Timeless stars to light the season
Suzy Menkes IHT Tuesday, December 23, 2003
PARIS For fashion, 2003 was the year of the icon, and especially the departure of emblematic figures - from the loss of the elegant American C.Z. Guest to the quiet retirement of Calvin Klein.
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So it is not surprising that the fashion books destined for a coffee table near your Christmas tree are visual records of the perennially stylish. They offer a panoply of images that are sometimes nostalgic but often just an affirmation of enduring style. After so much focus on designers in the 20th century and the deification of celebrity over the past decade, people tend to be at the heart of current fashion publications.
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It was a stroke of genius for John Loring, author of "Tiffany in Fashion" (Harold N. Abrams), to ask his friend and mentor Eleanor Lambert to write an essay to introduce the book. Through her often-lampooned but historically fascinating best-dressed list, Lambert was the keeper of the flame of elegance in a punk-and-grunge world. Her death this year at age 100 turned a page in fashion history.
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As she says in her preface, the art of fashion photography was born only three years after Chanel's "little black dress." She explains how the photographer Edward Steichen persuaded Tiffany's "to lend assorted armloads of diamond, ruby, emerald and sapphire bracelets" for photo spreads in Vogue in 1933.
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Loring, the design director of Tiffany's, subtitled his book "A Study of American Fashion and Fashion Photography, 1933-2003," and those 70 years are brought vividly to life in his excellent choice of images. Inevitably, the graphic, black-and-white photographs by Horst P. Horst or Steichen - precise poems in light and shadow - create the strongest pictures, often reeking of Hollywood and the silver screen universe. In fact, these early pictures are a roll call of iconic names in the photographic world.
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But an essay by the American designer James Galanos brings fashion into perspective. He points out that American photography was strongly influenced by Hollywood, not least Josef von Sternberg's images of Marlene Dietrich.
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The vision of Guest, in white beach shorts in front of an azure pool and a pillared temple by the sea, makes the cover of "Slim Aarons: Once Upon a Time" (Harry N. Abrams), a selection of images from society paradise by the American photographer who with his camera invented "the beautiful people."
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With hindsight, we may not find so palatable what Aarons himself called, in an earlier 1974 book, "an intimate portrait of the good life." There is something smug and self-satisfied about many of his sitters - a French duchess in her tapestried château in the 1950's, or a tiny heiress seated on a throne of a chair in front of the family's Palm Beach mansion (1968). Yet these photographs have become historic, especially those of English lordlings in the dying throes of aristocratic power before the 1960's Swinging London revolution.
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Some pictures are pure nostalgia - Joan Collins in 1955 lying on her sugar-pink bed with matching pink poodle and the happy-family picture of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and their son, Stephen, in front of a tinseled tree on Christmas Eve 1951. But Aarons's great strength was to capture the elite at play, just as jet set society was taking off. From the image of a young Senator Jack Kennedy looking up to the gallery above a ballroom to the open-air images of upper-crust golfers, the photographer captured a universe of privilege. Famous names caught on the move included Katharine Hepburn in her open-top car in Jamaica and other high-society folk enjoying their fancy swimming pools in vacation playgrounds across the world.
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The book becomes a fashion history lesson, as in the picture of a group of Palm Beach women in colorful 1960's dresses. The pink-panther outfit of a German princess captured outside her châlet in 1985 epitomizes, for Aarons, why he "never worked with models. She was at her own home, wearing her own clothes … she was just being herself."
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The model and actress Carla Bruni pays a pretty compliment to Gilles Bensimon in his book "Photography: No Particular Order" (Filipacchi). "Where most photographers have sittings and doggedly attempt to produce art," she writes, "Gilles's candid, honed eye is content to seize the moment, the 'virgin, lively and beautiful today' as Mallarmé put it - and the azure sky."
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As publication director and photographer in chief for Elle magazine, Bensimon has spent 30 years bringing out the beauty in women. Many of them became famous, as Elle (the Body) Macpherson, whom Bensimon discovered and then married. The ebony beauty of Alek Wek glows against a wooden backdrop. Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington are seen in their salad days, two high-school kids with fresh faces and a childish innocence.
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But Bensimon is also a fine portraitist of the male, from the lively images of his good friend Azzedine Alaïa to a spirited Calvin Klein and a moody vision of Alexander McQueen. Since almost every image is to camera, Bensimon appears to capture his subjects in the camera's eye.
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Nostalgia for a bygone era of luxurious gifts is the message from "La Beauté en Voyage" (Éditions Cercle d'Art). Although the brief texts are in French, this is a succulent book for those fascinated with the artifacts of travel. We are talking Hermès, and the meticulous elegance of a 1930 leather case of men's toiletries is far indeed from the plastic washbag. Each object in these so-called nécessaires turn necessity into beauty: tortoiseshell-back hairbrushes, silver-topped flasks and a bone toothbrush.
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The quality of the photography makes still lifes of these objects designed for people on the move - in the grandest style. From the Hermès collection is included Bogart's canvas and calfskin travel bag that looks as if it has been many times to Casablanca and back; a 17th-century shaving kit from Portugal (its carrying box set with mother-of-pearl in silver) makes even the shaving brush (not to mention the disposable plastic razor) look like ugly replacements in a dull modern world.
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International Herald Tribune
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