Free Fashion Books, Courtesy Of The Met

When I was in college, my roommate and I were very broke. This meant that anything we wanted to do in our free time needed to be either very very cheap, or (preferably) free. One of our favorite pastimes was visiting our local library. In the summer, it was a wonderful place to get out of the sweltering SC heat that our one ancient window A/C unit didn’t stand a chance against.

My favorite sections to pore over were Art and Fashion.

Art and Fashion books are generally very pricey, due to their size and that they contain mostly photographs, which are much more expensive to print than just text. I learned a great deal about fashion and art history while buried in the stacks, and I think that’s made a huge difference in how I clothe myself now vs. before. By learning more about fashion history, I was better able to create my own unique style, rather than just buy what was trendy right there and then.

Open culture is a beautiful thing.

Imagine how thrilled I was to discover that The Metropolitan Museum of Art has 1,556 publications available to download for free on their site…including an impressive collection of fashion publications.

Here are a just a few from their collection that I can’t wait to peruse:

Chanel

Koda, Harold, and Andrew Bolton (2005) / Download