Product Description: "Talons d'enfer explore le riche passé culturel du talon haut ainsi que ses liens avec le pouvoir, le fantasme, la sexualité et l’identité. Des chopines vénitiennes du XVIe siècle aux créations du XXIe siècle signées Christian Louboutin, plus de cent-soixante modèles extraordinaires, contemporains ou historiques, jouent avec les possibles culturels et artistiques du talon haut, intègrent des matières innovantes ou surprenantes, et repoussent les limites de la fonctionnalité et de l’esthétique...read more

Product Description: This gorgeous book explores the fashion world’s most coveted and iconic object—the high-heeled shoe. Killer Heels explores the rich cultural history of the high heel and its relation to power, fantasy, sexuality, and identity. More than 160 spectacular contemporary and historical shoe designs—from sixteenth-century Venetian platforms to twenty-first-century Christian Louboutins—play with the cultural and artistic possibilities of the high heel, use innovative or unexpected materials, and push the limits of functionality and beauty...read more

Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. Here, 18th-century specialist Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's 'Revolution in Dress,' covering each phase of her tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour. As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt provocative, 'unqueenly' outfits that, ironically, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion--the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs--was also her undoing.--From publisher description.Examines the various stages in Marie Antoinette's life from the perspective of the fashions that she popularized, from her struggle to adapt to the traditions of French royal glamour to the extreme costumes she developed to project an image of power.

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