Janet Reed brings her love for fashion and over 45 years of experience to you. By the time she reached high school, Janet knew she wanted to go into fashion. She loved clothes. She loved dressing up. And she loved sewing. She also loved to write though twenty more years would pass before she would begin work on her first book.

In 1972, she left Ohio and off to college she went. After earning a B.S. in Fashion Merchandising from Florida State University in 1976, she promptly pursued her life's vocation. Soon after, she fulfilled her dream of moving West and established roots in California which has been home to her since 1977.

During her first decade in the field, Janet explored many avenues of fashion: buying, retail store management, and visual merchandising including wall, shelf, and storefront window display. Eager to learn, she advanced quickly. By her mid 20's, she had attained the position of district store manager and during the second decade, she added regional account sales and custom clothing design to her growing resume.

In 1985, Janet's entrepreneurial spirit encouraged her to pursue self-employment. With 18 years of tailoring experience and self-taught knowledge of pattern making, she designed, drafted and constructed made-to-measure garments for private clients. It was through this experience that she was able to study a multitude of body types and to master the art of creating proportion and line illusions in dress. The endeavor influenced Janet's incisive understanding of the elements and principles of design and provided the framework for developing the concepts she introduced in "Elements of Art in Fashion", her first book.

Concurrent with her design business, Janet taught pattern drafting and design classes through a private firm. There, she self-published and sold books on the subject to her students. This compelled her to pursue teaching more rigorously. By the late 80's, she had taught for two California community college districts and two fashion trade schools. Her well-rounded career in retail, buying, sales, marketing, sewing, and clothing design was aptly suited for being a fashion instructor and led to a 17-year profession. She continued to work in the field bringing relevant experience into her classroom lectures and project assignments.

Discouraged by the textbook offerings for her courses, Janet stopped using an outside text and exclusively lectured from her own handouts. This led to the publishing of her first two textbooks. Teaching with her own course books allowed her to develop, refine, and clarify the material. In just over a decade, she had progressed the content to a detailed, comprehensive level. The books encompassed all she wanted to say regarding the design, promotion, and commercialism of fashion and how the industry's subfields work together harmoniously.

By 2001, restlessness was churning once again. She wanted to begin a third title about the history of fashion and she could no longer ignore a yearning desire to reach others beyond the confines of her class- room. So she relinquished her teaching post and redirected her career to pursue writing full time. As "The Evolution of Fashion" developed, it became a series collection itself and the final installment in her fashion education series.

The next chapter in her career began in 2006 when by a chance crossing of paths, she met a programmer who encouraged her to explore a new developing styling language called CSS. She was immediately sold on the idea for the ability to incorporate video, detailed fullscreen examples of designs, and a limitless usage of color. And she could update the material at will to reflect the changing fashion environment. A textbook on fashion that's always current. "Hmmm", she thought, "Now that's a good idea". So she set out to create a modernized version of "The Fashion Industry" and thereafter employed the digital format for all titles in her fashion education collection.

It has been a robust and multifaceted career that spans over four decades and five cycles of fashion. As she enters the golden years of her career, Janet's three-volume fashion education series reflects a half century of consistent engagement in a subject she loves and knows very well. The collection is a work of mastery, wisdom, and love denoting the pinnacle of her knowledge, cultural perceptions, and experiences. And yet the books are not yet finished for fashion today is history by tomorrow.