Cecil Beaton Book Covers

I found these while combing through the internet for an out-of-print book. If you're looking for something that's that bit to hard to find, ABE Books is the place to go. On their homepage was a feature on the books and illustrations of Cecil Beaton.

If you're like me and know close to nothing about Beaton, then this post by The Selvedge Yard is an excellent place to start.

I just love these covers. Now I just need a spare two and a half thousand dollars to buy a clean copy of Cecil Beaton's New York and see what's inside the beautiful watercolour dustjacket.






All pictures from ABE Books (this isn't a sponsored post, by the way)

P.S How great a title is 'My Bolivian Aunt'?
P.P.S You'd be surprised where you'd find copies of these books.  Check your local library - you might be surprised.

Related #3: Do it like a Dude

Yesterday's post dealt with women who dress like men, or don't (Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, I'm a-looking at you) to assert their power.

But where there are Queens, there are Kings...

And where there is power, there is also subservience...

So, to veer insanely from one end of a spectrum to another, here are some pictures of women who dress like men to show their love for a man.  Like a king.  The King, in fact. 

These photos were taken by Grey Villet in 1957 for TIME Magazine.  They show a day in the life of Susan Hull, who has decided to take the plunge and get an Elvis-style pompadour, joining the thousand strong ranks of girls and women in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who love Elvis so much that they want to look like him. 

If you want to put it in a modern context, imagine thousands of femme Justin Beiber fans, all with the same, super feathery, peekaboo, come-hither (but not too close, I'm a good Christian) hair*.  Just for the love of the Biebs.  Have you shuddered?  Has an icy cold finger of revulsion crawled down your back?  Good, let's look at the pictures.

All captions from the original article (because they're hilarious)



Susan Hull looks apprehensive as beautician prepare to form lock into Presley sidecurl




IN NEW GLORY: Nancy Hull happily shows off Presley cut.  Beautician who created style stresses convenience for girls who like swimming without caps.




CONFRONTING FATHER outside the beauty shop.  Susan Hull (left) and her sister Nancy, 20, display haircuts.  He was noncommital about new style.




COMFORTING MOTHER, Susan promises not to have her brown hair dyed black.  After showing cut to family, she gave ponytail to 4-year old brother.




CONVINCING SWEETHEART, Susan explains her coiffure to her beau Lew Potter in Motorcycle shop.  At first he threatened to break their next date.




CLIPPED GALLERY sits for a group portrait in Didgson's beauty shop.  The sideburns are standard but the number of stray locks on foreheads is optional


Read the original article here.

*Lesbians who look like Justin Beiber notwithstanding.  The Lesbiebers are awesome.

Théâtre de la Mode

I saw these on How To Be A Retronaut and they were too good not to share.

The Théâtre de la Mode was brought about at the liberation of Paris in 1944. Parisian fashion houses were only just starting to re-open their doors after several years of limited or non-production.

The purported story is that there wasn't enough fabric to make full-scale dresses, so two feet tall wire models were kitted out with the finest in couture and displayed, first in Paris, then around Europe and North America until their acquisition by the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington.

More than likely, it was a more cost-effective way to remind the world that Paris was still the epicentre of fashion, despite living through occupation, starvation, oppression and war. While fabric was rationed and still at a premium (especially silk, which was used for parachutes), Parisian women defied the Germans in any way they could, usually by flouting stringent material rationing and wearing dresses and skirts made with yards and yards of whatever they could get their hands on.

Breaking the law and looking chic at the same time - those Parisian women knew their stuff.

The first five photographs were taken by David Seidner in 1990. He deliberately set the dolls in a recognisably French, warlike background. At first, I thought that these photos were taken in the 1940's. In actuality, all 237 (!) dolls were put on display in 1944 as part of a number of scenarios designed by artists like Jean Cocteau, amongst others.

David Seidner, Lucien Lelong, 1990

David Seidner, Balenciaga, 1990

David Seidner, Marcel Dhorme, 1990

David Seidner, Madame Gres, 1990

David Seidner, Robert Piguet, Raphaël, Pierre Balmain, 1990

Jean Cocteau's 1944 setting, Ma Femme  est une Sorcière (source)

For more info, read Theatre de la Mode

Backtrack

I KNOW I said last week that some things were better in black and white, but sometimes you need a colour photograph to really get the full impact of the message.  In this case - early photography and national dress.

How many of you have seen black and white pictures of your great-grandparents?  Don't you wish you could see what their favourite colours were?

