This book is like having a great conversation with your brainiest fashion friend. Porter, an English critic and curator, considers the unspoken sartorial language of clothes – as opposed to fashion – that are bought, worn and given meaning by the wearer. In this case, he examines artists such as Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Jean-Michel Basquiat and what their choice in everyday, ordinary clothes tell us about who’s wearing them.

This beautiful book by a French journalist who grew up between Senegal, Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire averts the Western gaze and invites an exploration of African style through profiles of designers, artisans, shops, street style, stylists and photographers from Accra to Cape Town and Lagos.

The fashion and features director at The Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, previously weighed in on royal style with a book unpacking a decade of the Duchess of Cambridge’s closet. For the Queen’s Jubilee, Holt shares stories of Her Majesty’s wardrobe, including the messages communicated by her most memorable looks, from the Norman Hartnell Coronation gown that took nine weeks, six embroiderers and 3,000 hours to complete to the so-called Harlequin dress, just one of her colourful and witty evening gowns from the 1990s.

It takes former Vanity Fair editor Dana Brown two full pages in his new memoir Dilettante to detail the stage management around Anna Wintour’s standing lunchtime cappuccino order at the Royalton Hotel’s restaurant 44, and the particulars speak volumes about the Vogue editor-in-chief’s status, power and expectations. So it takes this bio more than 400 pages to detail how the English-born daughter of a Fleet Street newspaperman came to rule New York publishing, society and business circles. American journalist O’Dell, founding editor of New York magazine’s influential fashion vertical, The Cut, and former editor of Cosmopolitan.com, interviewed dozens of friends, associates, and even a few enemies to chart Wintour’s rise to icon. Read Zoomer’s interview with O’Dell here.

When turned on its side, i-D magazine’s logo represents a wink and smile — “the original emoji,” as current editor-in-chief McKimm writes in his foreword. In the pre-internet era, the revolutionary hand-stapled underground zine had one mantra: find fashion at its source, because new ideas are born on the street. British Vogue editor Edward Enninful was its fashion director 20 years ago, and he is among the names and past issues chronicled in this 40th anniversary tome, with appreciations from Sade, Raf Simons, Helmut Lang, Kate Moss and more.

More than a decade after his death by suicide at 40, we are still enthralled with the fashion designer’s life and work. Published as a companion to the current exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (on view until Oct. 9), which contextualizes his work within art history by pairing his iconic clothes with art and objects from the museum collection, this thoughtful exploration interprets McQueen’s work through the lens of his inspiration, methods and influences.

“It doesn’t take an expert to fathom the complexity of fragrance, only a willing spirant,” Volpert – a professor of interdisciplinary studies based in Atlanta – explains in the introduction to her slim, but fascinating, entry in the Object Lessons books series about the hidden lives of ordinary things. For a perfect pairing, read Elise Vernon Pearlstine’s comprehensive new book Scent: A Natural History of Fragrance, which explores human perceptions of scent through accessible botany: the raw materials, pollinators and plants that have inspired natural perfumers like her throughout history.

Louis Vuitton’s invitation was a “Will Return” sign with a clock and moveable arms. Gucci sent a packet of flower bulbs. When COVID-19 curtailed in-person fashion presentations, in lieu of a live runway show, Loewe printed a 64-page broadsheet newspaper with an excerpt from Danielle Steel’s latest novel and details of its runway collection. Webb, a former fashion editor now teaching at London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins art school, makes canny selections showing the inventive ways designers invited audiences to collections, and browsing these artifacts is the next best thing to perching in the front row.

Getting dressed is a political act, according to Thanhauser, a teacher at New York’s Pratt Institute. She tells a panoramic history of clothing through six fibres – linen, cotton, silk, wool and synthetics (rayon and nylon) – and makes a compelling case by charting the ethics of the evolution from handmade to manufactured clothes, including the impact and cost of textile production on the environment, the colonized and the poor. She also details various subcultures (like denim heads, for example), whose enthusiasms have helped revive or maintain niche production models.

For the 60th anniversary of Yves Saint Laurent’s first runway presentation, this colourful abecedary of the late Algerian-born French designer’s inspirations distills and celebrates his life’s work, and features many images from his extraordinary archives, plus contributions from friends, muses and tastemakers.