Fashion Designers A-Z

Photography by Rodrigo Gaya on March 11th, 2013 in Arts, Fashion

Valerie Steele & Charlene Parsons

Miami Beach, FL – March 8, 2013 – Lincoln Road’s TASCHEN store is home to tons of iconic coffee table books from art and photography to fashion and more. Last week, fashion took center stage as one of “fashion’s brainiest women,” Valerie Steele, made an in-store appearance for the launch of her book: Fashion Designers A-Z. Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, flew in for the special event. Her book chronicles a century’s worth of the greatest names in fashion from the permanent collection at The Museum at FIT- from Azzedine Alaïa to Yves Saint Laurent. Photos of over 500 garments selected from the collection showcase each of the featured designers, while curators explain the significance of each to the world of fashion and its history. Steele writes the introductory essay about the rise of the museum and fashion exhibits in general in the art world. The book is available as a series of six Designer Editions, where each edition totals only 11,000 copies, comes in a plexiglas box, and is bound in a fabric created by one of the six designers- Akris, Etro, Stella McCartney, Missoni, Prada, and Diane von Furstenberg.

Friday’s in-store event was co-hosted by FGI South Florida and HGTV’s David Bromstad with Valerie Steele and the evening’s moderator, Charlene Parsons, who is the Chair of Fashion Design at the Miami International University of Art & Design. The two ladies were joined by Miami’s top fashionistas for a lively discussion about the making of the book, the future of fashion, and the collections at the Museum at FIT. Parsons opened the floor for others to contribute and discuss other fashion-related topics with the two veterans of the fashion world with a question-and-answer period and book signing by Steele.