Clothing is perhaps one of the most misunderstood products of this century or, for that matter, any other century. It is only in the last ninety years or so that personalities in the form of designers have emerged. Those people (regarded by the layman with the utmost suspicion) have, in that time, released women from their corsets and built up a multi-billion dollar industry.

At last, the essential book for anybody interested in fashion design and all that is associated with it has been published. There have been many books written which concern themselves with a singular subject – reams on Chanel, illustrations from Vogue, the occasional, largely photographic book on the Japanese designers, but nothing that seeks to encompass fashion as a whole. This is because such a work would require a vast amount of research, co-ordination and thought. Colin McDowell has done this.

In this important volume there is a complete directory of fashion designers right up to the present, from Worth to Quant, from Dior to Kenzo. Each designer or fashion house has his, her or its history meticulously documented. Coupled with this are marvellous photographs and drawings in both colour and black and white. McDowell has included chapters which seek to explain the workings of fashion (‘What is it’ and ‘How does it come about?’). There is also a chapter on the image-makers, those people who take the dress off the hanger and breathe life into it – photographers such as Snowdon, Avedon, Bailey and Beaton, fashion editors such as Diana Vreeland and Edna Wollman-Chase.

More importantly than just documenting these 350 designers’ birthdates and working lives, this book seeks to pinpoint their influences and influence, like Chanel, the mistress of the ‘Little Suit.’ Those tweed skirts and jackets cut with the precision of an aircraft were far too expensive to come from her workrooms down into the street, but she helped other people to reproduce them cheaply.

Claire McCardell, the mother of American sportswear must surely be rated along with Chanel in terms of what she did for women. She would use a piece of fabric costing five dollars and turn it into a dress which looked like a million. She created the American look by using inexpensive fabrics such as denim, jersey, ticking and cotton calico to makes clothes suitable for life in the twentieth century – relaxed, comfortable and stylish . It was she who made the first really sexy bathing suits, who put women into flat ballet shoes, and, unlike Chanel, smartened everything up. She took workmen’s clothes and adapted them for women in similar fabrics to the originals thereby making the women who wore her clothes look not, as Chanel had done, expensively poor but classless. Rich and poor could and did look alike and they loved it. American clothing has never looked back since and we can see McCardell’s influence in the work of Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis and Ralph Lauren.

I find this book fascinating and only wish that it had been written ten years ago when I was a student. Anybody interested in fashion, from the serious student to the ardent clothes buyer, will find this book an extremely good read and a bargain for twenty quid.