Design

Based on the historian Peter Kimpton’s collection of fashion postcards from Edwardian times, this well-illustrated guide documents the hat (and hatpin) fashions that defined that era and the designers – including Coco Chanel – who created them. The author also explores the darker side of the millinery industry, from the wholesale slaughter of exotic birds for their ornate feathers to the appalling conditions in the hat-making sweatshops of New York.

No sooner had the Second World War ended than the governments of the victorious powers were promoting their ideology (and the folly of the alternative) to their peoples and beyond. This collection of posters, many by leading artists, ranges from propaganda regarding the reshaping of Europe on either side of the Iron Curtain, and responses to the nuclear threat, to a selection of cinema posters for films encouraging a partisan reading of the political situation.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has been helping people recognize risk since the increase in road traffic and traffic accidents during the First World War. Drawing on a recently discovered archive of artwork, this book looks back at how public information posters – dealing with safety at work and at home as well as on the roads – used slogans and colourful graphics to keep people safe in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s.

Alfred Leete’s iconic image of Lord Kitchener pointing over the slogan ‘Your Country Needs You’ is a design classic which was widely imitated, for instance in the American designer James Montgomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam poster. James Taylor explores its influence on the propaganda posters of Allied countries in the First World War and beyond, while arguing that, since it originated as a magazine cover and postcard, its direct effect on enlistment was smaller than is commonly believed.

The status bag existed long before Louis Vuitton put his initials on his Speedy 25. This illustrated history starts with medieval pouches embellished with gold and silver thread and semi-precious stones, and traces changing fashions up to the modern celebrity bag, with chapters on luggage, evening bags, jewel-encrusted and art bags, and current trends re-inventing handbags as ‘private objects of desire, their secret charms known only to those who carry them close’.