Lee Miller in Fashion by Becky E. Conekin

Aimed at fashion students and students of fashion alike. Packed with fascinating pub-quiz facts – ancient Greek women were the first to wear bras, white is the colour of mourning in India and shoes didn’t have different shapes for left and right feet until the 1860s – and more than 450 colour images of everything from henna tattoos and skin piercing to designs by Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen to paintings by Jan van Eyck and Michelangelo. The human body is at the heart of McDowell’s ambitious 358-page thesis on fashion, covering the development of dress over the past 40,000 years. The Anatomy of Fashion: Why We Dress the Way We Do by Colin McDowell, Phaidon, £59.95 (published October 2) Special features: the book comes with a cool sheet of stickers so you can personalise the cover. The plates are a mix of fashion editorial, advertising, art works and celebrity portraiture, including shots of Lady Gaga, Clint Eastwood, Gisele Bündchen, Rachel Weiss and Kate Moss. Tracing their career from the late 1980s, the book highlights the diversity of the pair’s work, which straddles art and fashion. This compilation of the work of Dutch photographers Lamsweerde and Matadin is a slimmed-down version of a limited-edition book that was priced at a hefty £450. Pretty Much Everything by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Taschen, £44.99 (published October) Subterranean books is also sponsoring a book signing, which follows the talk.Special features: the subjects are arranged alphabetically rather than thematically – so Missoni’s iconic zigzag stripes are happily matched by the trademark pleats of Issey Miyake. The event is sponsored by the Department of History, Politics, and International Relations the English Department, College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Art, Design, and Art History, Leigh Gerdine College of Fine Arts, Webster University. The title of her talk is “Lee Miller in Fashion.”Īccording to The New York Times, Conekin’s book “expands our view of that protean spirit, an American model who became a European Surrealist, a fearless photojournalist, and other things besides.” The Huffington Post calls it, “a lush page-turner that offers a very intimate look at a visionary and risk-taker who lived her life to the fullest.” Yale historian Becky Conekin has written a book about Lee Miller that she’ll be discussing Friday, April 18, at 12-1 in SVER 123. (One of her most bizarre and iconic photos is of herself in Hitler’s bathtub). Her brilliant photos helped revolutionize the fashion industry, but she also photographed war, poverty, and politics. She moved to Paris, apprenticed herself to the artist Man Ray and steadily became one of the most important photographers of her generation. She became unemployable thanks to a scandal involving ads for Kotex menstrual pads (!), and then her life was transformed. Lee Miller was the “it girl” of 1927, a gorgeous model who embodied elegance, refinement, and flapper chic.

Lee Miller in Fashion by Becky E. Conekin