BELLAS ARTES

Lavishly documenting men’s and women’s collections and featuring Owens’s continuing collaboration with the photographer Danielle Levitt, this book is an unabashed love letter to one of the most devoted followings in contemporary fashion. Picking up where Rizzoli’s previous monograph on Owens’s work left off, looks from his critically lauded homage to the rock-and-roll designer Larry Legaspi set a frenzied visual pace that never lets up—right through the pandemic, when Owens memorably staged shows on the Lido di Venezia. Here, the continued evolution of nearly three decades of Owens’s “grunge-meets-glamour” worldview is seen close up. Grace and grit are paired with an obsession with structural transformation and movement, where diaphanous, flowing shapes contrast with sharp objects. This formal invention is matched by a mania for new and exotic materials. The use of translucent bovine leathers, brightly dyed snakeskin, and the hide of the pirarucu, a massive Amazonian fish, are applied to old and new icons of the brand. Color is now firmly part of the Owens legendarium, and a profligacy of pink, orange, blue, green, and iridescent hues now vie with trademark black, oxblood, and dust that have been part of the palette since the inception of the brand.

Best known for UNESCO’s Cop22 in Marrakech and the French Embassy extension in Vienna, as well as his daring “guerrilla architecture,” such as Bow-House made from scaffolding and repurposed doors and windows in Holland, architect, urbanist, author, and former graffiti artist Stéphane Malka is at the forefront of the architectural avant-garde. Malka’s work blends art and architecture from a humanist perspective informed by the designer’s intention to create work that is positive and sustainable. His practice, based in Paris and in Los Angeles, realizes homes, offices, art installations, and stage designs with the idea that we ought always to rethink our typical notions and challenge established conventions. This results in surprising places where there is an intermingling of dreams and pragmatism, the baroque and minimalism, ecology and sophistication.

In 1972, Diane von Furstenberg created a chic and universally flattering ready-to-wear jersey wrap dress that launched her career and would forever change the landscape of women’s fashion. Since then DVF, the woman and the brand, have created designs that empower and promote a woman’s sense of self, weaving feminism and activism into the brand’s DNA. This visually vibrant tome, which accompanies an exhibition held in von Furstenberg’s hometown of Brussels, features nostalgic and contemporary photographs of her journey as a designer. Printed with three different luxe paper stocks withvarying inserts in each chapter, this book features beautiful graphicfabrics flooding each page, alongside numerous images of the wrap dressworn by von Furstenberg and models Jerry Hall, NaomiCampbell, and Cindy Crawford. Original essays discuss the intersection of Von Furstenberg and her designs with feminism, gender politics, and entrepreneurship, with personal anecdotes from collaborators like model Cindy Crawford and entrepreneur Stefani Greenfield. Unique and contemporary, this is a story of the inimitable designer, her brand, and the significant role of a single dress that continues to inspire generations of women.