25 Best Books For Fashion students 2025: The Ultimate Reading List For Aspiring Designers and Stylists

 1 // The Fashion Business Manual: By FASHIONARY gives you all of the relevant and detailed knocklege on how to build a fashion business. From copywriting logos to picking the right hangers for a brick and mortar store, it doesn't miss a single step.

2 // The Fashion Book: By PHAIDON is the A-Z dictionary of every formative figure in fashion. From designers and photographers, illustrators to models. Every relavant figure and what they did for fashion is referenced in this book

3 // The Hidden Facts Of Fashion: By FASHIONARY Did you know bullet proof vests expire? Or that you don’t really need to wash your jeans? Filled from cover to cover with facts, knowledge and trivia you didn’t know you needed to know about fashion.

4 // Why Fashion Matters: By Frances Corner argues the case that fashion is not the frivolous industry we have garnered it to be as it impacts everything form the economy, society to each of us personally as we move through the world.

5 // Why You Can Go Out Dressed Like That: By Marnie Fogg explains contempary fashion by breaking down avant-garde looks from Lady GaGa’s meat dress to Viktor&Rolf’s infamous topiary dress (on book cover) and why fashion is - or should be - a respected art form.

6 // FASHION: By TASCHEN is not a complete fashion history but is a fairly comprehensive reference book for women’s fashion from the 18th-20th century, showcasing the Kyoto Costume Institute’s vast and expansive archive.

7 // Fashion And Costume: By James Laver is a brief history of fashion from beginning to end. A digestable introdution to fashion and it’s history for new comers who want to be ushered in to the vast world of fashion gently but efficiently.

8 // Textilepedia: By FASHIONARY is exactly what it sounds like, a dictionary of all your basic textile and fabric knowledge. It covers weaves, fibers, yarns, care and maintenance etc. A complete reference book for everything fabric related.

9 // Fashion In Film: By Christopher Laverty is a mix of fashion history and cinema. A tour of iconic costumes in film which had profound and lasting impacts on fashion culture and made shifts in the industry.

10 // Pattern Magic, Stretch Fabrics: By Tomoko Nakamichi is one in a four part series, this particular book teaches you how to sculpt with stretch fabrics with set patterns and the fundamentals of working with stretch fabrics, giving you the skills to create Your own sculptural pieces.

11 // Pattern Magic 2: Tomoko Nakamichi is part 2 of the series teaching you how to sculpt with woven fabric with set patterns and the fundamentals of working with woven fabric, giving you the skills to create your own sculptural pieces.

12 // Pattern Magic: By Tomoko Nakamichi is the first of the four part series, teaching you how to sculpt with woven fabrics with set patterns and the fundamentals of working with woven fabric, giving you the skills to create your own sculptural pieces.

13 // How To Set Up And Run A Fashion Label: By Toby Meadows the guide to understanding the business side of setting up your own brand. Teaching you how to analyse your market and your product, with numerous case studies.

14 // Fashion Forecasting: By Kathryn McKelvey & Janine Munslow gives a detailed break down of forecasting future tastes, predicting the future of the market and anticipating trends in the world of fashion including interviews with industry professionals.

15 // The Art Of Fashion Draping: By Connie Amden-Crawford is written for fashion design and pattern cutting students, written with both metric and imperial measurements, it’s the complete tutorial on creating garments using the draping method, including the basic bodice, bias cut dresses and beyond.

16 // BIBA, The Biba Experience: By Alwyn W Turner tells you everything you need to know about the iconic 1960’s and 70’s London department store, it’s founders, it’s history and what the brand did for women’s fashion.

17 // Poetic Cloth: By Hannah Lamb is a resource for inspiration on playing with textiles, adding details in unconventional ways and unique embellishment ideas such as new uses for patchwork and unusual means of embroidery.

18 // Haute Couture, From The Metropolitan Museum Of Art: By Richard Martin & Harold Koda explores the history of Haute Couture, beginning with the founding of The House Of Worth in the mid 19th century to the Haute Couture designers of today.

19 // Pattern Cutting: By Dennic-Chunman Lo is another book written for pattern cutting students, explaining how to interpret the human for for pattern designing, runs you through all the tools necessary to make patterns and how to draft basic blocks to lead you on to more advanced pattern.

20 // Couture Sewing Techniques: By Claire B. Shaeffer is the best course in couture sewing. It runs you through advanced stitches, key couture tools and equipment, how to shrink, stretch and manipulate fabrics and how to apply all of these techniques to achieve the highest level of hand sewing.

21 // Creating Couture Embellishment: By Ellen W. Miller is a great partner for Couture sewing techniques as this book focuses on embellishments. From bead application to the use of feathers and traditional and professional stitching.

22 // The End Of Fashion: By Teri Agins explores the changing landscape of the fashion industry and how it functions from the dawn of haute couture to the consumer guiding the designer in an unfiltered, raw journalistic style and is essential reading for fashion industry experts even today.

23 // Notes On ‘Camp’: By Susan Sontag is vital reading for anyone in the arena of fashion. These two essays are classics of the fashion literary canon. Sontag dissects and critiques the difference between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.

24 // The Identification Of Lace: By Pat Earnshaw explains everything you’d ever want to know about lace, the different weaving patterns, different varieties, it’s history and origin, lace from around the world and everything in-between.

25 // Textile Art: By Creative Publishing International isn’t the most beautiful book but it is a brilliantly dense catalogue of creative embellishing techniques. In it’s own words, it is “a practical and inspirational guide to manipulating, colouring and embellishing fabrics”.