While publicity for the Fashion Dictionary claims it was first published in 2004, at the front of the book are listed the names of the managing editors for the 1999 edition and the managing editor of the 2003 edition which is a little confusing. However, what can be said with certainty is that this is the first English language edition of the Dizionario della Moda containing all you need to know about fashion in 1,356 pages.
Apart from a list of 100 or so contributors to the encyclopedia, who come from the world of fashion: historians; journalists; industry reporters; and those from the industry – the dictionary jumps straight in with the A‐Z entries. There is no introduction, essays, or appendices. The dictionary section covers, in more than 4,500 entries, the men, women and events of fashion and it includes those who are up‐and‐coming as well as those who have arrived and are well established within the fashion industry. It is extremely wide‐ranging, covering haute couture and Marks & Spencer, and is a dictionary of both the present and the past.
A few items here and there seem to have suffered in translation. My “favourite” was an entry for Portable Phone which was described as a “mobile apparatus by which one makes phone calls, with a microphone and receiver, available since 1983 … ”. The entry concludes by noting that the “portable phone” has turned into a “style symbol” with the phone producers bringing out two collections a year with the intent of convincing buyers to buy two, perhaps three models to alternate and match with one's tie or shoes. Of course, English speaking readers would refer to modern versions of “portable phones” as either a mobile phone (UK) or a cell phone (US).
Many entries, usually those relating to fashion houses or stores, are followed by a set of facts and figures, so, for example, the entry for Gruppo Sixty contains a description of it being an Italian group of brands concentrated on young fashion, and then has 13 bulleted items of interest, such as its turnover as at December 2003, the new lines of Energie and Miss Sixty Junior launched in November 2004.
It is always worrying when one discovers a factual error in an authoritative work. To use the old cliché, finding a factual error is like finding a mouse in the house. Find one, and there are almost inevitably others. Indeed, this is such an excellent dictionary, I really wished I hadn't found this one but the entry on Julian & Sophie says that the founders were the designers, Julian MacDonald and Sophie Cheung. Not quite! Sophie Cheung is correct but Julien MacDonald is the “wizard of knitwear” of French ancestry, but this Julian should be the talented designer, Julian Roberts, who has a separate entry anyway later in the Fashion Dictionary. (He is also Professor of Fashion at the University of Hertfordshire.)
The Dictionary reflects its world of talented designers and artists by, itself, being attractively designed, and has a very legible, well spaced, type font. The work is laid out in traditional two‐column format, but the entire work is an example of pleasing book design, with nicely balanced areas of white space, with numerous tastefully chosen and presented monochrome illustrations, mostly line drawings, some a whole page and others quite small. The illustrations nicely break up what might otherwise tend towards a monotony of text. The illustrations, while all relating to the subject of fashion, are, nevertheless, quite different. So for example there is the trademark of Vivienne Westwood; designs for hats (from Fili Moda, 1941); the lace ball‐gown that was entered at the first Italian fashion show in 1951 in the Florentine House of Giovanni Battista Giorgini, the Quintè; knitting instructions for a small summer shirt from 1941; as well as pictures of fashion accessories such as jewellery. There is a marvellous full‐page caricature from collections of 1954 presented in the Sala Bianca, Pitti Palace, Florence entitled “Who was there” showing the model on the catwalk and the fashion industry celebrities from that era. One illustration is simply of an invitation to the first Italian fashion event (Florence, February, 1951) reading (in Italian) “the purpose of this evening is to divulge our fashion. Ladies are then heartily invited to then don clothes of pure Italian inspiration”. The book cover is eye‐catching in stark simplicity with a line drawing (with a hint of colour) of a fashion figure, reduced almost to single lines against a white background. Very nice!
The book has been printed on a thin (light‐weight) paper stock as the work would have become unwieldy, or required two volumes, if printed on thicker paper. Whilst the paper is unlikely to tear, nevertheless I suspect it may suffer some folding to pages in heavy public library or educational library environments.
The Fashion Dictionary is a pleasure to handle and to read, and is well recommended, if not essential, for libraries in universities, colleges, and arts schools who run fashion or fashion‐related and design courses, as well as for fashion editors and curators of museums of fashion. The book will also have a keen readership in a public library.
