Chess Players: From Charlie Chaplin to Wu-Tang Clan

The first book to chart a visual history of women’s sportswear, and the key role that Nike has played in it over the last 50 years

This is a book about Nike sportswear and what it means to women. The garments women wear, and why they wear them. It’s about athletes, from the elite to the aspiring amateur, running marathons or running errands. It’s about the spaces we perform in, and the way we use clothing to do it: from the track and the fitness studio, to an online world and the street outside.

Look Good, Feel Good, Play Good visualizes the relationship between women and the garments they wear through five design archetypes from sporting history: warm-ups, jerseys, leggings, sport bras, and shorts. Steeped in narrative, history, and Nike’s abundant archive, the book’s rich imagery spans reproductions of Nike’s trade catalogues that date back to the early 1980s, period and contemporary photography, sketches, advertisements, fabric swatches, seasonal color palettes, original design proposals and patents, logos, product and campaign shots, and everything in between.

A photobook dedicated to players throughout time who have tried their hand at the beloved cerebral game, featuring text penned by chess enthusiast and acclaimed author Martin Amis.

This is a book for chess Grandmasters, novices and inquiring laymen alike. It is a book for anyone who has wondered, as Martin Amis wryly asks in his contributing text, "What are they playing at?"

Marcel Duchamp's iconic quote, "All chess players are artists," resonates throughout the volume. David Hockney likened the game's strategic thinking to that of making art: "Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make." "Chess is war over the board," said Bobby Fischer, Grandmaster and World Chess Champion, but here John Lennon and Yoko Ono checkmate this notion, with their all-white chess "peace" set.

Chess Players: From Charlie Chaplin to Wu-Tang Clan compiles photographs of notable figures playing the beloved game of strategy over the course of 130 years. The volume strings together zany and remarkable moments in time. In one image, players are captured on board a steamship crossing the Atlantic in 1888; in another, an astronaut studies a board in space. And, as the title suggests, Hollywood celebrities frequent the book's pages, playing chess on and off the screen: Humphrey Bogart deploys a Sicilian Defense against Lauren Bacall, while Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen plot their next gambit in the iconic chess seduction scene from The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).

Featuring an introduction by Dylan Loeb McClain, former chess columnist for the New York Times, the photographs in Chess Players evince the enduring attraction of this cerebral game. The volume also features an interview with Viswanathan Anand, who is inarguably one of the greatest chess players in history.

Hardcover, 7" x 9.5", 196 pages, 31 color illustrations, 124 black and white illustrations.