Absolutely Fabulous!: Architecture and Fashion

Absolutely Fabulous! Architecture for Fashion Ruth Hanisch

This globetrotting tour of the most spectacular flagship fashion stores shows how designers and architects are working together to reinvent the retail experience as we know it.

As flagship stores for famous designers get more and more glamorous, the architects of these stores raise their profiles with multitudes of influential, trend-conscious shoppers traversing the stores’ doorsteps daily. Absolutely Fabulous! looks at the collaboration between architecture and fashion from numerous perspectives, including recent developments in fashion, branding, shopping, individualization and globalization. It also shows how designers themselves are flexing their architectural muscle with cutting-edge display concepts, websites, and stores that double as galleries, theaters, and communal spaces. Designed to be as dynamic as its subject matter, Absolutely Fabulous! travels the world to feature the most innovative, revolutionary, and influential examples of the synergies between fashion and architecture.

Art historian Ruth Hanisch has worked on numerous exhibitions on architecture and the history of art. She is a contributing editor to Icons of Architecture: The 20th Century, Museums for a New Millennium, and Jewish Identity in Contemporary Architecture (all by Prestel).

"The pictures are often breathtaking... This is an often fascinating study of the increasingly popular merging of consumption and art." -- Florida InsideOut, July 2006