Collage Couture

Play dress-up with your art! Collage has never been so fashionable! In Collage Couture you'll learn how to sketch fashion figures, create stylish dresses from patterned paper and apply a variety of textured backgrounds to your collage pieces. With styles ranging from cute to elegant and sweet to sophisticated, these mixed-media projects will transport your art from the studio to the runway! Collage Couture features: 22 super-pretty projects, from collages on canvas to framed shadowbox art to gifts for your fashionista. Play with your materials—paper, paints, ink and markets—to create pieces you'll be happy to display and share. Illustrations and easy instruction for creating fashion sketches and silhouettes. And don't forget the details: learn how to add eyes, lips, hair and, of course, clothing! Tips and advice on setting the mood in your studio, from enhancing your art space with flowers and china to wearing a tiara as your work! Why not feel as pretty as your art? Indulge your inner girly-girl with Collage Couture!

Presents designs for paper dolls, their clothing, and other unique collage projects.

Play dress-up with your art! Collage has never been so fashionable! In Collage Couture you'll learn how to sketch fashion figures, create stylish dresses from patterned paper and apply a variety of textured backgrounds to your collage pieces. With styles ranging from cute to elegant and sweet to sophisticated, these mixed-media projects will transport your art from the studio to the runway! Collage Couture features: • 22 super-pretty projects, from collages on canvas to framed shadowbox art to gifts for your fashionista. Play with your materials—paper, paints, ink and markets—to create pieces you'll be happy to display and share. • Illustrations and easy instruction for creating fashion sketches and silhouettes. And don't forget the details: learn how to add eyes, lips, hair and, of course, clothing! • Tips and advice on setting the mood in your studio, from enhancing your art space with flowers and china to wearing a tiara as your work! Why not feel as pretty as your art? Indulge your inner girly-girl with Collage Couture!

Features techniques related to couture fashion, including fabric selection, collage design, origami patch, and appliquae, and highlights the life and work of Koos van den Akker.

After nearly a lifetime spent in the Industry, author and fashion insider Simon Doonan is ready to let you in on a little secret: his peers in this multibillion-dollar industry are just as nutty as the denizens of your local loony bin. In The Asylum, an unabashedly hilarious collection of autobiographical essays, Doonan, the creative ambassador for Barneys New York, tells the real-life stories of glamorous madness and stylish insanity. Doonan has witnessed models unable to work for fear of ghosts, gone deep-sea fishing with a couturier pal and his jailbird companion, and watched Anna Wintour remain perfectly calm while the ceiling fell—literally—in the middle of Fashion Week. Once you start looking, he says, you’ll notice telltale signs of lunacy everywhere. Style insiders see patterns and trends in everything; they suffer from outsize personality disorders and delusions of grandeur; and of course, they have a predilection for theatrical makeup and artfully destroyed clothing. No one is more suited to the asylum than the truly die-hard fashionista—after all, eccentricity and extremism are the foundations of great style. With his gimlet eye for the absurd and a love for eccentricity, Doonan’s personal and professional stories never fail to entertain. “The David Sedaris of the style universe” (The Boston Globe) gives us the scoop on the kooky, cutthroat—but always fabulous—fashion world, and proves himself one of the sharpest humorists writing today.

The DIY Couture collection features 10 stylish, easy to make pieces of clothing that can be endlessly reinvented in different fabrics, textures, and colors. Anyone who enjoys sewing and creating something unique will love using this book to make their own couture wardrobe. With simple, visual instructions and cool styling, DIY Couture will inspire people to join the handmade revolution. Where eco-fashion meets street style, this is the antithesis of fast-fashion. Absolutely no patterns required!

Cool Couture is a home sewer’s guide to professional, designer-quality construction and finishing. Fashion designer Kenneth King provides step-by-step instruction in the basic, reliable techniques of classical couture. He provides his own shortcuts, careful instruction, and advice to help home sewers of every level produce impeccable results. Each technique is presented with simple how-to drawings and detailed step-by-step instruction. Fashion-forward photographs of the designer’s own couture garments and tight shots of fabrics and construction and decorative detail show the finished effects. This book is an essential reference book of couture techniques for home sewers.

A glimpse into the rich history of paper dolls is accompanied by many charming manufactured and handmade examples.