"[Book] examines the relationship between high fashion and the evolving ideals of beauty through the careers and personifications of iconic models who posed in the salons, walked the runways, and exploded onto the pages of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and even Life and Time. High-profile models enlivened the designs of the world's most celebrated couturiers and, on occasion, even inspired them." --Book jacket.
An investigation of different uses for the architectural model through history—as sign, souvenir, funerary object, didactic tool, medium for design, and architect's muse. For more than five hundred years, architects have employed three-dimensional models as tools to test, refine, and illustrate their ideas. But, as Matthew Mindrup shows, the uses of physical architectural models extend beyond mere representation. An architectural model can also simulate, instruct, inspire, and generate architectural designs. It can be, among other things, sign, souvenir, toy, funerary object, didactic tool, medium, or muse. In this book, Mindrup surveys the history of architectural models by investigating their uses, both theoretical and practical. Tracing the architectural model's development from antiquity to the present, Mindrup also offers an interpretive framework for understanding each of its applications in the context of time and place. He first examines models meant to portray extant, fantastic, or proposed structures, describing their use in ancient funerary or dedicatory practices, in which models are endowed with magical power; as a medium for architectural reverie and inspiration; and as prototypes for twentieth-century experimental designs. Mindrup then considers models that exemplify certain architectural uses, exploring the influence of Leon Battista Alberti's dictum that models be simple, lest they distract from the architect's ideas; analyzing the model as a generative tool; and investigating allegorical, analogical, and anagogical interpretations of models. Mindrup's histories show how the model can be a surrogate for the architectural structure itself, or for the experience of its formal, tactile, and sensory complexity; and beyond that, that the manipulation, play, experimentation, and dreaming enabled by models allow us to imagine architecture in new ways.
Meet the unexpected, overlooked and forgotten models of art history. Who was Picasso's 'Weeping Woman'? Why was Grace Jones covered in graffiti? How did Francis Bacon meet the burglar who became his muse? The perception of the muse is that of a passive, powerless model, at the mercy of an influential and older artist. But is this trope a romanticised myth? Far from posing silently, muses have brought emotional support, intellectual energy, career-changing creativity and practical help to artists. Muse tells the true stories of the incredible muses who have inspired art history's masterpieces. From Leonardo da Vinci's studio to the covers of Vogue, art historian, critic and writer Ruth Millington uncovers the remarkable role of muses in some of art history's most well-known and significant works. Delving into the real-life relationships that models have held with the artists who immortalised them, it will expose the influential and active part they have played and deconstruct reductive stereotypes, reframing the muse as a momentous and empowered agent of art history.
A gorgeously illustrated look at the profound influence that classical ballet and the ballerina have had on high fashion Ballerina: Fashion's Modern Muse is a revelatory, irresistible treat for dance aficionados and fashionistas alike. Couturiers such as Balmain, Balenciaga, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Charles James, Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent designed ballet-inspired dresses and gowns, many featuring the boned bodices and voluminous tulle skirts of classical tutus. And ready-to-wear designers such as Claire McCardell found inspiration in ballet leotards and other practice clothing, creating knitted separates, bathing suits, and wrap dresses. Written by fashion and ballet experts, the book is illustrated with archival photography by such masters as Richard Avedon, Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, Man Ray, and Cecil Beaton, along with newly commissioned photography of contemporary ballerinas wearing ballet-influenced couture.
New York in the sixties and seventies was glamorous and gritty at the same time, a place where people like Warhol, Avedon, and Halston as well their muses came to pursue their wildest ambitions, and when the well began to run dry they darted off to Paris. Though born on the very fringes of this world, Patricia Cleveland, through a combination of luck, incandescent beauty, and enviable style, soon found herself in the centre of all that was creative, bohemian, and elegant. A "walking girl," a runway fashion model whose inimitable style still turns heads on the runways of New York, Paris, Milan, and Tokyo, Cleveland was in high demand. Ranging from the streets of New York to the jet-set beaches of Mexico, from the designer retailers of Paris to the offices of Diana Vreeland, here is Cleveland's larger-than-life story. One minute she's in a Harlem tenement making her own clothes and dreaming of something bigger, the next she's about to walk Halston's show alongside fellow model Anjelica Huston. One minute she's partying with Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson, the next she's sharing the dance floor with Warhol. One moment she's idolizing the silver screen sensation Warren Beatty, years later, she's deciding whether to resist his considerable amorous charms. In New York, she struggles to secure her first cover of a major magazine. In Paris, she's the toast of the town. A page-turning memoir of a life well lived, Walking with the Muses is a book you won't soon forget.
Illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings from nearly two centuries of fashion, this irresistible volume is a history of the ongoing love affair between designers and their muses. Lavishly illustrated and thematically arranged, Fashion Muse looks at the many iterations a muse can take: Greek goddess, fairy-tale princess, wife, lover, supermodel, celebrity, and artist. A prominent art historian with a profound knowledge of the culture of fashion, Debra N. Mancoff delves far and wide to present pairings both familiar and surprising, including the first couturier Charles Frederick Worth and his wife; Elsa Schiaparelli and the Surrealists; Yves Saint Laurent and the painter Mondrian; Oleg Cassini and Jacqueline Kennedy; and Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy. She reveals numerous designers whose muse was their own image, from Coco Chanel to Diane von Furstenberg to the Olsen twins. And she examines the influence of figures from the worlds of art, celebrity, and pop culture. Entertaining, inspiring, and surprising, this enthralling exploration places the muse where he or she belongs: at the highest peaks of the creative process. ILLUSTRATION: 250 illustrations 100 in colour
A life of glamour and tragedy, set against the watershed cultural and political movements of twentieth-century Europe. "Toto" Koopman (1908–1991) is a new addition to the set of iconoclastic women whose biographies intrigue and inspire modern-day readers. Like her contemporaries Lee Miller or Vita Sackville-West, Toto lived with an independent spirit more typical of the men of her generation, moving in the worlds of fashion, society, art, and politics with an insouciant ease that would stir both admiration and envy even today. Sphinxlike and tantalizing, Toto conducted her life as a game, driven by audacity and style. Jean-Noël Liaut chases his enigmatic subject through the many roles and lives she inhabited, both happy and tragic. Though her beauty, charisma, and taste for the extraordinary made her an exuberant fixture of Paris fashion and café society, her intelligence and steely sense of self drove her toward bigger things, culminating in espionage during WWII, for which she was imprisoned by the Nazis in Ravensbruck. After the horrors of the camp, she found solace in Erica Brausen, the German art dealer who launched the career of Francis Bacon, and the two women lived out their lives together surrounded by cultural luminaries like Edmonde Charles-Roux and Luchino Visconti. But even in her later decades, Toto remained impossible for anyone to possess. The Many Lives of Miss K explores the allure of a freethinking and courageous woman who, fiercely protective of her independence, was sought after by so many but ultimately known by very few.
The Wig, The Bitch & The Meltdown is a satirical look behind the scenes of the fictional reality model competition show Model Muse, and global phenomenon. Seen through the eyes of our moral compass narrator, Pablo Michaels-the heart of the production in the helter-skelter world of Model Muse-we see behind-the-scenes and backstage shenanigans of the fashion/reality TV world. As the "The Fixer,” Pablo is the man everyone turns to in a crisis. Struggling to hold the fledgling production together, he juggles his duties to his “BFF,” the ruthless and vulnerable antihero Keisha Kash, his Supermodel boss and to his soul.
This volume explores Poiret's radical modernity. Essays by renowned scholars describe the historical context of his work; its relation to the dominant artistic discourses of the early 20th century; his muse, Denise Poiret, and her influence on his work; and his role in the paradigmatic shift to a new ideal of feminine beauty.
Audrey Munson, a fine art model, who "was once called 'The most perfect, most versatile, most famous of American models'" spent many years in a psychiatric facility, from the age of 39 until she died at the age of 105.--Jacket.
