Designers’ memoirs, editors’ selections, collectors’ archives… This autumn’s fashion books offer an opportunity to consider who tells the stories of fashion’s past, and how we choose to remember them.
Contents
Virginie, in Her Own Words
Un regard – Virginie Viard
Stock |256 pages | 30 September 2026
Spending more than 30 years at a fashion house, then trying to secure your own place in its history… This is what makes Virginie Viard’s memoir both significant and worth reading. Recalling her years working alongside Karl Lagerfeld, the ateliers on Rue Cambon and the preparations behind the collections, Viard looks back on her career following her departure from Chanel in 2024. Through her account, we gain an understanding of the everyday workings of a creative partnership, told by someone whose job, for so many years, was to develop and bring another person’s ideas to life.
Lagerfeld famously described Viard as both his right and left hand, and with good reason. Yet one of the disappointments that prompted her to write the book was an article tracing Chanel’s history from Gabrielle Chanel to Karl Lagerfeld and then Matthieu Blazy, without mentioning her at all. The question running through Viard’s account becomes clear: Whose contribution survives in the memory of a fashion house? The book also includes a letter she wrote to Lagerfeld, in which admiration, longing and the feeling of having gone insufficiently recognised are closely intertwined. Viard’s determination to put her own story into her own words makes this one of the season’s more personal reads.
Through Marie-Amélie’s Eyes
The World To Come: Visions of an Image Maker
Assouline | 336 pages | 8 October 2026
Some fashion photographs are so distinctive that you can recognise the person behind them without reading the credits. Marie-Amélie Sauvé is one of those image-makers, although she is hardly a fashion editor who has built her reputation on repetition. From her longstanding collaboration with Nicolas Ghesquière, which began at Balenciaga, to the creation of her magazine Mastermind, her work has consistently explored the way we look at clothes. (Her relationship with Ghesquière even included a period as his fitting model.) It is little wonder that their work remains so closely associated today.
Sauvé’s first monograph, The World To Come, brings together Polaroids from those years, campaigns, fashion editorials and personal photographs. It features work by 28 photographers, including Steven Meisel, David Sims and Inez & Vinoodh, while fashion writers Alexander Fury, Sophie Abriat and Emanuele Coccia offer different perspectives on the images. The chapter devoted to the Balenciaga years is particularly intriguing. Seeing photographs that now circulate individually on archival Instagram accounts brought together through the eyes of the person who helped create them offers a chance to understand why that era continues to attract so much attention. The book concludes with Mastermind, where Sauvé developed her own approach to publishing.
Before Avedon Became Avedon
Richard Avedon: The Harper’s Bazaar Years
Abrams Books | 352 pages | 13 October 2026
Richard Avedon was just 21 when he joined Harper’s Bazaar. Until then, part of his photographic experience had consisted of taking identification portraits of sailors while serving in the Merchant Marine. His surname had yet to become shorthand for an entire aesthetic. The Harper’s Bazaar Years brings together photographs he produced for the magazine between 1944 and 1965, tracing the development of that distinctive vision. The images we are accustomed to seeing displayed individually on gallery walls were originally created for a magazine, within the demands of an editorial schedule. At its helm was Carmel Snow, celebrated for giving photographers the freedom to experiment.
Alongside Avedon’s best-known photographs, the book includes lesser-seen work, allowing readers to explore the long period of experimentation behind a handful of iconic images. Perhaps most intriguing are Avedon’s previously unpublished reflections on his years at Bazaar. Accompanied by a foreword from the magazine’s current editor-in-chief, Samira Nasr, and an essay by Derek C. Blasberg, the archival photographs are given another dimension through the recollections of the man who made them. We are accustomed to reading about Avedon through other people’s words. This time, we have an opportunity to discover how he described his own working life.
A Year with Monsieur Dior
A Season at Dior
Flammarion | 264 pages | 14 October 2026
In 1956, a 21-year-old from Bremen named Jürgen Michaelsen walked through the doors of 30 Avenue Montaigne. Christian Dior hired him and gave him a new name: Yorn. Ahead of him lay a profession to master and collections to prepare. What he could not yet know was how the story would end. Michaelsen’s memoir brings together the everyday details of this brief period before Dior’s death in 1957: the atelier heads, models, clients, runway preparations and friendships formed at work.
