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Product Description
Review
"A landmark study of human customs and foibles in remarkable photos and intriguing text that show us what is and has been 'in' around the world."
Holly Finn, Financial Times
"…shows, beautifully, why designing dresses is not child's play, but often as mature an art as painting or sculpting."
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Was quite dissapointed with this book, was not at all what i expected and i actually returned this book. I hope that by writing this reveiw other people will read it before ordering and not be dissapointed. I was expecting a fashion book, as the cover and small peice of writing about book suggest. There are only a few fashion images, the book is mostly about African traditions and sculpture, which i have no interest in whatsoever. I am sure that if you want a book about that, its a great book, just not what i was expecting at all!
21 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I would recomend this book to anyone with a intrest in fashion. It is presonaly my favarate book i own. the images are outstanding and the content is to my mind fasternating. i have leart so much about the history of the unwearable garmant from this book, the wrighter is easy to understand and detail is exstencive. this book to me contains every piece of avent-gard fashion i would consider of value to modern fashion and the history behind it /how it as a piece of work it placed within history. I would have loved to have seen this exibition but feel that this is really the next best thing. This is most def. the most exciting book i have had the plesure to come across.
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7 reviews
73 of 79 people found the following review helpful
Human preoccupation for Millennia
22 Feb 2002
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Sentient humans with brains as well as bodies have always been fascinated by the way we adorn ourselves and why. Once we can get past the cultural anthropology of fashion, and the fads that make it a billion-dollar world industry, we can dig down to discover the roots of historical and current adorned beauty, and EXTREME BEAUTY does this . . . beautifully.
It is pleasing--in an era in which physical beauty and adornment typified by fashion have been roundly rejected by most of the jeans-wearing public--to find a book that lets beauty out and helps us exercise our sense of mystery and wonder, based in no small part on human sexuality and attraction. Harold Koda (curator of the Costume Institute at New York's Met) has mounted a show and created a book with marvelous insights and passion, and the illustrations are wondrous--consider, as a case in point, Thiery Mugler's 'Chimere,' with its savage eroticism.
One could quibble with Koda's arbitrary division of the body into 'neck and shoulders,' 'chest,' 'waist,' 'hips' and 'feet,'
and his exclusion of the fascinating face/head/hair perplex, and the hands, with their magical touch and allure. But this book and its illustrations will become a benchmark by which human adornment is judged, and is a keeper of power and importance.
It is pleasing--in an era in which physical beauty and adornment typified by fashion have been roundly rejected by most of the jeans-wearing public--to find a book that lets beauty out and helps us exercise our sense of mystery and wonder, based in no small part on human sexuality and attraction. Harold Koda (curator of the Costume Institute at New York's Met) has mounted a show and created a book with marvelous insights and passion, and the illustrations are wondrous--consider, as a case in point, Thiery Mugler's 'Chimere,' with its savage eroticism.
One could quibble with Koda's arbitrary division of the body into 'neck and shoulders,' 'chest,' 'waist,' 'hips' and 'feet,'
and his exclusion of the fascinating face/head/hair perplex, and the hands, with their magical touch and allure. But this book and its illustrations will become a benchmark by which human adornment is judged, and is a keeper of power and importance.
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful
A brilliant book to celebrate a brilliant exhibit
11 April 2007
Format:Paperback
Extreme Beauty is a wonderful book that celebrates the Metropolitan's equally brilliant exhibit about fashion and it's different preoccupations with the body. The exhibit was magnificent, and the book truly honors the tone and feeling of it, while being extremely informative in it's own right. The book is divided into different chapters such as neck and shoulders, waist, chest, etc. Each chapter features photos of the garments displayed in the original exhibit, as well as additional historical drawings and photographs of the various fashions and cultural trends that have celebrated the parts of the body. And, as promised in the title, the book explores the cultural foundations of bodily transformation and mutilation(?) through everything from extreme corsetry, [..] footwear and peircing to the tribal women who use metal rings to actually elongate their vertebrae. Harold Koda's insightful and meticulously researched commentary is just the icing on the cake. This is a must for any fashion library, but also of great interest to non-fashionistas.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Museum exhibit in a book,,,,,
26 Dec 2007
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a beautiful book illustrating the different ways cultures reform the body and for what reasons. It is just like actually visiting an exhibit at a major museum. But this you get to take home and enjoy over and over. The photos are plentiful, full color, large and professional. The text is not overly scholarly, but informative and intelligent. It does leave me wanting to delve deeper into the subject intellectually.
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