Walter van beirendonck : dream the world awake - Hardcover

The best way to start off this review is to say that Walter Van Beirendonck: Dream the World Awake is a book for fashion intellectuals. While this may seem like an oxymoron, this could not be much more accurate and I say this in the most appreciative way. Walter Van Beirendonck was one of the original Antwerp 6 [from Wikipedia: ] The Antwerp Six refers to a group of influential avant garde fashion designers who graduated from Antwerp s Royal Academy of Fine Arts between 1980 1981. The fashion collective presented a distinct, radical vision for fashion during the 1980s that established Antwerp as a notable location for fashion design. They were Walter Van Beirendock, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Marina Yee. For those who are fashion devotees/historians, these are names that echo a swinging of the pendulum within the world of fashion. Mr. Beirendonck is a fashion intellectual but one with a great sense of humor. Walter Van Beirendonck: Dream the World Awake is a comprehensive and thorough study of his body of work since his start in the 1980s, lavishly filled with incredible photographs allowing you to enter this rarefied world. Under ordinary circumstances, this type of fashion that which requires textual references that must be studied in order to understand its origins and explain its position in the fashion world but this book is intriguing and enlightening. There are also countless quotes from Mr. Beierendock s collaborators and contemporaries that also serve to let us in on the mindset of this particular sect within the fashion world; and we read about nothing but huge accolades as well as proclamations of friendship and admiration for the man who seems to bridge the chasms between art, fashion, and design to own a very small slice of the fashion pie in its entirety. Just in case you are wondering why the price of this book is so extreme, you have only to hold it in your hands and feel the quality of the paper and se

Walter van Beirendonck has been at the forefront of fashion for more than thirty years. One of the 'Antwerp Six' and the director of fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, he is known for the uninhibited nature of his work and the wonderful daring that he shows as a designer. This lavishly illustrated volume, which features three interchangeable covers, accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Antwerp's Fashion Museum. With beautiful photography by Anton Corbijn, Nick Knight, Jurgen Teller and David Bailey, the volume showcases the full range of Van Beirendonck's oeuvre, from his Sado collection in 1982 and the outfits he designed for U2's Popmart tour in 1997, to his Hand on Heart collection of Autumn 2011. The book gives exciting and captivating form to the complexity and multilayered quality of Van Beirendonck's work, and reveals his wide range of inspirations, which include technology, art, pop culture and ethnography. With texts by famous authors from the fashion scene, such as Tim Blanks, Hettie Judah, Cornelia Lauf, Robyn Healy, Valerie Steele and Kaat Debo, and a foreword by Christian Lacroix.