Halloween is next week… and it’s just a short leap to Thanksgiving and then holiday shopping will be upon us. Before we get to that – and all the requisite shopping for others that is required – here are a few books you might want to think about looking into for yourself. There are more than a few that I’m interested in:

The Rise of Fashion and Lessons Learned at Bergdorf Goodman (Oct 18, Fairchild)

By Ira Neimark

I’m particularly interested in this book, not only for his personal anecdotes, but because the study covers “the late sixties through the early nineties”. For those unfamiliar, Ira Neimark was Chairman and CEO of Bergdorf Goodman for 17 years, and previously worked at Neiman Marcus Group, B. Altman, and Bonwit Teller. He’s currently director of Hermes of Paris and director emeritus of The Fashion Institute of Technology Foundation. His insights into the history and business of luxury fashion seem like they might be useful to understanding the industry. For more, see this review in the Wall Street Journal.

High Heels: Fashion, Femininity & Seduction (Goliga, Oct. 31, 2011)

By Valerie Steele, Tim Blanks, Philip Delamore, James Crump, and Ivan Vartanian (Editor)

While provocative, the cover is not what drew me to this book: Valerie Steele is. Though this is an edited book of essays on high heels, Steele’s name has such cache in the world of dress studies, that simply being associated with the book makes me want to read it more. That said, the book also includes well-known photographers such as Guy Bourdin, Juergen Teller, and David Lachapelle. The essay topics are intriguing, and are likely to hold some amount of controversy. Along with Steele (on the industry forces behind high-heel design) are contributions from Stella Bruzzi on High heels on film; insights from designer Manolo Blahnik, and a discussion of the use of high heels in fashion photography.

Bals: Legendary Costume Balls of the Twentieth Century (Assouline, October 2011)

By Nicholas Foulkes

Likely to be photo-heavy, the concept still intrigues me. “From the twilight of the Romanov dynasty through les années folles of Art Deco Paris to the jet-set seventies, Bals explores the nine most exceptional private costume parties of the twentieth century.”

The book includes both first-person accounts from and insider stories about Paul Poiret, Truman Capote, Cecil Beaton and Marisa Berenson, among others. Want more? Check out the 20 minute (French subtitled) video below.

“The terms ‘dress’ and – even more so – ‘fashion’ have many different meanings, and the contemporary study of dress testifies to this diversity and to the importance of what we wear at every level of society. The manufacture and sale of clothing is a huge industry, both in Britain (where it is the fifth largest) and worldwide; it is therefore of major economic importance. At the same time dress performs a wide variety of important social functions.”

— Elizabeth Wilson and Amy de la Haye, Defining Dress as object, Meaning and identity.

“What exactly is fashion? It is difficult to give an exct definition of fashion because the word has had different connotations throughout history; the meaning and significance of the word have changed to suit the social customs and clothing habits of people in different social structures. When fashion is treated as an item of clothing that has added value in a material sense, it confuses the notion of fashion. Fashion does provide extra added values to clothing, but the additional elements exist only in people’s imaginations and beliefs. Fashion is not visual clothing but is the invisible elements included in clothing”

–Yuniya Kawamura in Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies (pg 4)

“I open a fashion magazine; I see that two different garments are being dealt with here. The first is the one presented to me as photographed or drawn–it is image-clothing. The second is the same garment, but described, transformed into language; this dress, photographed on the right, becomes on the left: A leather belt, with a rose stuck in it, worn above the waist, non a soft shettland dress; this is a written garment. In principle these two garments refer to the same reality (this dress worn on this day by this woman), and yet they do not have the same structure, because they are not made of the same substances and because, consequently, these substances do not have the same relations with each other: in one of the substances are forms, lines, surfaces, colors, and the relation is spatial; in the other, the substance is words, and the relation is, if not logical, at least syntactic; the first structure is plastic, the second verbal. Is this to say that each of these structures is indistinguishable from the general system from which it derives–image-clothing from photography, written clothing from language? Not at all.”

–Roland Barthes, The Fashion System