Understanding Fashion
...some advice on elegance.
This book is a rediscovery. Better, a discovery: Para comprender la moda was written in 1945 by one of the most refined and elegant Spanish stylist, Pedro Rodriguez. Rodriguez tells the history of fashion: where it was born, how it spread, who controls it, how it conquers us and how we can understand it.
Para comprender la moda is not a handbook of elegance, neither a pocket super condensed book on style, nor a subsidiary on old fashion habits. This book is a set of current considerations about elegance, on how we cultivate it and find it, and at the same time, how to protect from it.
As a refined stylist and an extraordinary tailor, Pedro Rodriguez observes the old styles and tastes and he meditates on the mechanisms of beauty.
Spanish designer Pedro Rodriguez (1895-1990) opened his fashion house in Barcelona in 1919. His work was consecrated ten years later by the inclusion of his clothes at the Barcelona International Exposition. The Spanish civil war forced him to leave the country and he only resumed producing clothes in his homeland in 1937. These were the years of his greatest success, which was to continue until 1978, when he shut up shop to dedicate his time exclusively to haute couture for his most loyal customers
I started underlining illuminating and intelligent phrases to pass on to Vanity Fair readers. By the end, almost all of the book was highlighted
Vanity Fair, Italy
The surprise is that this little essay, written 70 years ago, is absolutely contemporary
El Mundo, Spain