FASHION DESIGNERS A–Z

‘A who’s who of style royalty’ — Stylist

Valerie Steele and the curators at New York’s Museum at FIT proposed a book celebrating their collection. The wealth of pieces, from hundreds of designers spanning more than a century, had been celebrated through decades of exhibitions. 

The brief was to create a coherent and visually rich book, using the museum’s existing assets. Adapting the diverse images called for some visual throughlines: 

– Unified color palette, black and silver (or gray, in the case of the 4-color images). 

– Illustrated portraiture, creating another throughline out of disparate source material.

– Consistent/coherent layout, starting with a ‘hero,’ followed by a logical progression.
 

My initial concept sketch shows the bold title typography used on the plexiglas slipcase. Once the decision was taken to produce multiple limited editions bound with designers’ vintage fabrics, each edition’s vellum ‘numbering’ page was printed with a garment specific to the designer.

To avoid the costly, time-consuming, and — for the museum’s fragile, irreplaceable vintage garments — potentially damaging process of staging for a new photoshoot required us to bring together the myriad photographs from exhibitions spanning years and with different aesthetics and goals. We unified all the photos’ by replacing the background to either a rich black, gray or white fond, as befitting the layout. 

The texts were similarly standardized from existing biographies of each designer used to accompany the FIT exhibitions, leaving only the captions to be newly written. 

Illustrator Robert Nippoldt was commissioned to create a family of idealized 2-color illustrated portraits from the diverse photographic source material spanning the collection’s 125 years.