The account is accompanied by photographs taken by Loomis Dean for Life during the same period, as well as previously unpublished documents from the fashion house’s archives. The book can also be read as the apprenticeship story of a designer who would eventually establish his own couture house. After working with Dior and Madame Grès, Michaelsen opened his own house on the Champs-Élysées in 1962. Here, however, we encounter him as a young man newly christened Yorn, still trying to find his place in Paris. If only we could watch this story unfold on screen.
Another Side of Saint Laurent
Yves Saint Laurent: The Hamish Bowles Collection
Rizzoli Electa | 262 pages | 13 October 2026
Hamish Bowles found his first Yves Saint Laurent piece at the age of 19, in a London second-hand shop: an evening dress dating from 1969. Not a bad way to begin collecting fashion history. Journalism and collecting would go on to inform one another throughout his career. One of Vogue’s genuinely legendary editors, Bowles has preserved in his own archive some of the garments he has written about over the years.
This book brings together pieces spanning Saint Laurent’s years at Dior to the establishment of his own couture house, seen through the eyes of someone who spent decades seeking them out. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech, it features newly commissioned photographs of the garments alongside sketches, period imagery and Bowles’s personal writings. The selection also includes pieces created for Betty Catroux, Nan Kempner, Lynn Wyatt and Lily Safra. Through these women, we begin to imagine where Saint Laurent’s designs were worn and the lives they led beyond the atelier.
Grace Has More to Tell
Grace: Now
Phaidon | 312 pages | 22 October 2026
Grace Coddington’s departure from her position as creative director of American Vogue in 2016 did not mean she had stopped working, but it certainly signalled the end of an era. After all, she and Anna Wintour had started at the magazine on the very same day in 1988. Grace: Now reveals just how productive the intervening decade has been.
The third volume in the series documenting Coddington’s career focuses on her years as an independent creative force. There are editorials for American and British Vogue, W and Document, alongside collaborations with photographers ranging from Annie Leibovitz to Rafael Pavarotti. It also offers a compelling perspective for anyone curious about how an editor establishes a new rhythm after leaving a major magazine.
Coddington knows both sides of a fashion shoot. Before becoming an editor, she worked as a model, joining British Vogue in 1968; she also worked for Calvin Klein in New York before moving to American Vogue. As she recounts this latest chapter of her long career, she places her own drawings and behind-the-scenes observations among the photographs. Contributors include Sofia Coppola, Nicolas Ghesquière and Marc Jacobs. Those names alone suggest the extraordinary breadth of the creative relationships she has cultivated over the years.
A Magazine’s Memory of Faces
Vogue Portraits: A Century of Icons and Idols
Abrams Books | 640 pages | 27 October 2026
Joan Didion, Madonna, Pablo Picasso, Audrey Hepburn: The people a magazine chooses to feature say a great deal about how it sees the world. Vogue Portraits gathers more than 320 portraits from the Vogue archives across two volumes. With photographs by Irving Penn, Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel and Peter Lindbergh, turning its pages feels rather like wandering through the corridors of the National Portrait Gallery.
Through the lens of popular culture, we revisit the recent past. Edited by Taylor Antrim, the collection features a foreword by Anna Wintour and contributions from Lena Dunham and Chloe Malle. It also allows us to trace the cultural curiosity that has shaped fashion publishing: who captured the public imagination, who became an object of fascination and how a single face came to embody an era.
The Changing Wardrobe of the Louis Vuitton Man
Louis Vuitton Menswear Catwalk: The Complete Collections
Thames & Hudson | 632 pages | 5 November 2026
There was a time when Louis Vuitton did not produce ready-to-wear clothing. Considering the excitement surrounding its runway shows today, that seems almost difficult to imagine. Founded in 1854, the Maison developed its ready-to-wear business during Marc Jacobs’s tenure as creative director, which began in 1997. Paul Helbers, Kim Jones, Virgil Abloh and Pharrell Williams subsequently brought different habits, social circles and ways of dressing to the Louis Vuitton man. Louis Vuitton Menswear Catwalk allows us to follow that evolution, collection by collection.
