Fashion Designers

Akira Isogawa featured image

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Akira Isogawa, an Australian contemporary fashion designer, is known for his elegant simplicity, traditional Japanese techniques, and luxurious fabrics. He collaborates with high-profile brands and celebrities, and has international recognition. Australian fashion designer Akira Isogawa focuses on women’s fashion and has won awards for his designs. He is passionate about animal protection and has been honored with postage stamps.Read More →

Claude Montana featured image

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Montana’s career in fashion began almost accidentally; he moved to London in the early 1970s “to escape studying,” having no plans and no work visa. Raising money by selling rhinestone-studded papier mache jewellery, he met a Vogue editor by happenstance and had his work featured in the magazine. Read More →

Jean-Charles de Castelbajac featured image

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Jean-Charles de Castelbajac (b. 1949) was a French fashion designer born in Casablanca. He studied law at Faculté de Droit, Limoges and founded the Ko ready-to-wear fashion firm in 1968. He was recognised for his avant-garde designs for women’s clothing featuring unconventional materials. Read More →

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, 1920

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From gold buttons to comfortable tailored trousers and comfortable cardigan sweaters, there is no more significant influence on clothes than Coco Chanel.Read More →

Paul Iribe Featured Image

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Paul Iribe was a French designer and illustrator known for his contributions to the Art Deco movement. Iribe’s modernism was influenced by 19th-century luxury, and he wrote a manifesto against modern art.Read More →

Jean-Paul Gaultier French Fashion Designer

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Before launching his label in 1976, Gaultier worked for Cardin, Jacques Esteirel, and Patou. From the onset, Gaultier was dubbed the ‘enfant terrible de Paris’.Read More →

Cecil Beaton featured image

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The house he occupied until 1945 at Ashcombe, Wiltshire, near friend Edith Olivier was decorated with limited funds using exaggerated baroque furniture. The walls of the ‘Circus Bedroom’ were painted by visiting artist friends, including Rex Whistler and Oliver Messel, in a kind of Surrealistic overstatement.Read More →

Michael Roberts, Fashion Editor and Renaissance Man

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Michael Roberts, the writer, editor, stylist, and photographer best known for his influential tenures as the fashion and style director of Vanity Fair magazine and the fashion editor of the New Yorker, has died at the age of 75. His work shaped the course of fashion through words, images, and illustrations, and he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to fashion in 2022.Read More →

Issey Miyake featured image

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Issey Miyake died on August 5, 2022, in a Tokyo hospital of liver cancer. He founded the Miyake Design Studio in 1970.Read More →

Pierre Balmain black and white featured image

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Pierre Balmain (1914 – 1982) was a French fashion designer and the influential postwar fashion house Balmain founder. He described the art of dressmaking as “the architecture of movement,” and he was known for his sophistication and elegance. LEARN MORERead More →

Judith Leiber featured image

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Judith Leiber (1921 – 2018) was a prolific designer whose fanciful minaudières had accessorised royalties, first ladies, and film stars, and entered the collections of art the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While her couture handbags—carried by celebrities such as Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Claudette Colbert, Björk, and Barbara Walters—are widely regarded as works of art, Leiber preferred the word “artisan” to “artist.”Read More →

Armi Ratia photo of dress in black and white

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Ammi Maria Ratia (1912 – 1979) was the co-founder of Marimekko Oy (‘Mary’s frock’) Clothing was created to free women from 1950s’ tight, body-shaping dresses and move them into fresh, free-flowing dresses, skirts, trousers, and shirts.Read More →

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Charles James was one of the first American fashion designers to gain recognition abroad. He created sculptural, moulded clothing using wire and padding. James designed a white satin jacket in 1938 that had channels filled with eiderdown padding.Read More →

Zandra Rhodes featured image

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Zandra Rhodes studied lithography and printing at Medway College before going on to the Royal College of Art to study textiles, graduating in 1964 during the height of the pop movement. She made a paper wedding dress that cost less than two shillings, motivated by this trend and the work of painter Roy Lichtenstein in particular (about 7 new pence). In 1967, paper clothing was all the rage: it was the ultimate representation of disposable apparel.Read More →

Jaeger Clothing Fashion

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During the twentieth century, a movement arose that advocated for clothing to be worn as part of a sensible, healthy lifestyle rather than only for fashion. These concepts sprang from the work of nineteenth-century fashion reformers, in the same way, that English writer Edward Carpenter popularised the open-toed leather sandal for men. Read More →

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Her family settled in the USA when she was in her teens and took the Carnegie name. In 1909, with a friend, she opened a tiny dress and hat shop, New York, known as Carnegie—Ladies’ Hatter.Read More →

Jean Patou fashion designer

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One of Patou’s most famous customers was the French tennis champion Suzanne Lenglen, whom he dressed both on and off the court. This lean and active young woman epitomised the 1920s “new woman.” She created a furore in 1921 when she wore Patou’s knee-length pleated skirt, which revealed much of her legs when she ran. The headband she wore while playing tennis was widely copied by women throughout the 1920s for day and evening wear.Read More →

Geoffrey Beene in black and white

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Geoffrey Beene (1927 – 2004) was an American fashion designer; born Haynesville, Louisiana. He was a premed student at Tulane University when he found himself sketching gowns when he became bored during his lectures. Along with Bill Blass, he was regarded as the Godfather of American sportswear. Read More →

Calvin Klein featured image

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Klein’s excellent, modest tailoring and beautiful sportswear lines, as well as his casual separates created in the finest linens, silks, and cashmere, had earned him a name by the mid-1970sRead More →

Caroline Broadhead featured image

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She used coloured ivory in her early work. In 1977, she started producing necklaces with bound thread. In 1978, she designed a wood- or silver-framed bracelet with tufts of nylon through which the hand could be squeezed; she was a leader in the new jewellery movement that began in 1968, and she used plastic, cloth, paper, and rubber instead of precious metal.Read More →