Beautés

Exhibition catalog published to coincide with the show held at the publisher's gallery from April 15 to June 14, 1987. Covers show light shelf wear only with some sunning at upper edge and page end edge. Previous owner's signatue and date on half title page. Printed endpapers. Text/interior is in Fine condition and filled with large format full color, often full page photos, prints, designs, fabric samples. Perfect bound, spine is intact and unblemished but appears somewhat fragile due to the age and size of the book. Shouldn't be handled roughly. "Lavishly illustrated, this book shows how the Aschers united elements from the complex worlds of fabrics, art and fashion, providing fashion designers with a constant flow of inventive textiles from the immediate post-war years until today. Art for fabric, Zika Ascher's liason with artists in the later 1940s which produced a remarkable series of screen-printed head squares, is investigated and the works are illustrated in color for the first time. The list of notables who designed these squares reads like a roll call of mid twentieth-century art, and included Christian Berard, Alexander Calder, Andre Derain, Barbara Hepworth, Marie Laurencin, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland and Feliks Topolski. Four immense printed linen wall panels of 1948 by Henry Moore and Henri Matisse represent the adventurous extremes to which Ascher took this artist/producer venture. Fashion begins with fabric. This part of the Ascher story highlights the firm's output from the 1940s. Illustrious designers including Hardy Amies, Balenciaga, Capucci, Cardin, Dior, Fabiani, Givenchy, Madame Gres, Lanvin-Castillo, Yves Stint Laurent, and Mary Quant were supplied with selections of printed and woven textiles, which were the starting points for their modish clothes. Full-scale fabric samples from the Ascher records are reproduced, alongside photographs of models wearing designer garments in the same materials, together offering a uniqe view of the varied used of trend-setting fashion fabrics...... 263 pages.