Featuring texts by Anders Christian Madsen, the 632-page volume explores each era through designer portraits and essays examining the references behind the collections. Another story unfolds alongside the clothes: the changing expectations we place on the male wardrobe. The relationship between tailoring, sportswear, bags and accessories is continually redefined with each new designer.
Yohji, on Paper
Yohji Yamamoto Drawings
Thames & Hudson | 310 pages | 17 November 2026
We know Yohji Yamamoto’s clothes. We have seen far less of the movement of his hand as he draws them. Compiled by fashion historian and Palais Galliera curator Alexandre Samson, Yohji Yamamoto Drawings brings together previously unpublished sketches by the designer. Some were made on old sheets of newspaper. Sometimes, the first surface on which an idea is recorded is simply whatever happens to be at hand.
Through drawings for both womenswear and menswear, the book reveals a part of the design process usually concealed behind the finished fabric. For anyone interested in Yamamoto’s approach to proportion and the volumes that extend away from the body, it is a book worth keeping alongside his runway archives.
Alaïa’s Dresses, Alaïa’s Collection
Azzedine Alaïa: Sculpting Fashion
Rizzoli Electa | 224 pages | 24 November 2026
It is no coincidence that sculpture so often enters the conversation around Azzedine Alaïa’s body-conscious dresses. His training in Tunisia was, after all, in sculpture. Sculpting Fashion accompanies a major retrospective devoted to the designer in the United States, bringing together his creations and the people with whom he worked. His relationships with Naomi Campbell, Farida Khelfa and other models are part of the intimacy we recognise in photographs of his dresses.
One section in particular deserves a closer look: Alaïa’s own fashion collection. Designs by Balenciaga, Chanel and Vionnet are presented alongside his work. Exploring the archive of a master who collected other designers’ creations with such care is a way of following his curiosity. We begin to look for the same craftsmanship we admire in his dresses in the pieces he considered worth preserving. We may already know what a designer created; what he chose to keep is a more personal revelation. Alaïa’s life as a collector offers precisely this kind of reason to reconsider his work.
Lace and Sicily
Dolce&Gabbana. Lace
Rizzoli | 272 pages | 29 December 2026
Lace is one of the materials most closely associated with Dolce&Gabbana. Sometimes, you hardly need to look at the label to recognise the house. Lace explores how that familiarity developed by focusing on a single material. Created by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, the book brings together editorial photographs and advertising campaigns with new imagery produced specifically for the publication.
Domenico Dolce grew up working in his father’s family business in Sicily, a revealing detail when considering the house’s relationship with clothing and craftsmanship. Stefano Gabbana, meanwhile, began his career in graphic design within fashion studios. The book invites us to consider these early relationships side by side: one with fabric and construction, the other with imagery. In lace, the two are difficult to separate. The scale of a pattern, the amount of skin it reveals and the angle from which it is photographed can make the same dress look entirely different.
Revisiting Chalayan
Reference: Hussein Chalayan
Acne Studios | 40 pages
For his 1993 graduation collection at Central Saint Martins, Hussein Chalayan buried garments in the ground with iron filings, digging them up six weeks later. The changes that occurred in the fabric became part of The Tangent Flows. Even today, when we are accustomed to all manner of techniques for making clothes appear aged, the strangeness of that decision remains intact. Chalayan’s work continues to raise questions about what can happen to a garment.
Published by Acne Studios, Reference: Hussein Chalayan examines why his work remains a source of inspiration for other designers. In a conversation with Chalayan, Charlene Prempeh explores his methods through the interests he shares with Acne Studios. Material choices have also shaped the book itself: its four sections are distinguished by paper in different shades of blue, one of them made from recycled denim.
The publication also arrives alongside a capsule collection in which the two brands revisit the Chalayan archive. It is an opportunity to consider the details that underpin one designer’s admiration for another. At a time when paying homage can often amount to little more than mentioning a name, devoting this much attention to the source is noteworthy in itself.
The Fashion Industry’s Uncomfortable Truth
The Designer Who Turns Femininity into Sculpture: Azzedine Alaïa
