MAISON LESAGE: HAUTE COUTURE EMBROIDERY

Description

The definitive monograph on the most luxurious and illustrious Haute Couture embroidery house in the world, featuring specially commissioned photography of Maison Lesage’s historic creations.The most prestigious Parisian Haute Couture artisans, Maison Lesage has collaborated with the biggest names in fashion, from Chanel, Schiaparelli, and Yves Saint Laurent, to Cristobal Balenciaga, Valentino, and Alexander McQueen. Founded in 1924, when the Lesage family bought the eminent firm of Michonet (then a supplier to such fashion legends as the House of Worth), Maison Lesage has created exceptional embroidery motifs—often requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of precise beadwork—for star fashion designers for decades. Perhaps best known today for the masterpieces it creates for Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel collections, the house was bought by Chanel in 2002 as part of its Paraffection group to ensure the survival of the house’s unique history and extraordinary skills. Illustrated with specially commissioned photography of the house’s historic creations and illuminated with texts by Patrick Mauries, who has written extensively on Chanel, Maison Lesage is both a tribute to exceptional craftsmanship and a journey through more than one hundred years of fashion at its most sumptuous and inventive. This book will be coveted by anyone interested in luxury fashion. Review: Best embroidery book ever. - Amazing book. A must have !!!!! Review: Gorgeous Pictures! - I almost didn't buy this book because another reviewer mentioned that it is pretty much a reprinting of an earlier book. However, that book is rare now and much more expensive. The pictures in this book are marvelous showing beautiful details. The text is very readable and is a wonderful explanation of the rise of the luxury industry into which Maison Lesage stepped. The connections to this house are well explained and interesting. If you are looking for a scholarly book this probably isn't the one you want, but if you want to understand the role of embroidery in fashion and particularly that of the House of Lesage this is a great place to begin. Someday I'd like to see the other book on which this is based, which I may find in a library, but for now I'm devouring the pictures and text of this one and glad I can own it to go back to it time and again.