Taschen
Annie Leibovitz
The collector’s edition of a career that defined the modern portrait.
$2,500.00
Assouline
The Impossible Collection of Fashion
The hundred most iconic dresses of the twentieth century, hand-bound.
$995.00
Fulfilled by Assouline · opens in a new tab
Available · worldwide delivery
The maison’s noteCurated by the director of the Museum at FIT: one hundred dresses that defined a century, in a hand-bound volume presented in a cotton clamshell case.
- Author
- Valerie Steele
- Publisher
- Assouline
- Published
- October 2011
- Pages
- 168
- Format
- Clamshell
- Size
- Monumental
- Language
- English
The LIBRO Note
Assouline’s Impossible Collection series asks a collector’s question: if neither money nor availability were the constraint, which hundred would you keep? For fashion, the house gave the question to Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at FIT, and bound her answer by hand in an oversized volume cased in cotton. The maison keeps it as the reference point of the fashion shelf: a museum exhibition that happens to be ownable, and a demonstration that curation, argued well, is itself a form of scholarship.
The Library Essay
A century of dress, argued in one hundred choices
The premise of the Impossible Collection is refusal: not a survey of everything, but a defended list. Steele’s hundred runs from Poiret and Fortuny through Chanel’s jersey and Dior’s New Look to McQueen, tracing the twentieth century as a series of decisions about how bodies would move, work and be seen. Read in sequence, the dresses are less costume history than social history: emancipation, wartime economy, couture’s rebuild, prêt-à-porter’s democratisation.
The object itself belongs to the tradition of the livre d’artiste more than the bookstore: hand-bound signatures, plates tipped onto heavy stock, a clamshell case in woven cotton. Assouline’s wager, which the series has won, is that in an age of infinite scrolling images, scarcity and weight are how a picture regains authority.
In the Collections