The first printing is available as a series of Designer Editions . Each edition will be bound in a fabric from one of six designers in the book and comes in a plexiglass box. Miuccia Prada mined her archives to select four of her favorite prints to cover the Prada Edition . From Azzedine Alaia, Cristobal Balenciaga, and Coco Chanel, to Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent, and Vivienne Westwood, the greatest fashion designers of the 20th and 21st centuries are featured in the permanent collection of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The curators of America’s premier fashion museum have selected 500 masterpieces of the art of fashion, providing a visual guide to the history of fashion. Known for its innovative and award-winning exhibitions and its outstanding permanent collection of more than 50,000 garments and accessories, The Museum at FIT in New York City is one of only a handful of museums in the world devoted to the art of fashion. The Museum has built its collection around aesthetically and historically significant directional fashion-the kind of clothing and accessories that move fashion forward.The designers are organized from A-Z: Adrian, Balenciaga, Chanel, Dior. ..through Xuly Bet, Yamamoto, and Zoran. Photographs of selected garments from the Museum’s permanent collection illuminate each of the featured designers, while curatorial texts explain why each designer is important in fashion history and what is special about the individual pieces featured. In addition to showcasing 100 of the most important designers of the last century with essays by the curators at FIT and a foreword by Suzy Menkes, this book also explores how a fashion museum goes about collecting and exhibiting fashion. In her introductory essay, director and chief curator Valerie Steele writes about the rise of the fashion museum, and the emergence of the fashion exhibition as a popular and controversial phenomenon. For her edition, Miuccia Prada selected four classic prints from previous collections and re-printed them on cotton. You can choose from the feminine tiny hearts (Spring-Summer 2000), the Baroque-inspired bananas (Spring-Summer 2011), the abstract geometric diamonds (Fall-Winter 2012), or a floral reissued for Prada from the 1960 Holliday & Brown archives (Fall-Winter 2003).Six designers - Akris, Etro, Stella McCartney, Missoni, Prada, and Diane von Furstenberg - have contributed fabrics - bold, iconic, revolutionary - to cover 1,000 to 2,000 books each, for a total first printing of 11,000 copies. Crafted by hand at a bindery in the heart of Italy, and stamped with a unique number, every copy is an instant classic, and an addition to your fashion library that is truly one-of-a-kind.