Books about Costumes from Amazon.com

Meet Nancy, who believes that more is ALWAYS better when it comes to being fancy. From the top of her tiara down to her sparkly studded shoes, Nancy is determined to teach her family a thing or two about being fancy.

How Nancy transforms her parents and little sister for one enchanted evening makes for a story that is funny and warm -- with or without the frills.

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Price: $10.07 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The 8 million fans of TLC’s hottest show, What Not to Wear, know it as the place to go for real-life fashion advice. Now the show’s hosts, Clinton Kelly and Stacy London, offer spot-on fashion wisdom—with an attitude—in this fully illustrated, authoritative, and irreverent fashion guide to dressing your best for every occasion. Clinton and Stacy’s surefire method for boosting appearance rests on their belief that we can all win admiring glances by selecting clothes that play up our positives and create a balanced body shape. In Dress Your Best, Clinton and Stacy match a wide range of female and male body types with the perfect work, casual, and evening attire, showing you exactly how to make your best parts “work” for you.

Dressing tips for 26 body types!
Features 18 women and 8 men: bigger on top, bigger on bottom, a little extra in the middle, not curvy, extra curvy, small-framed, athletic, and more!

Whether you’re searching for a way to accentuate your assets, puzzling over the right print pattern for your frame, or just looking for a solution to the dilemma “What do I need to wear to look fabulous?” you’ll find here the universal tips, dos and don’ts, seasonal alternatives, and must-haves that will deliver the answers. Dress Your Best is certain to become the standard by which all other fashion guides are measured..
Price: $11.36 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Dozens of imaginative ideas and kid-tested designs. Water-based paints go on smoothly, dry quickly and wash off easily. Face-painting brush and sponge included. 6 colors: white black, green, yellow, red and blue. Crystal-clear instructions ensure success.
Price: $16.39 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Dressing the Man is the definitive guide to what men need to know in order to dress well and look stylish without becoming fashion victims.

Alan Flusser's name is synonymous with taste and style. With his new book, he combines his encyclopedic knowledge of men's clothes with his signature wit and elegance to address the fundamental paradox of modern men's fashion: Why, after men today have spent more money on clothes than in any other period of history, are there fewer well-dressed men than at any time ever before?

According to Flusser, dressing well is not all that difficult, the real challenge lies in being able to acquire the right personalized instruction. Dressing well pivots on two pillars -- proportion and color. Flusser believes that "Permanent Fashionability," both his promise and goal for the reader, starts by being accountable to a personal set of physical trademarks and not to any kind of random, seasonally served-up collection of fashion flashes.

Unlike fashion, which is obliged to change each season, the face's shape, the neck's height, the shoulder's width, the arm's length, the torso's structure, and the foot's size remain fairly constant over time. Once a man learns how to adapt the fundamentals of permanent fashion to his physique and complexion, he's halfway home.

Taking the reader through each major clothing classification step-by-step, this user-friendly guide helps you apply your own specifics to a series of dressing options, from business casual and formalwear to pattern-on-pattern coordination, or how to choose the most flattering clothing silhouette for your body type and shirt collar for your face.

A man's physical traits represent his individual road map, and the quickest route toward forging an enduring style of dress is through exposure to the legendary practitioners of this rare masculine art. Flusser has assembled the largest andmost diverse collection of stylishly mantled men ever found in one book. Many never-before-seen vintage photographs from the era of Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, and Fred Astaire are employed to help illustrate the range and diversity of authentic men's fashion. Dressing the Man's sheer magnitude of options will enable the reader to expand both the grammar and verbiage of his permanent-fashion vocabulary.

For those men hoping to find sartorial fulfillment somewhere down the road, tethering their journey to the mind-set of permanent fashion will deliver them earlier rather than later in life.

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Price: $26.72 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Vintage aprons and modern designs are turning up in movies, magazine spreads, upscale shops, and hip retail venues like Anthropologie, whose trendy line of aprons is selling as fast as they can stock them. The Apron Book is an infectiously enthusiastic guide to aprons, old and new, that are suddenly everywhere.

Aprons take us back to our favorite place¿hearth and home. Vintage aprons help us remember home and family the way they used to be, while bright and sassy contemporary aprons confirm that nesting is all the rage. Actress and trendsetter Julia Roberts has a closetful of vintage aprons. Celebrity custom-made apron auctions have become an annual event for several popular charities in the past few years.

The Apron Book provides full-color photos of new and vintage aprons from the author's collection, patterns for four basic apron styles and myriad variations, recipes, tips on collecting and preserving vintage aprons, and heart-tugging stories from the author's traveling apron exhibit. The book also explores the heyday of aprons and looks at the various roles aprons still play when worn in the kitchen, around the house, by the backyard grill, on the job, and for special occasions.

Warm and inviting¿but like an apron quite practical!¿this book is a celebration of a great American icon and reminds us of what we loved about the people who wore them..
Price: $10.62 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A fashion history from the 18th to the 20th century Clothes define people. A person's clothing, whether it's a sari, kimono, or business suit, is an essential key to his or her culture, class, personality, or even religion. The Kyoto Costume Institute recognizes the importance of understanding clothing sociologically, historically, and artistically. Founded in 1978, the KCI holds one of the world's most extensive clothing collections and has curated many exhibitions worldwide. With an emphasis on Western women's clothing, the KCI has amassed a wide range of historical garments, underwear, shoes, and fashion accessories dating from the 18th century to the present day. Showcasing a vast selection from the Institute's archives of skilled photographs depicting the clothing expertly displayed and arranged on custom-made mannequins, Fashion History is a fascinating excursion through the last three centuries of clothing trends. The KCI believes that "clothing is an essential manifestation of our very being" and their passion and dedication positively radiate from every page of this book. This special 25th anniversary edition has a chic new format: two volumes packaged in a slipcase..
Price: $34.17 [Notify me when price goes down.]

FIGURE DRAWING FOR FASHION DESIGN offers a concise, topic by topic guide to acquiring and perfecting these skills, concentrating on the female form. The coverage provided means that this book is ideal both for those who want to apply themselves professionally to fashion design, and for all enthusiasts of drawing the human body. Fashion plates are the primary means of visualizing ideas and concepts in costume and fashion design. To give an accurate impression of what is in a designer’s mind it is vital to have complete mastery of the rules of figure drawing. Here, realism and anatomical precision are the chief values, whereas for costume and fashion, stylization and exaggeration are ways of adding individuality and verve to a plate, and of focusing attention on specific elements..
Price: $14.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $14.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

No one interested in the history of dress, from art historians to stage designers, from museum curators to teachers of fashion and costume, can function effectively without Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion series. Since her untimely death in 1998, admirers of her work have been waiting, with increasing impatience, for the promised volume devoted to the linen clothes of the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, a companion to her previous volume on tailored clothes of the same era. Planned and partly prepared by Janet herself, and completed by Jenny Tiramani, Janet's last pupil, no other book exists that is dedicated to the linen clothes that covered the body from the skin outwards. It contains full colour portraits and photographs of details of garments in the explanatory section, as well as patterns for 86 items of linen clothing, which range from men's shirts and women's smocks, from superb ruffs and collars to boot hose and children's stomachers. Beautifully produced, it is an invaluable guide to both the history and the recreation of these wonderful garments. There are 178 black and white illustrations and photographs, 86 patterns and detail, 433 color photographs and well as the patterns and details..
Price: $32.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]