Fashion week, err, month is currently on its second half with the shows finishing in New York and London. Almost immediately Milan follows. Then culminating in Paris. While you may only be seeing the collections from your web browser, why not enhance the experience by adding these newly released fashion tomes to your library.
Before magazine circulation numbers started to decline resulting in the slashing of fashion editorial budgets, photoshoots to highlight the new fashions used to be lavish affairs. Some would take weeks to produce with a battalion of crew and trunks of clothes shipped to far-flung destinations to create what would become iconic visual memories. Vogue has contributed to many of these images and in this latest book, we get to see those pictures, which not only trace the evolution of fashion, but serve as a tourism commentary. There in the early years showed the advent of air travel, making it possible for editors to travel to exotic locales like Morocco, India and Turkey. There is Linda Evangelista doing tai chi in China just as the country was opening up to the rest of the world. See Christy Turlington show off a ruby red coat outside the Winter Palace before the USSR’s dissolution. And of course there’s Veruschka wearing a fur coat with a sumo wrestler in a snow covered Japanese landscape (A fashion sitting that would reportedly go down in the magazine’s history as the most expensive). Call this fashion escapism at its most fabulous.
