From a book dedicated to all things purple to romantic images of Dior’s toiles, from 20 years of Erdem’s beautiful fashion collections to never before seen photographs from the legendary photographer Patrick Demarchelier, these books are sure to excite many fashion followers.
Patrick Demarchelier: Fashion Photographs Seen And Unseen
Even if you don’t follow fashion, you’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard of Patrick Demarchelier. He became a household name in a key scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Anne Hathaway’s character struggled to pronounce the photographer’s Gallic nom de famille. Demarchelier passed away in 2022 but his legacy lives on in the enduring images he captured of supermodels, celebrities and rockstars. He was one of the leading fashion photographers of his generation working with models like Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell for magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and W.
This new book Patrick Demarchelier: Fashion Photographs Seen and Unseen, a companion to an exhibition of Camera Work Berlin, is a glossy compendium of Demarchelier’s most iconic images, as well as never before seen photographs. In our current age when magazines have slashed the budgets of fashion editorials and where the fantasy and glamour has dimmed, this book takes us back to the golden age of fashion photography. The supermodels are all represented in photographs conjured by great editors and stylists like Grace Coddington, Tonne Goodman and Sarajane Hoare. And Fabien Baron, the legendary art director who reshaped Harper’s Bazaar into the magazine of modern elegance in the 1990s designed the book. Patrick Demarchelier: Fashion Photographs Seen and Unseen is the book for the fashion-obsessed.
Erdem
To mark the 20th anniversary of the founding of his eponymous fashion label, Erdem Moralioglu has released a doorstopper of a coffee table book that traces his fashion journey. Chapter by chapter, he takes readers from his early beginnings to his current perch at the pinnacle of fashion told through interviews, conversations, stories and essays from a roster of writers, editors and other boldface names including Glenn Close, fashion design legend Christian Lacroix, editor and novelist Hanya Yanagihara and fashion critic Tim Blanks. He lets us inside his world and shares what inspires him, which include icons like Maria Callas and the Duchess of Devonshire Deborah Cavendish, the ballet, and gardens and flowers.
“Fashion, to me, has always been a way to tell stories,” Erdem writes in his introduction. “This is a story built from fabrics, feelings, real lives and imagined ones. It is a personal map of the past twenty years.” His collections, which are romantically elegant, have earned him critical and commercial success. In her foreword to the book, Anna Wintour described Erdem, “here was a designer whose work looked instead only for beauty and joy and optimism, whatever the odds. Flipping through Erdem, you will be tracing that line of beauty from page to page, collection by collection.
Dior by Yuriko Takagi
Every so often, the House of Dior releases a book in collaboration with different artists, be they fashion illustrators or photographers. Dior opens up its collections and archives to these artists so they can interpret the house’s codes through their own medium and style. In the past were books by the artist Mats Gustafson and photographers Patrick Demarchelier and Brigitte Niedermair. This season marks the release of a new title. This time in partnership with Japanese photographer Yuriko Takagi.
Takagi has worked closely with Dior in the past. In 2023, Dior presented her exhibit entitled Parallel Lives which drew a common thread and created a dialogue between the traditional garbs of Iran’s nomadic people and haute couture pieces from the French fashion house.
In Dior by Yuriko Takagi, the photographer set her lenses on the toiles: the early stages of haute couture garments, the first iteration of a designer’s sketch made to life by skilled mains at Dior. In her signature romantic and fluid style, often blurred or in motion, Takagi presents a unique perspective on what makes a Dior dress truly a work of art.
Carlos Mota: Purple Fever
Though not technically an fashion book, Carlos Mota: Purple Fever has enough style between its pages to merit an inclusion in this roundup. This is a follow up to Mota’s bestselling G: Forever Green. Mota assembles a vivid assortment of purple hued images from the worlds of fashion, jewelry, interiors, travel and everything in between, from lilac to violet, from lavender to aubergine. Purple reigns supreme.