Truman's Book Club: 'Perry Ellis: An American Original'

At the turn of the 1980s, Perry Ellis belonged, along with Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, to a holy trinity of American sportswear designers revolutionizing ready-to-wear.
In less than a decade, his effortlessly cool creations had become classics, revealing a promising talent that would be cut short by an AIDS-related illness in 1986. Now, Ellis's work is collected for the first time in Perry Ellis: An American Original, a monograph spanning his entire career. Rare photos and interviews with Ellis's close friends and family paint a portrait of a man who not only defined an aesthetic, but changed the landscape of fashion forever.

"Perry Ellis: An American Original" by Jeffrey Banks, Erica Lennard, and Doria de la Chapelle, $75, RizzoliUSA.com