Drawn

Fashionistas rejoice! Cally Blackman’s book 100 Years of Fashion Illustration is a stunning and heavy brick of a book. Loaded with images spanning a century of fashion design, the book is not only a document of the evolution of culture and fashion. It also serves as a visual timeline of illustration techniques, materials, and styles wherein the forms of each successive decade seem to be a reaction to the one that preceded it. It should make a handy resource on my bookshelf, too, when I need to quickly source some 1920′s flappers or the finest bellbottoms of the 70′s. Though, if aliens found the book they’d surely be convinced that our planet was populated entirely by thin, elegant, well-dressed women, and two or three dorky-looking guys with really neat haircuts.

Admittedly, I don’t know much about the world of fashion illustration, so the book is, I trust, a thorough introduction to the genre. Flipping through the pages and the index of illustrators (of which there are a few hundred), the only names I immediately recognize are J.C. Leyendecker, Andy Warhol, and Autumn Whitehurst, the latter being one of the few representatives of the digital age.