Violette Editions

The Concise Dictionary of Dress

Photographs by Norbert Schoerner. Edited by Robert Violette.

A brilliant amalgam of psychoanalysis, literature, art and couture, The Concise Dictionary of Dress is bestselling author and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and fashion curator Judith Clark's inventive recasting of dress in terms of anxiety and desire. The book is structured as a dictionary, but an unusual one: Each entry--for words including "armor," "brash," "comfortable," "conformist," "diaphanous," "essential," "fashionable," "loose," "measured," "plain," "provocative," "revealing," "sharp," "tight" and so on--is elucidated by a litany of highly unconventional definitions. "Loose," for example, is defined as "1. Never knowingly over-attached; a disappearing act. 2. A moveable feast; not conforming to contour or arrangement; subject to influence and gravity; seeking direction. 3. Of uncertain boundary." Phillips' entries in The Concise Dictionary of Dress are paired with photographs of installations that Clark created among the rolling racks, rambling corridors and high-security vaults of the Victoria & Albert Museum's vast reserve collections at Blythe House in west London. Cast objects and photographs, tableaux of clothing and accessories and metaphors of repression and ceremony continue the conversation. Phillips said that viewing the works at Blythe House is "like looking up a word in a dictionary and finding a picture instead of more words; it is not clear whether the word and its definition are the caption, or vice versa."
Judith Clark is Reader in the field of Fashion and Museology at London College of Fashion, where she is Director (with Amy de la Haye) of M.A. Fashion Curation. Clark opened the first independent gallery of dress (Judith Clark Costume Gallery) in 1998, and has since curated major exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, ModeMuseum in Antwerp, the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips is the author of 14 acclaimed books, most recently Side Effects and On Kindness (written with the historian Barbara Taylor). He is the editor of the New Penguin Freud translations, and a regular reviewer for the London Review of Books.
Norbert Schoener is a German photographer and filmmaker, and the author of The Order of Things. He has exhibited at White Cube, Comme des Garçons and Chapman Fine Arts.

Malerie Marder: Carnal Knowledge

Edited by Robert Violette. Preface by Gregory Crewdson. Text by James Ellroy, Neville Wakefield, A.M. Homes, James Frey, Bruce Wagner. Interview with Philip-Lorca diCorcia.

A seminal experience for American photographer Malerie Marder (born 1971) was a family friend's request for Marder to photograph her with her lover, naked and in the anonymous setting of a motel room. This set the tone for Marder's work for the next decade. Her photographs of nudes are composed simply, much like portrait painting, her subjects sitting plainly near the center of the frame, often set against the bleak anonymity of motel rooms, their impassive gazes almost daring the viewer to interpret their bodies. "Marder has explored the psychosexual undertow of her own intimate relationships," Siobhan McDevitt wrote in Artforum, "frequently shooting herself along with family and friends in close quarters (including pay-by-the-hour motels) and, usually, undressed. She flirts with prurience, with ideas of privacy and surveillance, eroticism and pornography, but seems more satisfied when approaching the complications of love or being in love." Beautifully illustrated, Carnal Knowledge contains 77 color reproductions of these photographs, as well as new texts from James Ellroy and Neville Wakefield, a preface by Gregory Crewdson, short stories inspired by Marder's work by A. M. Homes, James Frey and Bruce Wagner, and a Q & A for Marder devised by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. It is the first volume to collect these works and to bring Marder's work to a wider audience.

THE CONCISE DICTIONARY OF DRESS
Photographs by Norbert Schoerner. Edited by Robert Violette.
ISBN: 9781900828352 | US $39.95
Active | In stock

MALERIE MARDER: CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
Edited by Robert Violette. Preface by Gregory Crewdson. Text by James Ellroy, Neville Wakefield, A.M. Homes, James Frey, Bruce Wagner. Interview with Philip-Lorca diCorcia.
ISBN: 9781900828307 | US $75.00
Forthcoming | Awaiting stock

PAUL SMITH: YOU CAN FIND INSPIRATION IN EVERYTHING*
Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Robert Violette. Introduction by William Gibson. Text by James Flint, Richard Williams, Paul Smith.
ISBN: 9781900828291 | US $59.95
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LEIGH BOWERY LOOKS
Artwork by Leigh Bowery. Photographs by Fergus Greer.
ISBN: 9781900828277 | US $25.00
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JOSEPH BEUYS: WE GO THIS WAY
By Caroline Tisdall. Artwork by Joseph Beuys.
ISBN: 9781900828130 | US $65.00
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FATHER + SON
By Harold Smith and Paul Smith.
ISBN: 9781900828147 | US $19.95
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THE WORDS OF GILBERT & GEORGE
Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Robert Violette.
ISBN: 9781900828024 | US $400.00
Active | Awaiting stock