Ireland

Sometimes you don't appreciate how powerful red is until it smacks you in the face.  Metaphorically.

This picture was taken in the rural west of Ireland in 1913 and was probably one of the first colour photographs ever taken in Ireland.  It is part of the Albert Kahn Archive, just one of over 72,000 colour photographs commissioned in the first three decades of the 20th century in an effort to document all aspects of society and culture.  If you don't know much about Kahn and would like to know more, there was a BBC documentary tv series called The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, which is well worth tracking down and watching.  There is also a book of the same name.

Here are some more photographs.

West of Ireland

China

Japan

Amazing still life

Macedonia

African colonial soldiers circa WW1

Some things are better in black and white...

...like film noirs, for example.  Imagine The Big Sleep in Technicolour. Oh no no no.

With pattern, black and white can sometimes have a higher visual impact than the full prismatic experience.  Black and white are two absolute opposites.  One could not be more different than the other.  It's the ultimate contrast.

Even better than black and white patterns are black and white patterns that are shot in black and white.  Excuse me if I'm getting too Brechtian here.  Case in point - these pictures, taken by Nina Leen for the March 1958 issue of Life.











Source: Life Photo Archive



This photo is unrelated, but I love the monochromatic goodness the picture adds.  I wonder what colour Barbara Streisland and Marlene Dietrich's suits were in real life?

Kiki de Montparnasse

The past week I've been sick in bed, which is not fun.  The upside was that I finally had the time to read the books that I had stockpiled for such an occasion (and watch the boyfriend scurry about getting me hot lemony drinks).

A new addition to the pile, which arrived on my doorstep this week, was the graphic biography of Kiki de Montparnasse, the model, muse, artist, actress, drug addict, cabaret singer, prototypical scenester and general inspiration to large-nosed women everywhere.  I'm starting to love the graphic biography genre, because it appeals to both the comic book nerd and the history nerd that hold an uneasy truce inside my brain.

This book, by Catel and Bousquet, is a joy to read.  For the first time in years, the minute I finished the book, I went back to the first page and started to read it again.  Here she is as she appeared in the book.

Illustration by Catel for Self-Made Hero

 And here's some real-life Kiki.

Kiki in Man Ray's 'Emak Bakia' (source)

 Kiki was Man Ray's long-standing muse until the arrival of Lee Miller.


Violon d'Ingres by Man Ray

Nu Couche a la Toile de Jouy by Tsuguharu Foujita

Kiki de Montparnasse by Pablo Gargulo

Kiki with Accordionist by Brassai

“All I need is an onion, a bit of bread, and a bottle of red; and I will always find somebody to offer me that.” - Alice Prin (Kiki de Montparnasse)

Who was the real Holly Golightly?

Any fashion blogger worth his or her sodium intake has heard about, if not already read Truman Capote's novella, Breakfast at Tiffany's.  The book's heroine, Holly Golightly, is a gadabout girl-about-town with a predisposition for rich men and total character reinvention.  She's flighty and flirty.  She's a phony - but she's a real phony.

Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in the 1961 film

I've got a real grá (that's Irish for love, international readers) for Truman Capote.  I wrote many essays about him while studying English in university.  He was an enfant terrible, an enigma with a cryptic tongue, an interviewer with an uncanny knack to get details out of any source and reduce macho men like Muhammad Ali to tears.  When it came to being interviewed, Capote was undeniably economical with the truth.

Playboy:  Shortly after publication of Breakfast at Tiffany's, a writer named Bonnie Golightly sued you for $800,000, on the grounds that she was the real-life inspiration for your fictional heroine.  At least four other New York girls about town countered with the claim that they were the prototype of Holly.  Was the characterisation of Holly based on a real person?
Capote:  Yes, but not on any of the people you refer to.  The real Holly Golightly was a girl exactly like the girl in Breakfast at Tiffany's, with the single exception that in the books she comes from Texas, whereas the real Holly was a German refugee who arrived in New York at the beginning of the War, when she was 17 years old.  Very few people were aware of this, however, because she spoke English without any trace of an accent.  She had an apartment in the brownstone where I lived and we became great friends.  Everything I wrote about her is literally true - not about her friendship with a gangster called Sally Tomato and all that, but everything about her personality and approach to life, even the most preposterous parts of the book.
                 - From a 1968 interview with Playboy, click to read


Sorry Truman, I call bullshit on your answer...

