The Dress: 100 Ideas That Changed Fashion Forever

Fogg, an English fashion expert and lecturer, demonstrates that the dress is the first garment in the wardrobe to indicate new and sometimes surprising directions in fashion innovation. Dresses often reflect a technical virtuosity, a departure from the dominant taste of the era, or a specific vision of a designer. They can also express a reinterpretation or reaction, or reference a past style. In encyclopedic one-page entries, numerous examples are given such as various styles (e.g., petal dress, trapeze line), genres (e.g., tea dress, little black dress), and motifs or designs (chinoiserie, paisley motif, Byzantine mosaics) that are drawn from a wide variety of wonderful historical and contemporary images. For instance, the corseted or crinoline dress is shown to have been reinterpreted by numerous 20th- and 21st-century fashionistas, including Christian Dior, Charles James, and John Galliano.