Stylist: The Interpreters of Fashion
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. --PopPhoto.com December 2007 - David SchonauerStylists, as a lavish new book called "Stylist: The Interpreters of Fashion" (Rizzoli) makes clear, are the handsomely paid but largely unheralded behind-the-curtain personnel. Stylists do not merely push but sometimes also find the buttons, cast the models, choose the colors, hire the hair-and-makeup divas, build the outfits, layer upon layer, or strip them down. More crucially, perhaps, they serve as spirit-familiars to designers when they tune into the cultural ether, awaiting an inspiring rap on the table, or at any rate news of a book or movie or band that will render service as the next season's muse. --The New York Times September 9, 2007