People like to search for the 'real' Holly Golightly', just as they want to know who the 'real' Sherlock Holmes is, or the 'real' Sal Paradise.  In fiction, there is no 'real' anything, only composites and impressions drawn and interpreted through that writer's vision.  Even if the German did exist (which, due to Capote's predisposition for embellishment, I seriously doubt), she's not Holly Golightly.  Holly is her and more of the many women in Capote's coterie of female friends, all exceptional, all stylish, all Holly, all the time.  Here's a few of Capote's possible influences.

Maeve Brennan

Maeve Brennan at home - Photo by Karl Blissinger

Maeve Brennan moved from Ireland to the USA when she was seventeen.  Both Brennan and Capote worked at Harper's Bazaar, which is probably where they met.  They also worked at The New Yorker (where Brennan wrote a column called The Long-Winded Lady) at the same time.  She was regarded as eccentric, but this soon turned into obsessive behaviour and she became an alcoholic.  Towards the end of her life, she was committed to a hospital, where she died in 1993.

Just like Holly - Wore trademark black dresses and dark glasses. Spent far beyond her means.  Erratic behaviour.  Often had a case of the Mean Reds.
Not so Golightly - Brennan had a real, taxable job and a creative outlet, writing short stories and a novel.

Read more:  The Long-Winded Lady , by Maeve Brennan and Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy - An Irish Writer in New York by Angela Bourke

Doris Lilly

Lilly in later years

After Capote published Other Voices, Other Rooms, he became very good friends with Doris Lilly, a blonde starlet who famously dated Gene Kelly and Ronald Reagan and with whom he'd eat dinner and talk for hours.  Lilly said "Truman used to come over all the time and watch me put make-up on before I went out..., there's a lot of me in Holly Golightly".  Lilly died in 1991 with no money.  Her mountain of costume jewellery, given to her by her many admirers over the years, had to be sold off to cover funeral costs.

Just like Holly - Had a thwarted Hollywood career, was a gal-about-town, had a famously pragmatic attitude towards men (Lilly wrote How to Marry a Millionaire, amongst other suggestively titled works and said "Millionaires are marrying their secretaries because they're so busy making money that they haven't time to see other girls"), never actually got to marry a millionaire.
Not so Golightly - Can you see Holly Golightly as a leggy blonde?

Read More - How to Make Love in Five Languages by Doris Lilly

Suzy Parker and Dorian Leigh

Parker (left) and Leigh at a shoot for LIFE Magazine

Parker and Leigh were two sisters who were both models.  Leigh was photographed by Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Cecil Beaton, amongst others. Parker, 15 years younger than Leigh, became Avedon's muse and the face of Chanel during the 50's and 60's.

Just like Holly - Terminal cat owners, use of the fire escape as means of exit and entry, beguiling and hilarious.
Not so Golightly - Both sisters were supposed homebodies and, unlike the champagne and cigarettes Golightly, both were excellent cooks - Leigh even had cordon Bleu training.

Read More - Avedon Fashion 1944 - 2000, by Richard Avedon

There are more women who could be Golightly.  If I was to list them all I'd be writing this post for a month.  But, that's what's so great about Holly Golightly.  She's such a singular character, but she could be anyone.  That's why so many women (myself included) identify with her.

John Galliano - or is it?

What fashion blogette worth her salt doesn't have Fashion Gone Rogue on her reader?  Everyone has their reason for clicking; their favourite models, labels, stylists and photographers are all there.  I'm not the biggest fan of editorials, but I do love their Morning Beauty feature - chock full of notable picks that you might not have seen the first time around.

Here's part of a shoot from Vogue Paris' Dec/Jan '06/'07 issue - Dans la Peau de John Galliano, photographed by Peter Lindbergh, styled by new Vogue Paris editrix Emmanuelle Alt and starring Sasha Pivovarova as, er, John Galliano.  The resemblance is uncanny.

I want to be a Teddy Girl

Before Ken Russell was shocking us with his films and I was astounding the world with my poor command of Photobucket (hence the higgledy-piggledy pictures), he was a photographer.  You could probably say that he was one of the first street style photographers.  His pictures were brought to my attention in a guest post by new Licentiate fave Vagabond Language.  His documenting of the working-class Teddy Boys and Girls in the 50's are a source of endless inspiration.

Throw in a viewing of Nowhere Boy, where the young John Lennon mixes with all kinds of Teds and Julies, and an obsession is born.