Five Art And Fashion Books To Have On Your Radar This Autumn

From a comprehensive volume on a maverick New York-culture figurehead to an essential and timely artistic look at the climate crisis, here is our selection of some of the most exciting new and upcoming releases you should make space for on your bookshelves

1. Virgil Abloh: Figures Of Speech by Virgil Abloh
   This hefty volume, created by Abloh himself, catalogues the late visionary fashion designer’s genre-bending work across art, fashion and design. Published in conjunction with Abloh’s revered 2019-23 touring exhibition, the 500-page edition examines the designer’s multidisciplinary practice through essays, prototypes, inspirations and archive images, inter-webbed with intimate commentary from Abloh, offering a comprehensive behind-the-curtain glimpse into the world of one of the 21st century’s most impactful cultural figures. 
   
2. Art And Climate Change by Maja and Reuben Fowkes
   Across five chapters, this extensively illustrated book gets to grips with the fields of art and ecology, toxic dynamics between racial capitalism and climate change, extractivism, and climate uncertainty while also surveying the hopeful ways to achieve ecological restoration. The volume stresses the magnitude of climate change and the terrifying consequences of the inaction to stop it.
   
3. Jimmy DeSana: Submission by Drew Sawyer. Preface by Anne Pasternak. Epilogue by Laurie Simmons
   This is the first-ever comprehensive tome dedicated to the photographic oeuvre of Jimmy DeSana – an instrumental yet under-explored figure of New York’s art, music and film scenes of the ’70s and ’80s. Submission deep-dives into DeSana’s deliciously artificial renderings of the human body, twisted and misshapen in monochromatic or glaring colours while also exploring relationships between gender, sexuality and consumer capitalism in often surreal, diverting ways.
   
4. 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone by Lucy Lippard, Amy Smith-Stewart and Alexandra Schwartz
   Celebrating the 51st anniversary of the seminal exhibition Twenty Six Contemporary Women Artists, curated by Lucy Lippard at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 1971, this title showcases work by the artists included in the original exhibition alongside a new cohort of 26 female-identifying and non-binary emerging artists. The volume traces the transformation of feminist art practices over the last five decades, celebrating the progress in women’s visibility in the art world while also highlighting an ardent concern for female rights today. 
   
5. Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love by Asma Naeem, Evan Moffitt and Hanya Yanagihara. Foreword by Christopher Bedford
   This monograph accompanies Salman Toor’s first retrospective exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, comprising the artist’s essential works – intimate snapshots of the imagined lives of young, queer Brown men residing between New York City and South Asia. Toor’s work is lionised for the singular depiction of the ephemerality of life tinged with reality, angst, and anxiety that – as curator Asma Naeem describes in the introduction – ‘mine the complexities of being an immigrant, queer and human’. Alongside Toor’s powerful auto-fictional narrative paintings, the volume offers an original new short story by the acclaimed author – and Season 1 At Your Service podcast guest – Hanya Yanagihara. 

Nini Barbakadze is a fashion journalist and editor of Phreak Issue who has written for publications such as the Financial Times, Love Magazine, Metal Magazine, Forbes, Coeval Magazine and Year Zero