Dress in Detail from Around the World by Rosemary Crill, Jenniger Wearden and Verity Wilson
Rating: 
Read before: No
Ownership: Bought second hand
Found Dress in Detail as I was searching for a more varied and less Western focused costume encyclopaedia. It was a gamble since I found it extremely cheap second hand and it looked like it’d have a lot of photographs on the details of patterns, embroidery and other items of clothing.
Let me say, this was one of the best gambles I’ve done in a while. Each pair of pages is a stunning set of information. On the right page, you get a photograph of the details, and on the left, you get one or two flat lay illustrations of the garment composition, almost like a pattern of the piece of clothing included alongside a description of where it came from, its history and a few other details. This is even better than I had hoped to find, as I bought it as a reference to draw and write, and that extra details page with the full item drawn is like finding a perfect treasure. I cannot convey how amazing this was.
The book is laid out to highlight in sections different parts of clothing items, starting with necklines, or showing buttons, and it shows the many incredible details fo each piece alongside a good variety of garments, if I remember correctly theres about 150 of them with a good variety of countries and periods alongside occasions for those garments to be worn. As I went through the book I was in awe of the amount of details, and everything in it.
This is exactly what I wanted, and now I wish there was one per country and their costume history which I find fascinating and would like to know more about it. Definitely setting it up as a source of inspiration and reference for future works.