Searching for the perfect book on these topics as a gift? Or just to have for yourself? Six outstanding titles come to mind, works that display the best ideas and images.

Probably the best exhibition of the year was the Metropolitan Museum’s Poiret, which ran from May to August. The exhibition catalogue of the same title by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton pays tribute to Poirte’s uncanny fashion sense and his link with the decoration of the times. (Stay tuned for the NYPL exhibition in September 2008: “Art Deco Design: Rhythm and Verve.”)

The Victoria & Albert weighs in with two groundbreaking catalogues: The Surreal Body: Fetish and Fashion by Ghislaine Wood; and New York Fashion by Sonnet Stanfill. A fourth publication which addresses fashion and taste directly is: Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past .

Two books, which haven’t hit the Library’s shelves yet since they just came out last month, deserve a close perusal. Tim Gunn’s witty A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style  follows a long-standing tradition of personal beauty and grooming manuals.  And who better than Tommy Hilfiger (a brand himself) with George Lois to explain Iconic America: A Roller-Coaster Ride Through the Eye-Popping Panorama of American Pop Culture. More than 400 ideas and items are surveyed to provoke the reader’s interest, and the subtitle says the rest.