Vivienne Westwood: The Illustrated World of a Fashion Visionary by Tom Rasmussen and Marta Spendowska
This new illustrated guide to Vivienne Westwood’s life and work is testament to one of the fashion world’s true originals. From her working-class upbringing to her OBE from Queen Elizabeth II, by way of her mad punk days, her outspoken climate-change activism and, of course, her inimitable designs and runway shows, she left an indelible stamp on the fashion industry. Her refusal to bow to trends and tastes has shown the way for scores of designers since.
Coco Chanel: The Graphic Novel by Carola Di Giovanni and Federicade Fazio
Can there be a more storied fashion figure than Coco Chanel?Generation after generation has venerated her, minutely parsing her life and work. There is no let-up in the films, books, essays, and histories that examine her mystique, her lovers, her homes, her clothes, and her jewels. Historians are at odds as to whether she was a Nazi sympathiser or just a businesswoman desperately trying to survive the war. Chanel herself was a master of prevarication, an unreliable narrator if ever there was one.
Now there is a new approach to Chanel: a contemporary graphic novel that will appeal to a younger audience and demonstrates how and why her style evolved, and why it changed fashion forever. It describes her hardscrabble early life and how she began as a seamstress, learning skills that would reflect later in her beautifully tailored clothes. It shows how she borrowed from male fashion to suit herself. She wanted to move freely, unencumbered by corsets, and scandalised society by wearing trousers, elevating them from workwear to haute couture.
When she first showed her short-jacketed suits, the reception was stony, but it became one of her most emblematic designs, along with the iconic “255” bag, which was based on her own and had a long, gold-chain shoulder strap so women would have their hands free. Both the suits and the bags are still coveted today, along with her necklaces, perfumes, and scarves. And her ropes of pearls have never gone out of fashion. As she said herself, “Trends may pass but elegance remains.”
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style by Monica L Miller et al.
This year has seen the high fashion art exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” at the Anna Wintour Costume Centre in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and it was also the theme of the famed Met Gala in May.
As always, MoMA has produced a handsome book to accompany the exhibition. The striking cover introduces the notion of Black dandyism, which had its origins in Enlightened Europe and evolved through many manifestations in the ages thereafter. The authors trace the often-dazzling legacy of this clothing style — from a uniform for servants and enslaved people to the use of its aesthetic in the Harlem Resistance as political agency, going right up to the present time. They show how the evolution of dandy style inspired new visions of Black masculinity in the US that use the power of clothing and dress as a means of self-expression.
Of course, over here on the African continent we are no strangers to our own forms of Black dandyism. Think of the sapeurs of Brazzaville and Kinshasa; extravagantly dressed men — and sometimes women, known as sapeuses —who use their meagre wages to invest in couture brands in brilliant colours. Creativity is paramount, the mixing of colour, pattern and texture carefully thought out, and the parading of the outfits a way for the community to escape the hard circumstances of their lives. The sapeurs are elegant, proud, and admirably suave, living by a strict, highly mannered code of conduct.
Down in South Africa we’ve had a more raucous history of dandies —think Drum magazine in the 1950s and the photographs of gangs like the Americans, who paraded in the streets of Sophiatown in the latest and loudest US fashions, driving top-down, low-slung gas guzzlers with whitewall tyres. There were also groups like the “Swenkas” that originated in Zulu hostels, which had a strict social code and ritual celebrations of elegance and sharp clothes. Like their brothers in the US, they knew that to dress well was to defy the authorities, a mark of self-respect and deep pride.
The Domestic Stage: When Fashion Comes Home by Adam Murray and Charlotte Cotton
This unusual, zeitgeisty book explores the role of the domestic interior in fashion photography and how it has come to define a new kind of fashion image.
In the past few decades, fashion imagery has shifted away from glossy, high-concept shoots for magazines and advertising to the pared-back, roughed-up Instagram-style style of pictures. As curator Adam Murray says, “The obsession with showing off our lives on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok has ushered in the post-privacy age.”
Previously, the fashion image was produced in two primary spaces: the studio, a highly controlled and artificial environment in which aspirational ideals would be created; and the street, where those ideals would play out.
All that has changed. These days, social-media platforms display pictures taken at home that are often the antithesis of glamour and gloss. It is an extension of the lifestyle concept, and celebrities and their publicists were early adopters of letting the light in on their way of life. Step up, Kardashians.
Communicating our daily lives is an aspirational choice, writes Murray, and since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, we have the technology to do this, usurping the gatekeepers of magazine editors and TV producers. The Domestic Stage is a captivating window on contemporary fashion photography and its transformation in recent years.
From the October edition of Wanted, 2025
