Customer Reviews

Fashion of the 20th Century: 100 Years of Fashion Ads

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20th Century Fashion: 100 Years of Apparel Ads is a multilingual (all text is present in English, French, and German), visual reference featuring full-color photography of fashion advertisements and endorsements from throughout the twentieth century. A striking compendium sure to prove particularly useful to theater, movie, television, or even Halloween costume designers seeking to accurately reflect or recreate the advertisements and apparel of past decades, 20th Century Fashion also a treasure to simply browse through and observe how human garments (and ads!) have changed through time. A compendium that treats the history of modern fashion advertisement very seriously, 20th Century Fashion is highly recommended.

This book is amazingly priced for being such a hefty coverage of 20th century fashion. You'll be surprised that such a beautiful, coffee table friendly, thick, hard cover book could be so cheap. Of course, a large part of its thickness is due to the translated text into three languages: english, french, and german. That was a bit misleading to me at first because I thought the book was packed with (english) explanation and history but the captions and decade summaries are actually pretty brief and then translated into two other languages. Not that the book is lacking in photos /prints either, they make the best of the extra text space by putting visuals on pages that have french or german text so even if you see the extra language translations as wasted space, there's still something to sink your teeth into on nearly every page.

The book covers 1900s-1990s with the 1990s being the briefest and least representational section. The book does a great job of trying to include fashion illustrated ads rather than just photography ads whenever possible. It also covers not only clothing, but clothes accessories, shoes, and undergarments and ranges from childrens to mens to womens and teens in a way that it is very functional-- showing the various "new fabrics" and innovations. My only criticism is that in the periods I was most interested in 1920s-1960s there was very little coverage of higher end designers or known models. Throughout the book the ads are focused on widely available, mainstream manufactures like Keds, maidenform, Jantsen, and Arrow. Many of the companies shown are bygone names that were a widely accessible, household name at one point. The 1980s and 1990s finally starts to focus on higher end designers. I just would have loved to flip through the 60s section and seen a Mary quant ad, or flip through the 70s and seen Halston... even though there were less high end advertisement in these years, it would have been nice to see a few.

All in all, this book is invaluable at a great price for anyone interested in everyday fashions in history.