Fashion Library

A library is a collection of sources of information and similar resources, made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing. A fashion library applies that idea to clothing, footwear and fashion accessories — and the name covers both scholarly collections of books and images and, in one famous New York case, a library of garments themselves.

Research Libraries for Fashion

The Berg Fashion Library is the field's leading research resource: comprehensive coverage of world fashion through reference titles, journal articles, ebooks and images, with lesson plans, thematic reading lists and biographies for students and researchers. First launched in 2010 as a subscription product, it won the Dartmouth Medal, and it is accessible through the New York Public Library's collections.

Universities hold the other great collections. Kent State University's June F. Mohler Fashion Library is the primary repository for printed materials on the history of fashion, the apparel industry, fashion retailing, accessories and design. The Fashion Institute of Technology's Gladys Marcus Library serves FIT's students with its own fashion holdings and services, and Drexel University's library guide supports research for its fashion design courses — all linked from this page.

A Library You Can Wear: The Albright Fashion Library

The Albright Fashion Library in New York City stretches the definition in a useful direction. Founded by stylist Irene Albright, its 7,000-square-foot space holds around 20,000 high-fashion designer treasures — Giambattista Valli gowns, DSquared2 jackets and Christian Louboutin shoes among them — available for rent, by appointment only. It is a lending library where the stock is clothing, used by stylists, editors and productions rather than readers.

Between those poles sits the ordinary public library, which remains a genuine fashion resource: fashion books — written works bound in covers, from histories to pattern and business guides — can be found at a local library as well as in specialist collections. Readers who want to buy rather than borrow will find the fashion books section linked from this page, and the FIT summary gives the college behind one of the great fashion libraries its own page.

Using a Fashion Library Well

A fashion library rewards a question, not a browse. Researchers get the most from these collections by arriving with the specific thing they need — a period silhouette, a designer's chronology, a construction detail, a company's history — because fashion holdings are deep in images and trade material that general search engines index poorly. Librarians in the specialist collections are part of the resource: the Gladys Marcus and June F. Mohler staffs guide students to material they would not find alone. For designers, the collections serve a different purpose again — not answers but evidence, the documented past of garments against which new work is measured.