Hollywood Sketchbook: A Century of Costume Illustration

Before movie costumes become the actors' second skin, they exist in the mind of the costume designer. It is his or her job to render illustration after illustration, bringing the characters to life on page with watercolor, paint, and pencil before committing to one stitch or cut of fabric. Many an era of film or singular look of a particular actor or actress is defined by the costume designer's deft hand, sweeping vision, and creative intuition. Who is Marilyn Monroe without the billowing white dress of The Seven Year Itch or the candy-pink silk number from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? Both dresses were created by Travilla, who preferred to score lines on canvas first, and then on fabric, to visually maximize his ideas of where the sweep should be. Every costume designer has his or her own signature technique or sense of style and artistry. In Divine Design: A Century of Motion Picture Costume Illustration, author and Academy Award-nominated costume design expert Deborah Nadoolman Landis opens the doors to the dynamic world of costume illustration, revealing the world's most sumptuous illustrations and behind-the-scenes stories of the most beloved costumes of all time.
As the follow-up volume to Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design, Landis showcases the work of one hundred of Hollywood's most accomplished, provocative, and pioneering costume design artists of the last century. Drawing on years of extensive research, Landis has discovered a wealth of never-before-seen, original sketches and full-color illustrations from some of the biggest names in the biz-Adrian, Pauline Annon, and Cecil Beaton, for example-to the lesser well-known but equally important-Bonnie Cashin, Joe De Yong, Charles LeMaire. This book is singular in its form-a deluxe, oversized, luxuriously produced package-and its content, making it a stand-out on the shelf as the perfect gift book for anyone interested in film, fashion, and costume design history.
Featuring a comprehensive introduction that contextualizes the rigors of costume illustration as well as highlights the individual contributions each of the featured artists made to the history of the art form itself, this book is authoritative yet accessible in tone, and contains a dazzling array of first-person anecdotes that inform and further enhance the images. The artists are presented alphabetically; each entry contains a thorough biography and a gallery of images that best highlight the artists' work over the ages.
A luxurious send-up of the world of costume illustration, Hollywood Sketchbook is sure to delight fashion and film buffs worldwide.