By Diana Vreeland with Christopher Hemphill, 1980
The front cover of Allure, first published by Doubleday & Company in 1980. Underneath the book’s dust jacket, the book boasts red linen cloth boards embossed with Diana Vreeland’s initials. The book is 11” x 15” and 208 pages.
“A good photograph was never what I was looking for. I like to have a point.” –Diana Vreeland
Allure is the book that explains why Diana Vreeland (1903-1989) was a style-icon for most of the twentieth century. While working as a fashion editor for Harper’s Bazaar, where she started in 1936, and then as Editor-in-Chief of Vogue from 1963-1971 Vreeland set about reinventing the job of publishing fashion photography. Before her, as the legendary taste-maker explained, “the fashion editor was a society lady putting hats on other society ladies.”
In other words, before Vreeland, fashion layouts were more like catalogue pages where conventional beauties wore the latest styles. But Vreeland, an original (to whom designers offered their clothing and accessories in exchange for only her visibility in them) knew elegance has nothing to do with being well dressed. As she stated, elegance is innate and “Elegance is refusal.”
So instead of filling her magazines’ pages with what she described as “démodé so-called society,” Vreeland made her mark by demonstrating the allure of ravishing personalities and the indescribable essence of what makes someone chic. For Vreeland allure was a quality that exists and holds us… “Whether it’s a gaze or a glance in the street or a face in a crowd or someone sitting opposite you at lunch…,” she explained. “Like a perfume or…a memory…it pervades…you are held.”
In Vreeland’s hands, the fashion layout became all about popularizing an attitude. She created a two-page spread of a nude female lying face down in the sand, her behind covered by a large black straw hat. Its caption read, “Spend the summer under a big black sailor.” As the photographer Richard Avedon explains it, Vreeland’s approach to fashion started, “a totally new profession.”
To create captivating fashion images, the most spectacular of which are featured in Allure, Vreeland hired the century’s greatest photographers–among them Horst, Adolf de Meyer, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Edward Steichen. Their pictures of such celebrated personalities as Greta Garbo, Rudolf Nureyev, Marilyn Monroe, Maria Callas, the Duchess of Windsor, and Josephine Baker define Vreeland’s concept of the glamorous and elusive quality of allure and reveal how one woman revolutionized fashion.
For more on Vreeland, see “The Devine Mrs V” by Eleanor Dwight, published October 28, 2002 in New York Magazine
For an interview with Vreeland from 1980 go here
Diana Vreeland
Spread from Allure
Paris by Night
By Brassaï, with an introduction by Paul Morand, 1933
Cover of the first edition of Paris by Night, published in 1933 by Art et Metiers Graphiques. The book is 250 x 190 mm and spiral-bound. Copies of the first edition sell for approximately $5000 dollars.
Before the publication of Paris by Night no one had heard of the concept of night photography. That is until Gyula Halász (1899-1984), a child of Hungarian Transylvania, who went by the pseudonym “Brassaï,” (meaning “from Brassó,” after the city of his birth,) set out at dusk with his camera.
In the early 1920s, Brassaï, who studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, lived and worked as a journalist in Paris. Captivated by the beauty of his adopted city’s streets and gardens in rain and mist, and in particular after sunset, he started making photographs of its nearly emptied avenues. Influenced by the photographers Eugène Atget and fellow Hungarian André Kertész, Brassaï was inspired to become a photographer because he had a desire “to translate all things that enchanted me in the nocturnal Paris I was experiencing,” as he later wrote.
But as Paul Morand explains in his introduction to Paris by Night, for Brassai, “La nuit n’est pas le négatif du jour.” In other words, the night is not the negative of the day, a viewpoint that makes the photographer’s first book so extraordinary. For Brassaï, the Parisian night revealed a very different world: one of outsiders existing on the exterior of convention. Paris by Night begins and ends with images of the cobble stones that pave the boulevards and alleys of France’s capital and takes the reader through a provocative array of characters, including gangsters, courtesans, and exotic entertainers. To record his scenes Brassaï visited his sitters on several occasions until his face became familiar to them. To prove to those who disbelieved that photography in the dark was possible, he carried a number of prints in his pocket.
Paris by Night is also remarkable for the ethereal quality that Brassaï gave his photographs. Working on a folding 6 × 9 cm Voigtländer Bergheil plate camera, Brassaï experimented with extended-time exposures and unusual vantage points to create dream-like scenes of his city’s geography and monuments, including the Seine River and views from Notre Dame Cathedral. Upon its publication, Paris by Night created a sensation because of its beauty and risqué content. Yet the book was much admired and when the writer Henry Miller called Brassaï “the eye of Paris,” the description stuck. Brassaï remains the most celebrated photographer of France’s capital, while no artist has made more iconic images of the city than those found in Paris by Night.
Brassaï scoured the avenues and alleys of Paris, capturing its geography and its inhabitants in his moody, gritty photographs.