S">The first printing is available as a series of "Designer Editions". Each edition is bound in a fabric from one of six designers in the book and comes in a plexiglass box. For the covers of the "Missoni Edition", limited to just 2,000 copies, the Missoni family selected and produced an iconic knit. 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. The colorful zigzag-striped knit selected by Missoni exemplifies the company's optimistic, playful approach to pattern since the 1970s. 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.