{"product_id":"ceaseless-century-300-years-of-eighteenthcentury-costume-9780870998843","title":"Ceaseless Century: 300 Years of Eighteenth-Century Costume","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe shapes and silhouettes  the corseted waists and deep dcolletage  the incredibly wide and flat skirtsin a word  the majestyof eighteenth-century style have provided lasting inspiration for fashion even to the present. Consider  for example  the images on the cover of this book. On the front a Gianni Versace evening ensemble with denim blouse of 1992 is juxtaposed with a mantua and petticoat of 169095. The back cover shows a 1998 natural vintage recycled linen evening dress by Olivier Theyskens  a young designer in his twenties. These three images bracket the subject scrutinized in The Ceaseless Century  a volume aptly named for a century whose ramifications are still felt in historicist fashions  for example in the Versace ensemble  a creation that exemplifies that designers penchant for what Richard Martin has called \"a kind of Elton John ancien rgime \" and in the Theyskens piece  which reconsiders both the style and the material of eighteenth-century dress and incorporates miniskirt contemporaneity as well. In this fascinating volume  which accompanies a fall 1998 exhibition of the same name at The Metropolitan Museum of Art  Richard Martin  Curator of The Costume Institute there  discusses and analyzes fashions of the eighteenth  nineteenth  and twentieth centuries  using the eighteenth century as a touchstone to discuss the complex navigation that characterizes revivalism. In the Introduction  he explains the history of The Costume Institutes involvement with dress of the eighteenth century and notes that \"eighteenth-century fashion is unceasing because its principles in silhouette as artifice and in textile and surface as opulence are abidingly recalled in the history of fashion.\" Martin postulates that The Ceaseless Century fulfills two goals: it not only shows outstanding examples of eighteenth-century dress in the collection of The Costume Institute but also sets forth recurrent patterns of revival that have occurred over the past two hundred years. Those goals are well accomplished in three chapters  one treating each century involved and each including an introductory text and individual paragraphs on the costumes  all reproduced in color.  The full-page details and multiple views of costumes that appear throughout this elegantly designed volume truly highlight the luxuriousness  charm  and craftsmanship of the fashions in The Ceaseless Century. They also complement the history as told in the text of the ongoing and important influence of the eighteenth century on fashion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to the present moment. In the words of Richard Martin  \"Without the possibility of an eighteenth-century persistence  we would be immersed headlong in an ordinary world of minimalism  austerity  and unmitigated reason in dress.\" At the end of the twentieth century  when scruffy can hold sway over swagger  this tour through the past three hundred years declares an opulent option in taste that provides a pleasurable experience for both the historicist and the futurist.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45652200423477,"sku":"ByrdShop_0870998846","price":276.61,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780870998843.jpg?v=1781849894","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/ceaseless-century-300-years-of-eighteenthcentury-costume-9780870998843","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}