Book Introduction
When people think of American fashion, New York, Los Angeles, and major fashion weeks often come to mind first. Yet American style has never been created by only a handful of fashion capitals. The United States of Fashion: A New Atlas of American Style, conceived by the editors of Vogue, sets out to redraw a broader, more decentralized, and more lived-in map of American fashion. Moving beyond familiar runways and global labels, the book turns its attention to designers, craftspeople, photographers, and independent brands working across states, cities, small towns, and Indigenous communities, revealing how contemporary American style is created, worn, and continually redefined in different places.
The book grew out of Vogue’s 2021 project of the same name and documents a crucial moment when the pandemic, digital platforms, and changing consumer habits were accelerating the decentralization of American fashion. In the past, designers often felt compelled to move to New York or Los Angeles in order to enter the industry’s core. Today, social media, e-commerce, and local creative communities allow artists and labels based in Detroit, Nashville, Santa Fe, Miami, Montana, and many other places to develop their own visual language and audience. The word “Atlas” therefore refers not only to geography, but also to a new way of understanding fashion production, cultural identity, and the relationship between creativity and place.
The volume features Laura and Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte, Jeremy Scott, Libertine founder Johnson Hartig, and numerous jewelers, photographers, craftspeople, and emerging designers. Indigenous beadwork and metalwork, Western dress, Latinx culture, Gothic subcultures, local manufacturing, recycled materials, and small-scale studios appear side by side. Together, these practices demonstrate that there is no single definition of American fashion. Instead, it is a complex visual landscape shaped by geography, ethnicity, family memory, music, community, and everyday experience.
Beyond clothing and accessories, the book pays close attention to the environments in which its contributors live and work. Some of the images were made by the designers and artists themselves, documenting their studios, hometowns, families, and daily surroundings. This gives the publication the intimacy of a private album and the observational quality of a cultural field notebook. The photographs do more than present finished work; they reveal how personal style gradually takes shape through climate, street life, childhood memory, and social relationships. Essays by writers including Louise Erdrich and Suzy Exposito further explore Indigenous fashion, subculture, and personal experience, showing how dress can become a visible expression of identity, belonging, and cultural memory.
The United States of Fashion is more than a fashion photography book. It is also an important visual record of the transformation of the American creative landscape in the early 2020s. It shows that fashion does not exist only on runways, in luxury boutiques, or within seasonal trends, but also in regional craft, independent labels, family traditions, and everyday dress. For fashion designers, photographers, brand founders, craft researchers, and readers interested in American culture and local creative industries, the book offers a more open way of seeing: what truly defines American style is not a single center, but the creativity continually emerging from countless places.
Details
Author: THE EDITORS OF VOGUE, Anna Wintour
Publisher: Rizzoli
Publication Year: 2021
Size: 27×21 cm
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 176 pages
