Best Design Books

Book Review: Photographs From The Hunger Games

October 23, 2015

In exclusive collaboration with Lionsgate, Assouline is proud to release Tim Palen: Photographs from The Hunger Games. In this luxurious large-format volume, Tim Palen’s evocative and powerful photographs of the cast from the enormously successful series The Hunger Games come to life as never seen before. Palen is widely recognized as an industry pioneer in creating innovative marketing campaigns and his work for The Hunger Games has helped catapult the films to the top of the market. His unique relationship with each of the actors over the course of the filming of the series allowed him to capture each of them with striking intimacy and to transform the high-octane adventure of the films into exquisite visual art. Thirty-three exclusive portraits from Mockingjay – Part II, the final film of The Hunger Games, provide a moving conclusion to Palen’s cycle of photographs. This limited-edition hand-bound Ultimate Collection volume, signed by Tim Palen, includes a limited-edition art print and is presented in a soft-touch clamshell case. Tim Palen, chief brand officer and president of worldwide marketing at Lionsgate, is an award-winning fine-art photographer whose work encompasses editorial, advertising, fashion, portraiture, and video portraiture. He was named an AdWeek 2012 Brand Genius for…

150 YEARS, Couturiers, Designers, Labels

December 19, 2013

“Fashion – 150 Years” is an encyclopedic work, not only in content but in size and weight. Fashion is taken from about the mid 1800s to the present. Seeling locates the beginnings of modern fashion about 1860 when the English clothing designer Charles Frederick Worth working in Paris put labels with his signature on the gowns he designed. Seeling sees this as turning clothing–however ornamental, stylized, or individualized–into art–Worth was the first “fashion designer.” Since Worth’s innovative touch, there have been scores of outstanding fashion designers–all of whom make their appearance. The history of fashion from the mid 1860s is related in terms of profiles of the leading, most imaginative and skilled, most influential, and often most acclaimed fashion designers accompanied by abundant photographic material. One could follow the history just by following the copious, most color photographs. One sees how fashion spread out from its beginnings in Paris to the global, popular enterprise it is today. But one wants to read the profiles too for their colorful biographical material and ideas and approaches to fashion, and for putting the respective designer into the context of fashion history. Seeling has been a top editor at Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire…

Pioneers of the possible

August 23, 2013

“I wanted to make sure I was looking at women from all different parts of the world- the Far East, South America- and to be sure that the stories I’m putting into the book are those of women who overcame odds or who were the first, ”says Angella M. Nazarian of her choices for the 20 women she writes about in “Pioneers of the Possible: Celebrating Visionary Women of the World”. “It’s that element of surprise for the reader, to be able to read biographies of women nobody’s heard about.” Among those selected for the book, some, to be sure, were very well known, among them Golda Meir, Martha Graham, Ella Fitzgerald and Anaïs Nin. But Nazarian also included a number who are less famous in the U.S.: Cambodian anti-human-trafficking activist Somaly Mam, bullfighter Conchita Cintron, Guatemalan human-rights advocate Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Moroccan runner Nawal El Moutawakel. Of artist Frida Kahlo, who appears on the cover of the book, Nazarian says, “She never wanted to be just Diego Rivera’s wife. She made sure that there was something that always remained Frida in their relationship. One reason she’s photographed so much is there’s something so beautifully exotic about her. She…