http://www.bluefly.com

The ultimate hook-up for the fashion obsessed.

The great reason to shop Bluefly.com is the ease of use. You may shop utilizing such categories as women, men, new arrivals, home, accessories, etc. Bluefly carries some of the best known names in fashion - Bottega Veneta, Fendi, Prada, Hermes, Gucci, Kate Spade and many more. For instance if you go to "new arrivals", you can go to the left-hand navigation and further refine your search by size, how long ago the merchandise arrived, by color, by designer or by category such as shoes, accessories, men, women or home. This makes everything so easy to find and saves the user time. Another great feature of this site is that they will always tell you what the original retail price for the item as well as the percentage discount offered to Bluefly customers.

For those who are true blue fashion victims, there is Flypaper, Bluefly's very own blog! Best of all, you can visit Flypaper to link to other fashion blogs such as Couture in the City and Invade My Closet. Fashion fans of the world unite. For those who are not in close proximity to Rodeo drive or Fifth Avenue, Bluefly is great. It is also great for those who just like to shop from the comfort of their own laptop! Bluefly is your one stop shop for designer goods.

Reviewed by Library Staff Member - Monika Earle

In the introduction to Textile Designs, Susan Meller and Joost Elffers write, “To be original in fabric design is to make the best use of an old vocabulary.” The authors arranged the book as a visual dictionary, an alphabetical conversation between cultures, periods, and styles. Meller and Elffers took almost two thousand pattern samples from the last two centuries of mechanical printing and divided them by “families:” floral, geometric, conversational, ethnic and art movements. Within these categories, they organized the textiles by motif, color, layout, and period. They give brief notes on the context of the motifs, how the pattern evolved, how it fared commercially and other useful comments. (About “punk” themed patterns they write, “The wearer of a garment-industry-designed punk print is announcing loudly, ‘I tried to come up with my own look, but I failed.’ ”)

Flipping through the book, you get a sense of the endlessly creative ways that the “ghost artists” of commercial textile design reinvent ancient motifs. Interlocked ying-yang commas become a Japanese heraldic crest, a de-ethnicized circle pattern or a French flower shape. The layout also sets up some unusual juxtapositions - the swirling greens of the “Renaissance Look” face the hard red shapes of the “Russian Constructivist” fabrics; “Plaids: Black and White” follow “Pinwheels and Spirals.” Everyday fabrics often seem invisible; Textile Designs illuminates them. Most of the prints are gorgeous, some are tacky, funny, elegant or awful, but together they're an invaluable resource for anyone designing or working with textiles.

Reviewed by Library Staff Member - Madeleine McQuillan - S.F.