This little book was created as a "trial balloon" by that great scholar and curator of material culture, Richard Martin, in response to what we both saw as a fault in all existing periodical literature: the lack of a proper index of fashion criticism and writing. At the time, Richard was secretly developing a plan to launch a Masters' Degree program in Fashion Criticism and this was the passion of the moment. It was also my first year of my being "his" librarian at The Costume Institute and we were both pretty giddy on the whole enterprise. Richard sent me the citations for this book all willy nilly for about 6 months and I compiled and output over New Years...actually was inside my library at the Met when the New Year turned over...in order to finish. That year, Richard also contributed a selection of these citations to a calendar issue of Visionaire (#16), a publication he championed.

Its companion was a book called "La Belle Assemblee," which was a bibliography I compiled of donations to the Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library over 6 months of 1995. Sadly, these were not the start of some grassroots publishing enterprise, as we hoped, because Richard became ill the following year and could no longer be so daring and productive. He passed away in November of 1999. ( )