Celebrating Fashion
New Books Celebrate Fashion Illustration
Dallas Morning News
BY JASON SHEELER | PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAM GRANADO
Monday, March 31, 2008
“For however much I enjoy photographers, I have to admit their work is done to the detriment of design. In the case of an illustration, it is the opposite. The design is well and truly present, alive.”
So writes Yves Saint Laurent in his forward to Drawing Fashion: The Art of Kenneth Paul Block (Pointed Leaf Press, $95), a lushly oversized monograph on the life and work of the celebrated illustrator. Together with Fashion Illustration by Fashion Designers (Chronicle Books, $40), the two spring releases spotlight an art that has all but fallen off the page.
Block, now in his 80s, rose to prominence as a staff illustrator for Women’s Wear Daily. His three-decade run ended unceremoniously in 1992, when the trade paper acknowledged photography’s dominance by dismissing the entire illustration department on one day.
At his peak, Block covered the collections and society for the newspaper, sitting front row at couture shows, and turning courtroom artist during Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ lawsuit against paparazzo Ron Galella.
Block’s broad, watercolor brushstrokes helped define the work of Halston, Saint Laurent and Perry Ellis, and influenced future fashion stars, including Isaac Mizrahi, who remembers pinning the pages to a corkboard above his desk. “More than any single designer,” Mizrahi writes, Block “gave New York fashion its sophistication.”
The book’s sections encompass not just the Women’s Wear years but the full range of Block’s work – from informal 1950s sketches of his partner, Morton Ribyat, to 1990′s “imaginary cast” of characters in Block’s “unwritten novel.”
Despite photography’s supremacy, illustration does still have a place – in the sketchbooks of working designers, where a pen’s line or a pencil’s shade determines what we’ll wear tomorrow.
In Fashion Illustration by Fashion Designers, 60 tastemakers peeks into the creative process. Look for the spare, headless, black-ink drawings by Phillip Lim – a nod to the California native’s quiet, cerebral process – as well as the lavish, whimsical watercolors of Christian Lacroix, which seem ready to leap onto the runway.
A few designers’ illustrations came directly from their sketchbooks or tack boards, while others were created at the request of the book’s editor, Laird Borrelli, a senior fashion editor at Style.com and author of two previous works, Fashion Illustration Now and Fashion Illustration Next.
Unlike photography, says Italian designer Antonio Berardi in the book’s introduction, “A drawing is more pure and direct. It does not rely on tricks or technology and is perhaps the most sincere way of putting across an emotion.”
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