Couture Graphique: Fashion, Graphic Design & the Body

If you are looking for a fashion book to sit back and enjoy in hope of mindless abandon, move on—in fact, move far far away from Couture Graphique.

This is not the warm, fuzzy, visually stimulating volume you are hoping for. This is serious reading about the business of fashion—every single solitary aspect of fashion as a business from art directors to labels to logos to so called subliminal messages—all of which are examined and dissected with the same seriousness and clinical attentions as if this were rocket science.

This is a book that really should be considered more textbook than leisure reading.

Ms. Teunissen offers us a treatise on fashion based upon her exhaustive observations and research, which I found nonetheless somewhat flawed, and essays to convince us that there is nothing about the fashion that isn’t totally premeditated—which leads me to believe that she has never actually participated in or worked within the environments she writes about.

If one has a somewhat removed, much more empirical, and an unequivocally cerebral approach to the hows, whats, whens, wheres, and whys of fashion, this might be your kind of reading: it is extremely cut and dry, a pedantic and intellectual investigation.

It is hard to explain the depth of thought the author has put into the most basic of fashion’s progressions, and yet so much seems to be proffered as fact when that is not the case at all or at the least highly disputable. It is a far too scholarly pursuit for a very unscholarly business.

The bottom line here is very simple; this is a book that offers far too much information that is based on speculation and assumption rather than the cold hard facts, which would be far more difficult to come by.

If you have a super-focused attention span, an unquenchable curiosity about fashion, and can never get enough arcane information or minutiae in your head, then have I got a book for you!