Books on radical designers and fashion as art share the shelf with coffee table volumes on courtside couture, the silver screen and the beautiful game of soccer in our seasonal roundup of new and noteworthy style and design titles.
Collective wisdom
In 1987, a group of fashion graduates from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts brought their collections to the British Designer Show in London (a trade-fair precursor to London Fashion Week). The press dubbed them the “Antwerp Six.”
Editor Geert Bruloot’s The Antwerp Six (Hannibal Books, June 23), is a companion to an ongoing exhibition at MoMu, the fashion museum of Antwerp. Canadian fashion journalist Tim Blanks is among the critical voices evaluating the lasting impact of designers Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs, Marina Yee and Ann Demeulemeester.
The avant-garde group emphasized radical deconstruction and artistic experimentation along with technical mastery. That austere – and often conceptual – aesthetic precipitated a foundational shift in fashion. It also made Belgium shorthand for intellectual, considered clothing.
Game on
As Sunita Kumar Nair, the bestselling author of CBK: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, lays out in ACE: The Times & Style of Tennis (Abrams), the sport had game long before the NBA’s tunnel fits made headlines.
In the 1920s, designer Jean Patou dressed French star player Suzanne Lenglen in modish sporting costumes (including then-shocking short sleeves and knee-length skirts). A century on, Coco Gauff stars in fashion campaigns for Miu Miu, and top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka sat front row at Gucci’s Milan Fashion Week show.
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If the recent French Open was any indication, this summer’s tournaments promise fashion moments worthy of awards season. At Roland Garros, Novak Djokovic’s winning style was on display in a custom jacket emblazoned with a wolf. Naomi Osaka made a statement in a court-grazing gown by Keith Germanier and Nike that revealed a sequin-and-mesh kit underneath.
Exploring the interplay between the court and the runway, Nair includes interviews with Nike designers; players Gauff, Maria Sharapova, Ben Shelton, Chris Evert and Jannik Sinner; and tennis enthusiasts Tory Burch and Anna Wintour.
Design for living
In The Eames Houses: Charles and Ray Eames Residential Architecture (Phaidon, July 8), editor Eckart Maise presents a comprehensive look at the houses by the American design supercouple.
Loosely organized chronologically, the volume features architectural portraits of projects such as the Case Study House program, the Art and Architecture Magazine-sponsored initiative that supported experiments in post-Second World War residential design.
Entenza House, a part of the program developed in collaboration with architect Eero Saarinen, presented a vision of modern living centred on hosting, flexibility and a close relationship with the landscape. Bridge House, meanwhile, explored the use of new materials, prefabricated construction and the Eames’s Pavilion System. Seen as a whole, the book positions the houses “not as isolated objects but as experiments within a much larger inquiry into how we live,” as British architect Norman Foster puts it in the forward.
Fever pitch
As the world’s biggest soccer tournament gets under way, French publisher Assouline is releasing several lavish new coffee table titles honouring the sport. The standout is Football Roots: The Spirit of the Game, pitched as both a “sports chronicle and a cultural study of freedom, imagination, and belonging.”
The idea took shape in 2016, when Brazilian photographer Sam Robles was chronicling families who had been displaced by an earthquake in Nepal and followed a group of children playing in a makeshift soccer field. He spent the better part of the next decade taking pictures across 18 countries.
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Robles’s saturated photos in Paris, Rio, Miami, Lisbon and Doha capture moments that pulse with life, in improvised matches in alleyways, parking lots and city streets. The book is a story of both global street style and soccer, distilled to its most elemental joy: childhood play. Robles captures this theme by returning – Antony, Endrick and Adriano in tow – to the old neighbourhoods where the famous footballers first learned to play.
Lights, camera, fashion
The early Hollywood period was formative for today’s celebrity culture, as movies became the dominant force in pop culture – and fashion.
In Banton of Paramount: Haute Couture in Hollywood’s Golden Age (Lyons Press), film historian Howard Gutner sifts through archival publicity files, stills and sketches to retrace the career and influence of costume designer Travis Banton, the man whom photographer Cecil Beaton called “one of the most important designers in Hollywood history.”
Paramount understood the commercial value of on-screen fashion and its role as a powerful arbiter of taste, more persuasive and with a larger reach than Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar. Throughout the 1930s, Banton was the only studio costume designer to make regular trips to the fashion showings in Paris and New York. In translating trends (bias-cut dresses, padded shoulders) into memorable, often extravagant wardrobes for melodramas (Marlene Dietrich’s mannish chic in Morocco and striking plumage in Shanghai Express) and screwball comedies (the elegant refinement of Trouble in Paradise), Banton shaped the image of leading ladies turned style icons such as Dietrich, Carole Lombard and Anna May Wong.
Strike a pose
Since its establishment in 1937, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute has been making the case for fashion as art. This year’s Met Gala inaugurated the new Condé M. Nast Galleries with the exhibition Costume Art (on until Jan. 10, 2027).
Works of art from the Met’s collection are juxtaposed with fashion garments, suggesting connections between them. A Delphos gown by Fortuny Atelier from the 1920s is paired with a classical fifth century BC statue of the goddess Nike in flowing robes, and JW Anderson’s Van Gogh-inspired jacket appears alongside the Dutch artist’s 1889 Irises.
The accompanying essays in Costume Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press), by curator-in-charge Andrew Bolton and contributors such as award-winning author Andrew Solomon, unfold thematically, structuring ideas of the body through the lenses of race, gender, sexuality, disability and religion.
