It's hard to imagine a more successful combination of author and subject. The history of fashion and its protagonists in the first half of the twentieth century, written and illustrated by famed photographer and designer Cecil Beaton, is a unique and personal work whose appeal has endured over time. "Excellence of Beaton as designer, whose designs are one of the charms of this book, is comparable to that of his prose, art that evokes a gesture, a gait, the curve of a neck. Beaton has a sense exquisite taste, fashion, what we call the beauty that has passed, and that has made him one of the princes of English society. In all this is surely the greatest value of this book: it is a quintessential work, and Beaton is the man who symbolizes the quintessence." - CHRISTIAN DIOR
