Counting Those Who Matter

OF all the hefty fashion tomes that land with a thump in bookstores at this time of year, the vanity monographs and the oh-please-not-another-one biographies of Coco Chanel and Diana Vreeland have nothing on a good survey of designers who matter.

Who are the 100 most noteworthy of all time? Of the last decade? It depends on whom you ask, but a study of the genre can often reveal surprising details about fashion, and how ephemeral success can be. (Among the entrants in the exhaustive 1995 survey “Contemporary Fashion,” edited by Richard Martin, are formerly hot labels like Andrew Fezza and Pepe Jeans.)

Now come two new surveys with markedly different perspectives, beginning with “Fashion Designers A-Z” from Taschen, an extraordinarily lavish overview of the archives of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The 654-page, $350 book comes in multiple editions, with covers by Stella McCartney, Diane von Furstenberg, Etro and others, one bound in Miuccia Prada’s banana print from spring 2011.

While conceived to include only 100 designers, the end tally, after much hand-wringing and additional acquisitions, was 103. This includes the obvious ones (Alaïa, Chanel, Poiret) and some younger labels like Rodarte and Undercover, reflecting the ever-changing nature of the archives.

“A fashion collection is like a shark,” said Valerie Steele, the museum’s chief curator. “It has to keep moving or it dies.”

Interestingly, only two of the designers in that book, Thom Browne and Gareth Pugh, also appear in “Pattern: 100 Fashion Designers, 10 Curators,” coming in March from Phaidon. “Pattern” is a follow-up to the 2005 “Sample,” a yearbook of fashion’s new generation, which at the time included designers like Hedi Slimane, Raf Simons and Phoebe Philo, and also some who have since fallen by the wayside, like Miguel Adrover and Bruce.

“Pattern” similarly reflects its moment. The majority of entrants (a whopping 40) work in the hot fashion capital of London. There are also several of Asian descent, like Jason Wu and Alexander Wang of New York and Xander Zhou of Beijing, but only one, Noritaka Tatehana, from Japan.

Showing how quickly fashion changes, there were 15 from Japan in “Sample.”