Amazon.com
"Beyond the smoke and mirrors of the runway lies another part of the fashion world." It is there that Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Lucian Perkins finds the most compelling images: über-waif Kate Moss sipping champagne decked out in an undershirt, jeans, and a bogling network of curled hair extensions. Design maven Isaac Mizrahi fretting over a voluminous skirt. Glamour-pusses Naomi Campbell and Veronica Webb lolling around, waiting for their curlers to set, while the clock ticks at the rate of $250 per hour. Perkins gets up on the runway, too. He turns his camera on his colleagues, who form an impenetrable wall of extra-long lenses and tripods. He looks out into the audience, where he finds the gender-bending RuPaul, Southern belle Dolly Parton, and actress Mira Sorvino parked amid the ubiquitous fashion editors and buyers and socialites. And he follows the impossibly fabulous creatures as they strut their wares down that most glamorous corridor--the runway.
The unusually long and narrow shape of the book is an excellent format for Perkins's atmospheric panoramic shots, and leaves room for quotes by Azzedine Alaia, Coco Chanel, and other fashion fixtures to accompany the smaller images. Readers who don't share original supermodel Iman's fashion ennui--she's quoted as saying she "couldn't get excited about another dress"--should be more than sated by the 100 fantastic photos of frocks, gowns, and shifts in Runway Madness.
The Washington Post Bookworld
Backstage at a fashion show is all about smoke and mirrors: Just look at these photographs of models girding themselves for the runway, pouting at their own reflections, daubing paint on lips, eyes, cheeks, while cigarettes dangle from their limp elegant fingers. Lucian Perkins, a Washington Post staff photographer, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995; in Runway Madness, he focuses not on the clothes but on the people creating and parading them. The primping, the waiting, the nerves, the backstage champagne, the gossip, the girl talk, the quick sashay down and back: That's the fashion world as captured here by Perkins and Robin Givhan, fashion writer for The Washington Post. Quotes from fashion mavens accompany the photos. 'So what's there to do after the thrill is gone' says model Yasmeen Ghauri. 'Maybe I'll go back to school and study economics or something. Oh, I don't know. Tell 'em I want to be an astronaut.'
