori and Kehinde Wiley.

About the Authors:

Markus Bertsch is Head of the 19th-Century Collection at Hamburger Kunsthalle. Johannes Grave is Professor of Modern Art History with a focus on European Romanticism at the University of Jena. He was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preis in 2020 for his research on art in the early 1800s, early Renaissance painting and picture theory.

An in-depth look at the many ways women around the world helped shape modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s as they captured images of a radically changing world

During the 1920s the New Woman was easy to recognize but hard to define. Hair bobbed and fashionably dressed, this iconic figure of modernity was everywhere, splashed across magazine pages or projected on the silver screen. A global phenomenon, she embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art ― including photography. This groundbreaking, richly illustrated book looks at those “new women” who embraced the camera as a mode of expression and made a profound impact on the medium from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Thematic chapters explore how women emerged as a driving force in modern photography, bringing their own perspective to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography and photojournalism. Featuring work by 120 photographers, this volume expands the history of photography by critically examining an international array of canonical and less well-known women photographers, from Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange and Lola Álvarez Bravo to Germaine Krull, Tsuneko Sasamoto and Homai Vyarawalla. Against the odds, these women produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.

Crewdson's epic photographic trilogy -- a portrait of America a decade in the making

Over the past three decades, Gregory Crewdson has been fleshing out a portrait of middle America, an America gazing wide-eyed at the glimmers of a fading dream.

His cinematographically staged photos have pieced together the fragments of a twilight world tinged with numbness.

This book brings togetherthree bodies of work made between 2012 and 2022. Envisaged as a trilogy, they previde unique insight into a decade of creation and offer a comprehensive view of the universe that hasposited Gregory Crewdson as one ofthe major figures of photography.

This trilogy isintroduced by Fireflies, a pivotal series if one is to grasp the intimate undercurrents in Gregory Crewdson's artwork.

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Considered one of the greatest exponents of staged photography, Gregory Crewdson has drawn a portrait of middle America, enclosed in the intermediate spaces of modest-sized cities, an America with eyes wide open towards the lights of a dream in exhaustion, already exhausted, already dilapidated. His photographs, staged with the devices of the cinema, have assembled the fragments of a twilight world, populated by the neutral faces of its protagonists, frozen like ruins that ignore themselves in a present cracked by the oracular manifestations of imperceptible decompositions.

This book brings together for the first time the trilogy conceived between 2012 and 2022. It unfolds an unprecedented vision of a decade of creation and reveals the intimate and political sides of the universe that has established Gregory Crewdson as one of photography’s major figures. Cathedral of the Pines and An Eclipse of Moths vibrate with an intimacy crystallized by places deeply connected to the life of the photographer, his partner and collaborator Juliane Hiam and their children. At the same time, these two series shift towards a political dimension which finds its most subtle expression in the black and white photographs of Eveningside which close the trilogy in 2022. To this trilogy is added the Fireflies series, produced in 1996, which is essential for capturing the intimate movements that operate in his art.