The Rolling Stones 50

Following on the heels of Martin Parr's limited-edition, album-style presentation of Life's a Beach, released last season, Aperture is delighted to introduce a new beach-bag-sized edition. Parr has been photographing beaches for many decades, documenting all aspects of them, including close-ups of sunbathers, rambunctious swimmers caught mid-plunge, and the eternal sandy picnic underway.

Hardback,  229x295mm,  124p,  100  colour illustrations

David Bowie is a pioneering artist and performer whose career has spanned nearly 50 years and brought him international acclaim. He has sold over 140 million albums, and been cited as a major influence on contemporary artists and designers working across the creative arts. This is the first book to be granted access to Bowie’s personal archive of performance costume, ephemera and original design artwork by Bowie, and brings it together to present a completely new perspective on his creative work and collaborations. The book traces his career from its beginnings in London, through the breakthroughs of Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and on to his impact on the larger international tradition of twentieth-century avant-garde art. Essays by V&A curators on Bowie’s London, image and influence on the fashion world are complemented by Christopher Frayling on film; Howard Goodall on musicology; Camille Paglia on gender and decadence; and Jon Savage on Bowie’s relationship with William Burroughs and his fans. Victoria Broackes is a curator of Theatre & Performance at the V&A. Geoffrey Marsh is Director of the V&A Theatre Collections.

*Please note: We will restock this book mid-April

Surfing’s formative period from 1965 to 1978, as shown through the most complete book of the iconic images of photographer John Witzig. Chronicling the great creative years in the evolution of surfing, the late 1960s and early ’70s, this engaging volume documents the revolutionary changes of the era—in board length, in surf style and technique—through the images of Australian photographer John Witzig. Witzig was not only photographing the scene, he was part of it, a group that included surfers Bob McTavish and George Greenough, and his images reflect both that access and that intimacy. In 1967, he created a firestorm of controversy with a Surfer cover story declaring that a core of young Australian surfers had redefined the sport, as evidenced by his friend Nat Young’s blazing win in the 1966 World Surfing championships. Witzig went on to capture the defining moments—the surfers, the draft-dodging back-to-landers, the radical developments of board design, and, of course, the waves, from Australia to Honolua Bay—of surfing’s most thrilling period. Soulful, poetic, iconoclastic, filled with rare images, this book is a unique look at surfing’s cultural revolution.

Famous for his lush early ’60s paintings of cakes and other sweets, this retrospective of Wayne Thiebaud is the definitive book on the seminal American artist. Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same title, Wayne Thiebaud: A Retrospective is the first major survey in twelve years of the work of one of the most original and accomplished American artists. This large-format book is a retrospective of his work from the 1960s to today, with numerous works coming from the artist’s collection. Like many artists, Thiebaud has held on to some of the best examples of his work from every period. The book also includes his most recent work up to 2012—at 91, Thiebaud is still working from his studio in Sacramento.With more than ninety color illustrations, this book and the exhibition it documents—put together by noted art historian John Wilmerding—reveal the painter to be preoccupied with a larger slice of American life.

New York at Night: Photography after Dark, showcases images of New York City's legendary nightlife by the leading photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Joseph Byron and James Van Der Zee to Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Elliott Erwitt, Larry Fink, and more. As diverse and complicated as the city itself, New York's nightlife is glamorous and grungy, lonely and dangerous, highbrow and lowbrow. These images are complimented by writing from some of New York's most respected contemporary authors, adding depth, context, and personal stories of their own experiences to those presented by the photographers. This engaging book captures the energy of the New York night and the city's evolving hotspots, building a history of how New Yorkers play after dark and how that helps make this city a cultural and entertainment powerhouse.

A good street photographer must possess many talents: an eye for detail, light, and composition; impeccable timing; a populist or humanitarian outlook; and a tireless ability to constantly shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot and never miss a moment. It is hard enough to find these qualities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and rewarding their efforts. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers.

Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things, a professional nanny, who from the 1950s until the 1990s took over 100,000 photographs worldwide—from France to New York City, to Chicago and dozens of other countries—and yet showed the results to no one. The photos are amazing both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the humorous, moving, beautiful, and raw images of all facets of city life in America’s post-war golden age.

With the eye of a painter, Guy Bourdin created images that contained fascinating stories, compositions, and colors. Using fashion photography as his medium, he sent out his message, one that was difficult to decode, exploring the realms between the absurd and the sublime. Famed for his suggestive narratives and surreal aesthetics, he radically broke conventions of commercial photography with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humor.

An extraordinary collectible, Kenzo creatively presents forty years of the Paris-based fashion house, founded by Japanese designer Kenzo Takada and now in a resurgence under artistic director Antonio Marras. Established in 1970 by Kenzo Takada, who had arrived in Paris from Japan in 1965, Kenzo is one of the great French houses that transformed global fashion in the latter half of the twentieth century. Now under the artistic directorship of Antonio Marras, KENZO has again achieved critical and popular acclaim. Marras draws from the rich vein of Kenzo tradition as it engages the spirit of the new century. Armed with an unmatched vocabulary in prints and textiles, Marras mines both East and West, the present and the past, to create a collection that evokes, reveres, and reinvents the intentions of its founder. The highlights of Takada’s tenure until his retirement in 1999 are also documented here. 

Graduating from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the 1980s, Martin Margiela (and his contemporaries in the Antwerp Six) transformed global fashion with his aggressive restatement of traditional fashion design and a polemical approach to luxury trends. Working first with the house of Gaultier, Margiela absorbed the radical design of Japanese deconstruction, making it wholly his own with the founding of his own label in 1988. Margiela propounds a singular, enigmatic look, moving beyond the recognizable tropes of deconstruction—a monochromatic palette, outsized garments, non-traditional fabrics, exposed seams, or roughly appliquéd details—to develop a fully considered worldview, one with elegance, mystery, and menace in equal measure. This book provides an inside look at the design process from a craftsman who creates pieces prized for their originality, delicacy, and daring. In the spirit of Margiela’s garments, the book is a work of art in itself, designed exclusively by Margiela and complete with silver inks, ribbon markers, a variety of lush paper types, twelve booklets, and an embroidered white-linen cover. This book provides a window onto the intimate, handmade world of a unique designer.

This book is Karl Lagerfeld and Carine Roitfeld's reinterpretation of Chanel's iconic little black jacket. Lagerfeld has redesigned the jacket, transforming it into a modern, adaptable garment to be worn by both sexes of all ages. The Little Black Jacket contains Lagerfeld's photographs of celebrities wearing the jacket with individual flair - sometimes classic, sometimes irreverent, but always Chanel - and each styled by Carine Roitfeld. A range of accomplished actors, musicians, designers, models, writers and directors gets the little black jacket treatment, including Claudia Schiffer, Uma Thurman, Kanye West, Tilda Swinton, Baptiste Giabiconi, Yoko Ono and Sarah Jessica Parker. This book shows the astounding versatility of Chanel's vision in Lagerfeld's hands, and ensures the little black jacket's future as a timeless classic.

Brand Spaces: Branded Architecture and the Future of Retail Design

The future of spatial branding experiences. New concepts for communicating brands via architecture, trade show presentations, shops, and interior design. Brand communication is becoming increasingly sophisticated and diversified. Today, the consistent implementation of a corporate design is not enough to keep a brand relevant. More and more companies are discovering the benefit of spatial brand experiences for communicating their messages effectively on an emotional level. Until recently, uniformity was the rule. Today, however, an impressive range of ideas, concepts, variations, and experiences for effective spatial brand communication are being developed. The results are locations with character that are a far cry from the excessively ornate brand temples of the past. Brand Spaces shows how trailblazers are creating branded worlds, event locations, flagship stores, and pop-up shops to continually surprise and inspire their target audiences.

