The best fashion books of 2011

This year has brought a number of fundamental changes in fashion, absolutely necessary in an environment that became too fragile for a society driven by information obtained dependent easy and free. In 2011 fashion is slowly if we think of the premises that gave it the special note, intangible note. Dreams are no longer build in front of the monitor, but arise as a result of a permanent journey around the world.

These being said, I urge you to put up a reading fashion list of best books to read and to follow and read the most interesting books that were launched in 2011.

The best fashion books of 2011

Ugly Beauty

If you're into fashion books, "Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L'Oréal, and the History of Looking Good Blemished" (Harper Collins Publishing) is a must. Ruth Brandon, novelist and fine connoisseur of the history of culture and civilization, is trying to bring the spotlight on two legendary icons: Helena Rubinstein and Eugene Schueller, L'Oréal founder. The volume is especially interesting to study, because it is a successful attempt to penetrate the secrets of business sites that have dominated the cosmetics market since the early years of the Second World War (“War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden”, “Helena Rubinstein” de Catherine Jazdzewski etc). Definitely a best book to read.

Rose, c'est Paris

"Rose, c'est Paris" is not itself a book of fashion but more of an inspirational volume that you should not miss. Bettina Rheims's vision and Serge Bramly's talent meets in pages that evokes Paris in a whole new way. A city animated by artists, identity is confused, obsessions, fetishes and manipulation concealed in the darkness of nights, which is materialized both in fashion and in the film or photography. "Rose, c'est Paris" is published by Taschen.

Christian Lacroix and the Tale of Sleeping Beauty

In 2011, fashion stories are told with a more consistent dose of involvement, not necessarily related to marketing. It's all about an area that constantly fascinates female audience. Beautiful story of Sleeping Beauty, The Brothers Grimm is transposed and told in a new and original manner. The fashion dream becomes real and closer to fulfillment for women who have not forgotten to look at the world through the eyes of a child.

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Top 10 Books of All Time

Yes, lists are shameful, but irresistible. But let's play a little: the last battle of authors, a transgression of genres (fiction, journal, poetry), even of styles (modern, classic). The result can be interesting.

In addition, it is a kind of parlor game that adapts perfectly at global narcissism that floods the Internet every day. The exercise has been applied and J. Peder Zane has written book, The Top Ten, published in 2007. The author took 125 great names of literature and came up with a sentence. Here are the best books, in his view:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy,

2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert,

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy,

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov,

5. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

9. Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Cekhov,

10. Middlemarch by George Eliot.

(you can find all these books on Amazon)

It is an American point of view, because Zane has applied a survey among Americans that can be said to have a certain insight regarding literature. Maybe that explains why Asians are missing, Kazuo Ishiguro, Murakami or South Americans, Allende, Llosa, Marquez.

There are no women in this top. There is no Muriel Spark, no Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch. There is no Kundera, Musil and Mann. And you should consider ontemporary authors that are not detected by radars of our whimsicaltimes, but that will dominate the literary space in a century from now.

Is there a finality for the game above? It's just a taste of test guidance, reading. For that, we can rest assured that we live in the golden age of reading (never before have so many books been available), but we are tortured by the need to choose. What book to read? Where to start? Zane thinks that modern reader works on coordinates described by opportunity and confusion.

The irony is that dedicated readers does not have an apetit for force reading. Libraries are build out of passion, not according to some lists. Reading a book of our choice may be the last freedom we have.