book | Clothes on Film

The latest book by fashion historian, and now TV presenter Amber Butchart (A Stitch in Time on BBC 4 – second season please), is a comprehensively researched stroll through the best dressed folk ever to exist on the planet. The Fashion Chronicles: The Style Stories of History’s Best Dressed is laid out to be effortlessly readable, split into sections ranging from Ancient (and we mean ancient; basically like the first clothes ever) to 20th and 21st Century. Each entry gets a couple of pages of engaging historical notes and background justifying their inclusion along with a photo / picture or two. It works; it doesn’t feel like study or revision,…

Author Matt Zoller Seitz has published a continuation of his superb book The Wes Anderson Collection (2013), entitled (deep breath) The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel. The former is a detailed look at Anderson’s output so far, influences, meaning and interpretation of his work; the latter covers exclusively Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel. This is far more than a bolted on sequel, however, and one of the reasons we know this is because Clothes on Film editor Christopher Laverty was asked to contribute a chapter. More than that, it has recently joined The New York Times bestseller list. A pretty, candy-coloured slab of hardback, Seitz’s follow up…

Note from the Editor: You may have noticed that Clothes on Film has not been updated as frequently recently. We’ve had some excellent analysis and a few strong interviews, but in general content has been considerably lighter than usual. Well there is a reason for this… I have recently signed my first publishing deal to produce a book about, unsurprisingly, clothes in film. Specifically this will be a book about fashion in film. Apologies if this reads a tad vague; I promise more details will follow in the coming months. I will say now, however, that it is not just another tome describing pretty dresses or sharp suits in movies,…

Recently we were fortunate enough to get our hands on Amber Jane Butchart’s new book, her ‘Fashion Miscellany’, which has just been published by The IIex Press. If you don’t already know, Amber is a contributor to Clothes on Film and will soon be teaming up with editor Christopher Laverty for an evening of Jazz Era discussion at the British Library. Her book, by the way, is flippin’ brilliant. If you care even slightly about what we wear and why, AJBFM is an indispensable purchase. The layout of it is simple enough. It’s basically designed as a dip-in-and-out for research, or whenever you fancy a flick though. We’d call this…

Not the only book you should buy about costume design, but probably the best.

The bleakest Potter outing yet.