Height Of Fashion - Softcover

4.36

11 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0967236673 ISBN 13: 9780967236674

Publisher: Greybull Press, 2001

Fashion victims past and present will share a collective shudder when they take a peek at this gloriously campy and unexpectedly touching photo compilation...participants--which included the unfamous as well as Gina Gershon, Sofia Coppola and Dennis Hopper--smugly model such atrocities as ruffled bolero and painfully '80s workout ensembles...yet clearly feel like they've got it going on.
--Entertainment Weekly
It's an anti-fashion book. We love celebrating this time when people feel great about themselves, where they're just oozing confidence.
--Lisa Eisner

The mix is both disturbing and delicious, a quilty pleasure.
--The New York Times

Everyone has one. Their height of fashion. A time in their lives when they felt like they could really knock your eyes out, they were so "on." Maybe it was the perfect accessory or the right shade of blue or maybe it was the genius foresight to combine stripes and plaids. Editors Lisa Eisner and Roman Alonso invited a cross section of the famous and not-so-famous and not-famous-at-all to provide a photo that captured that moment of 'height of fashion." The results range from the hilarious to the sublime, from the ultra chic to the totally un-cool, but always intimate and original. In her introduction New York Times Magazine Style Director Amy Spindler offers not only a look at some of the most incredible fashion moments of the last several decades, but also a peek into the psyche of those who were making fashion fabulous just by being themselves. While focusing on the charm and immediacy of snapshots and vernacular photography, Height of Fashion also includes a sprinkling of contributions from such well known photographers as Jurgen Teller, Helmut Newton, Bruce Weber and Arthur Elgort.

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Review:

Remember the day you knew you looked your very best, and someone grabbed a camera to immortalize your wonderfulness? Height of Fashion is a beguiling, utterly original album of 231 enlarged snapshots of kids, teens, and adults showing off their Easter outfits, their party finery, their funky fashion and designer suits, their shags and Afros and punk dye jobs. Not to mention, when the occasion warrants, their birthday suits.

Sometimes that "height of fashion" feeling derives from proximity to fame (posing with the Beatles, or Ronald Reagan, or Miss Wyoming), but more often it comes from the importance of a particular event--a bar mitzvah or a wedding or the day a beauty salon owner just felt like doing a handstand while roller-skating at the beach in a vintage dress. (Quotes from the subjects of some of the photos evoke snippets of memory--and offer some wry observations about style aspirations.)

Who are all these people? Well, a few are celebrities, many occupy large and small positions in the worlds of fashion, design, and film, and some may be "just folks." But since everyone is identified by name only, fame takes a back seat to sheer nostalgia. Whether the subject is a windblown Faye Dunaway in a black dress and a convertible, on her way to meet Marcello Mastroianni, or a small, beaming woman posing on a Miami sidewalk in the Jackie Kennedy-style suit she made for her 1964 wedding, what matters is that somebody is having a moment of personal glory and that somebody else can't resist taking a picture. Fashion is fickle, but these snapshots evoke the enduring power of dreams and fantasies in our lives. --Cathy Curtis

Review:

...vintage cool in a totally different way. -- New York Magazine, December 2000

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