Fashion Designers A-Z, Prada Edition (Limited Edition)

From Azzedine Alaïa, Cristóbal Balenciaga, and Coco Chanel to Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent, and Vivienne Westwood, a century’s worth of fashion greats from the permanent collection of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology are celebrated in this limited-edition volume. Photographs of over 500 garments selected from the museum’s permanent collection illuminate each of the featured designers, complemented by 110 drawn portraits by Robert Nippoldt. Texts by the curators explain why each designer is important in fashion history and what is special about the individual pieces featured. In her introductory essay, director and chief curator Valerie Steele writes about the rise of the fashion museum and the emergence of the fashion exhibition as a popular and controversial phenomenon; and both Steele and contributor Suzy Menkes provide a history of this museum’s role in the world of fashion scholarship and preservation.

Fashion Designers A–Z is available as a series of six Designer Editions. Each edition (a total of 11,000 copies) is bound in a fabric created by one of six designers—Akris, Etro, Stella McCartney, Missoni, Prada, and Diane von Furstenberg—and comes in a Plexiglas box. Crafted by hand at a bindery in the heart of Italy and stamped with a unique number, every copy is an instant classic, and an addition to your fashion library that is truly one of a kind.

For the Prada Edition of 2,000 numbered copies, Miuccia Prada selected four classic prints from previous collections and reprinted them on cotton: the tiny feminine “hearts,” the Baroque-inspired “bananas,” the geometrically abstract “diamonds,” and a floral reissued for Prada from the 1960 Holliday & Brown archives. Orders placed online will be fulfilled with one of the pictured Prada fabrics.

The editor and author

Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at FIT and founding editor of Fashion Theory. Described in The Washington Post as one of “fashion’s brainiest women” and by Suzy Menkes as “the Freud of fashion,” Steele combines serious scholarship (and a Yale Ph.D.) with a rare ability to communicate with general audiences. As author, curator, editor, and public intellectual, Steele has been instrumental in creating the modern field of fashion studies.

The contributing author

Unquestionably a leader in the global fashion press, Suzy Menkes is International Vogue Editor at Condé Nast International. Her work appears on the websites of 23 international editions of Vogue in 16 languages. She is also a leading Instagram influencer. Among the world’s most influential fashion critics, she is an officer of the Order of the British Empire as well as a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. She lives and works in London and Paris. @SuzyMenkesVogue

The illustrator

Robert Nippoldt is a German graphic designer, illustrator, and book artist. He is best known for his award-winning books Gangster, Jazz and Hollywood about America in the 1920s and 1930s. His studio is located at the very hip old depot of Muenster.