Northern Delights: Scandinavian Homes, Interiors and Design

Northern Delights reveals why hardly any other interior or product design is so timeless, so functional, so aesthetic, and of such high quality as that of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. The book’s stunning selection of Scandinavian design ranges from individual products to skillfully staged living spaces. Although it also presents iconic designs, the book focuses on the work of young talents who are consciously building upon local sustainable design traditions and further developing them in a way that is consistent, intelligent, and reflects an unerring sense of style. Northern Delights showcases classic, minimal, rustic, and pop styles that are united by their simplicity, functionality, and love of light. The included examples show how the grains of different woods, the clarity of colored glass, the cheery colors of fabrics and patterns, and the overall quality of craftsmanship contribute to creating simple, inviting, and very comfortable spaces. Whether the featured work was created for residences, offices, or any other rooms, in a Scandinavian interior, everyone feels at home.

All fashion accessories have a historic beginning and an evolution. They all started life for practical reasons, to protect our feet from the cold, our face from the sun, our personal belongings, etc. Even jewelry, despite the fact that it is more decorative in nature, has in turn been used to distinguish various social groups or classes. Such facts are important to know and will be observed in the small details. Details we shall use to present a gallery of innovative photos and unveil a wide range of contemporary fashion accessories invarious chapters: shoes, bags, jewelry, watches, sunglasses, hats, shawls and gloves, etc. Those that think that everything has already been invented in the accessory world are wrong. Today's fashions have obviously drawn from centuries of costume history. However, new techniques and new materials, combined with the explosion of contemporary creativity, have generated a challenging
whole world of accessories. The final chapter, devoted to the concept of style, will teach us how to play with accessories and combine them to create different styles inspired by a particular era, color or urban tribe, with a classic or futuristic look about them.

For nearly 30 years, David LaChapelle (b. 1963) worked with an imagery that transcends boundaries and he has made a universe that includes people of all gender, skin color, body types and ages. The photographs take up influences from everywhere: movies, amateur photography, art history and pornography, and converts them to the parts of his own artistic vision. LaChapelle’s transnational aesthetic blends conventions of commercial and artistic photography and includes both the classical arts ideals and an alternative distinctly contemporary perspective rooted in popular culture and subculture.

When French Elle ran an article on How to Become Hip in 15 Steps, there was no question about Step 1: have your photograph taken by Face Hunter. Face Hunter is the pseudonym of 32-year-old Swiss-born Yvan Rodic, who began his career with the advertising agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett before founding one of the most innovative fashion blogs on the internet, which bills itself as eye candy for the style-hungry. Until recently, fashion trends were created by designers, celebrity models and fashion editors from the top down; now they trickle up from the street to the runway, sometimes bypassing the fashion industry entirely. Face Hunter is at the forefront of this fashion revolution as he travels the globe, snapping the most stylish looks in the street and discovering beguiling individualists in some 30 countries. These unexpected new icons of style are gathered together in over 300 photographs, accompanied by Face Hunters sharp observations from the new frontline of fashion: the street corner.

In Vogue is a fascinating look at the history of the world's most influential magazine. The complete compendium is illustrated with hundreds of covers and archival interiors of past Vogue editions, featuring the work of some of the twentieth century's most respected artists, cover illustrators, and photographers—from Edward Steichen, Toni Frissell, and Erwin Blumenfeld to Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, David Bailey, Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino, Steven Klein, Bruce Webber, and Herb Ritts. In 1909, an entrepreneurial New Yorker named Condé Nast took charge of a struggling society journal and transformed it into the most glamorous fashion magazine of the twentieth century. In Vogue traces the history, development and influence of this media colossus—from its beginning as a social gazette in the late nineteenth century, to the exploration of modern fashion photography and new visuals in the mid-twentieth century, to its status as the top style magazine today. The book explains the makings of the magazine—from runways, to editorial meetings, to the pages of Vogue.The thoroughly researched story incorporates first-person accounts, interviews with editors and photographers, and excerpts from stories written in the magazine by many world-renowned writers, including Truman Capote, Aldous Huxley, Richard Burton, Federico Fellini, and Marcello Mastroianni. Unparalleled in its scope and exceptionally illustrated, In Vogue is sure to be among the most important publications on the subjects of culture, art, fashion, photography, and media.

