For registered users

Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon was one of the most important and prolific photographers of the second half of the twentieth century, and in the eyes of many photography and fashion specialists, he was the most important fashion photographer of all time.

Comme des garçons

Rei Kawakubo was born in Tokyo in 1942, the daughter of a senior academic at Keio University. She studied fine art (both Japanese and Western) at Keio and, after graduating in 1964, joined the advertising department of the Japanese chemical company Asahi Kasei, which produced acrylic fabrics.

Giorgio Armani

Giorgio Armani, one of the most authoritative names in Italian ready-to-wear design, was born in Piacenza, Italy, in 1934. He became interested in fashion in 1957, when he left the school of medicine at the University of Piacenza to become a buyer for the La Rinascete chain in Milan.

Cristobal Balenciaga

Born in 1895 in Guetaria (Getaria), a small fishing village on the tempestuous northern coast of Spain, Cristobal Balenciaga Eisaguirre (1895 – 1972) was to become, in his own lifetime, the most famous Spanish fashion designer of his generation.

Hussein Chalayan

Hussein Chalayan’s fascination with architecture, spatial dynamics, urban identity, and aerodynamics is expressed in garments based on concepts, technological systems, historical dress, and theories of the body. His clothes are minimal in look but maximal in thought.

Manolo Blahnik

Manolo Blahnik (b. 1942) was a designer and manufacturer of what were called “the sexiest shoes in the world”—beautiful, expensive, and highly coveted by many of the world’s most fashionable women.

Patrick Demarchelier

French-born fashion and portrait photographer Patrick Demarchelier has become a legend in his own time . . . and in many lands. His ad and celebrity images are recognizable at once for their casual, realistic, and playful qualities, hallmarks of a style he developed in the late 1960s.

Fashion Designers

A fashion designer is responsible for creating the specific look of individual garments— including a garment’s shape, color, fabric, trimmings, and other aspects of the whole. The fashion designer begins with an idea of how a garment should look, turns that idea into a design (such as a sketch), and specifies how that design should be made into an actual piece of clothing by other workers (from patternmakers to finishers).