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hrusewif's review
3.0
Despite the fact that it's supposed to be a history, I certainly wouldn't consider it such. It's certainly an interesting book, and an informative one for sure... But it's more correctly a collection of Essays written by various authors- which I only figured it out when I went back and really examined the Table of Contents, because the book's title and description certainly don't tell you as much. And if you don't know that fact starting out, the book feels disjointed and makes absolutely no sense in terms of structure, subject, and organization.
Speaking of: The inclusion of German (I think) translations alongside the English text also made for an incredibly disjointed read. Every time I finished the English column on the left, my eyes kept wanting to naturally swap to the right column where the German was located. It took longer to get through because of it; honestly, it would have just been easier to print the translations as two different books in my opinion- or print the translation on the reverse in the back, as some magazines do with double content issues. Either way, there were better ways to handle it that are more friendly on the eyes and don't mess with innate western reading structure.
My problems with it aside, I did love how every image in the book is credited with a source- including the museum collection information where extants are shown. It also has superscript numbers referring you to texts in the bibliographies included at the end of each section.
Overall, though, it still focuses largely on modern Couture, Runway, and Popculture- with only minimal attention to older eras. And while that's great in its own right, it didn't have anything I needed or was looking for.
Speaking of: The inclusion of German (I think) translations alongside the English text also made for an incredibly disjointed read. Every time I finished the English column on the left, my eyes kept wanting to naturally swap to the right column where the German was located. It took longer to get through because of it; honestly, it would have just been easier to print the translations as two different books in my opinion- or print the translation on the reverse in the back, as some magazines do with double content issues. Either way, there were better ways to handle it that are more friendly on the eyes and don't mess with innate western reading structure.
My problems with it aside, I did love how every image in the book is credited with a source- including the museum collection information where extants are shown. It also has superscript numbers referring you to texts in the bibliographies included at the end of each section.
Overall, though, it still focuses largely on modern Couture, Runway, and Popculture- with only minimal attention to older eras. And while that's great in its own right, it didn't have anything I needed or was looking for.
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