The book features rare and unseen paintings from the late 1940s and early '50s, along with several projects from that era that are carried out here for the first time. The project will introduce a small group of unknown and unseen abstract silver gelatin works, along with a monumental painted Mural Project. William Klein (New York, 1928) is a photographer and filmmaker noted for his ironic approach to both media and his extensive use of unusual photographic techniques in the context of photojournalism and fashion photography. He was ranked twenty-fifth on Professional Photographer's Top 100 most influential photographers

A homage to Scandinavian Fashion: Fashion Scandinavia

This stylish publication heralds a new movement in fashion – the arrival of Scandinavian designers onto the world scene.
It features over fifty notable fashion designers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland. Whether they are well-established – for example, Acne, COS, DAY Birger et Mikkelsen, Marimekko and Peter Jensen – or up-and-coming, whether they work in menswear or womenswear, they all share a passionate commitment to a hip and refined design style that carries huge international appeal. 

“My Freedamn! 3″ was released in 2005, featuring vintage Americana sports jacket; from military jackets, motorcycle jackets, surfs jackets etch. You can enjoy lots of super rare and cool designs. 10,000 copies of this title were also sold out very quickly; it became “out of print” now. (Unfortunately, no plan to be reprinted in the future. Please find this collectable title at used book markets.)

Collector's item - limited availability

Featuring Rock ‘n’ Roll Fashions at Elvis Presley Times

“My Freedamn! 6″ released in 2007, continued from “My Freedamn! 6″ Featuring lots of “fifties fashions” at the golden age of America in the 1950s! Must to see for worldwide rockabilly fans!

Collector's item - limited availability

A beautifully produced notebook featuring the wonderful illustrations of Nina Chakrabarti. Her illustrations are featured on the cover, on the interleaved tracing paper inserts, and in small details running through the notebook. With pink quarterbinding, an elastic closure and a pocket inside the back cover, this notebook will appeal to Nina's many fans.

A groundbreaking and always controversial musician, M.I.A. is an influential artist and an important cultural figure of the last decade. Here is a documentation of her entire visual output and a telling of her story in collages, photos, and prints from her early years in art school at Central Saint Martins London through to her hugely successful three albums, mixtapes, and live performances at PS1 MoMA, Coachella, various exhibitions, installations, and music video shoots.

"Eames: Beautiful Details" celebrates the seamlessness and fluidity in which Charles and Ray Eames operated as both a husband-and-wife team and as designers unrestricted by traditionally profesionally boundaries. Select details of their life and work, from their refined designs to to their innovative experiments, and even including images depicting the everyday poetic moments of their lives, and are shared here in this exhibit within a book.

From Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, his 1992 graduate collection, to Plato's Atlantis, the last show before his death in 2010, Lee Alexander McQueen was as celebrated for the exquisite tailoring, meticulous craftsmanship, and stunning originality of his designs as he was notorious for his theatrical—and often controversial—runway shows. McQueen found inspiration for his avant-garde collections everywhere: his Scottish ancestry, Alfred Hitchcock movies, Yoruba mythology, the destruction of the environment—even the fashion industry itself. Whatever his inspiration, however, McQueen’s concept for his runway show came first and was crucial to the development of the collection. Every show had a narrative and was staged with his characteristic dramatic flair. Highland Rape featured disheveled models smeared with “blood” staggering down the runway in town clothes. In Scanners, two robots sprayed paint on a model trapped on a spinning platform. Illustrated throughout with stunning photography and liberally sprinkled with quotations from McQueen.