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America is a land of contrasts, an amalgamation of ethnicities and cultures. Built on immigration, one can understand the premise that America has no culture of its own. The American culture we are witness to today, resulted from thousands of immigrants finding themselves in the same place, and responding to that environment in their own ways, as opposed to any ethnic culture that is specific to the area. American Style tries to dispute this supposition by providing a compilation of all things ‘American’.

Since the inception of cinema in the early nineteenth century, America has been the undisputed champion of entertainment; later television propelled ‘America’ into living rooms around the world. The American way of life has been witnessed and judged by us all, and America has undoubtedly exerted its cultural identity on the world.

American Style is an alphabetically arranged collection of photographs that epitomise American fashion and social culture: American fashion designers as refined as Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs are represented along side iconic images of Coca-Cola and MTV. The title shows off the core elements in the cultural phenomenon of Americanisation all over the world: MTV transformed the music industry and ensured American domination over global youth pop culture.
Who can forget the iconic red swimsuit in Baywatch, or the ‘baggy jeans’ phenomenon of Hip Hop clothing?

Television series such as Sex and the City illustrated the lives of single thirty-something female New Yorkers and depict the changes occurring not only in American Society, but also worldwide. In the introduction, Harold Koda (curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of What?) states that American style has been influenced by ‘political and economic realities of the social experiment that is democracy, and a consequence of the power of the egalitarian body politic’.America’s late entry into Word War II ensured that it did not suffer the same infrastructural and economic damage seen in the rest of Europe. After World War II, Europe set about rebuilding its economy, and America cemented its own superpower status. As a result of this many of the photographs start from the mid-1950s and accelerate in the 90s.

Like many publications from Assouline – the fashion industry’s sweetheart – this is a glossy coffee table embellishment, with many photographs and minimal text in the form of an introduction. As a new world order emerges and new super-economies appear, America’s cultural impact on the world will become more evident and publications such as American Fashion will become historical artifacts into the culture of the American empire as we know it today.

Keywords: Bookstore, David Krut Bookstores, Design, Fashion, review, Style