Thierry Mugler: Couturissime

Amazing book from an amazing exhibition

I was excited about receiving this book, it would be the first Thierry Mugler product I would own having discovered his work about 10 years ago, when I stumbled across him in the university library while studying Art Direction and Graphic Design. His graphic sensibilities matched my own, but in an entirely different context - he translated art, mythology, comic books & anime into the architecture of fashion in a way no one has since.I've seen most of his famous shows online, but it's been hard to find good quality, high-resolution images of his work or catwalks - in large part due to the video and print quality of the time - until now.This Phaidon book is massive, with 400 heavy weight pages and at 29.1 x 37.3cm it's just shy of being A3, opening to almost A2 spreads - making the incredible, crisp photography inside worthy of being framed, especially given the paper stock.The page edges are blacked out, making the front cover seem to wrap around like a 2001 A Space Odyssey monolith.But Phaidon seem to have lost the art of the compendium art book, ceding ground to academia and now super deluxe specialists, Taschen in recent years - and it really shows in this volume.I was hoping this book would be as comprehensive as the exhibition that inspired it - and you can tell they had the potential to, because some of the most iconic moments, costumes and couture we know Mugler for are reproduced here in singular, full page prints - but I'd say 2/3 are featured as thumbnails in a timeline of his career at the back of the book - and that's what feels so egregious and short-sighted. One image I had never seen before for example, but is used in most promotions of the book are the red and green stage costumes for Mugler Follies, 2013, photographed by Christian Gaultier [scroll up and have a look for yourself in the "From the Publisher" section]- and is featured *only* as a tiny thumbnail in the back of the book. Why?You can now follow Manfred Thierry Mugler on Instagram to see just how much we're missing out on in the Phaidon book. I can only imagine how exciting and radical a Taschen format might've been, and even if most of us wouldn't have been able to afford a limited large scale version - at least we'd still have a smaller XL edition, which would be around the same size as this one, with x2 images across a couple hundred more pages - and probably at a similar price point too.By no means is this a bad or unworthy book on the work of Mugler, it's certainly the best on the market right now - but it's just not the exhaustive collection of work that you'd expect from a publication tied to an exhibition.One for the library or coffee table, just not the one for the ages that I'd hoped for.