PopPhoto.com December 2007 - David Schonauer
If your idea of a fashion shoot comes from the shenanigans of America's Next Top Model, then this book will reeducate you. A marvelously conceived and beautifully printed survey of contemporary fashion photography, it looks into the compulsive creativity of the underappreciated fashion stylist. In these pages you will find a glorious lunacy that reality TV cannot hope to re-create. After years of celebrating the art of designers and photographers, it is high time that fashionistas turn their gaze upon the work of the stylist, and here the editors of style.com, the online home of Vogue magazine, pay tribute to 16 of the best in the business, including Polly Mellen, Grace Coddington, and Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele. As Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour writes, the nature of a fashion stylist's talent is ultimately unknowable: "What are these gifts?" she asks. "What makes one picture of a dress humdrum and another legendary?" Brilliant fashion editors transform garments into stories that drive consumers to unconscionable acts of expenditure. Those stories are brought to life by photographers, represented in this volume by the likes of Steven Meisel, Mario Testino, and Bruce Weber.
