Cubism and Fashion

Containing illustrations of paintings by Picasso, Braque, Delaunay and Leger, and designs by Chanel, Vionnet and Callot Soeurs, this is a study of the interrelationship between fashion and Cubism in the early-20th century. Published to accompany a 1998/9 exhibition at The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, it sets out to demonstrate how fashion's newly planar forms and cylindrical, waistless silhouette exemplified Cubism's interpretation of the body. Fashion illustration and photography of the period also followed the precepts of Cubist imagery, with its indeterminate space, cylinders, cones and rotation. The author, a fashion historian, traces Cubism's continuing synergy with fashion up to the present day.