Published to tie in with an exhibition opening on 19th May and running throughout the year. A quite fascinating progress through recent women’s fashion for glamorous evening wear. A change that we follow from the highly structured and corseted New Look to the more recent trends of deconstruction and asymmetry with folded and pleated fabric showing new materials, radical new ways of wearing clothing. As ever with V & A costume books, the colours are rich and vibrant but I would just have loved a bigger book with more detail and I would have loved to see inside some of these costumes to look at their construction.
This innovative book presents dynamic and interpretive photographs of British ballgowns spanning 60 years and includes designs by Alexander McQueen, Bellville Sassoon, Bill Gibb, Erdem, Gareth Pugh, Stella McCartney and Zandra Rhodes.
The specially commissioned photographs, by fashion photographer David Hughes, are supplemented by essays exploring the ballgown as a particularly British garment, with designers, clients and occasions unique to Britain. The social season of debutante parties and private balls, weddings and charity events have long provided Britain's fashion designers with opportunities to design elaborate, tour de force eveningwear. In more recent years the ballroom has been replaced by the red carpet. Though the context has changed, the ballgown remains a staple in many designers' collections and continues to serve as an expression of status, protocol and taste, while simultaneously embodying elements of drama and fantasy.
Sonnet Stanfill is curator of 20th-century and contemporary fashion at the V&A, a post she has held since 1999. She was curator of the V&A‘s Ossie Clark display (2003) and in 2007 she curated New York Fashion Now, a display featuring the work of a new generation of New Yorkbased designers. Sonnet also wrote the accompanying book of the same title (V&A 2007) and has edited the publication From Club to Catwalk: fashion in 1980s London which will be published by the V&A in 2012. Before joining the Museum, Sonnet worked as a fashion buyer in New York. Oriole Cullen is a curator of 20th-century fashion and textiles at the V&A. Since 2006 she has run the V&A's Fashion in Motion programme, working with leading international fashion designers to present their work in a series of free catwalk shows within the Museum. Prior to joining the V&A she worked as curator of dress and decorative arts at the Museum of London, where she co-curated Stolen Skins: Fur in Fashion (2002) and The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (2004). In 2009, she curated, and wrote the book for, the V&A's exhibition Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones. Recent publications include Pop Patterns (V&A 2011).
