Sir Cecil Beaton was an English fashion photographer. As a child, he adored the picture postcards of society ladies that came with the the Sunday newspaper. In the 1920s, he was hired as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue, where he developed a unique style of posing sitters with unusual backgrounds. He was also a diarist, interior designer and Oscar-winning stage and costume designer.
Charles James (18 July 1906 in Sandhurst – September 23, 1978 in New York City) was a fashion designer known as America’s first couturier. He is considered a master of cutting and is known for his highly structured aesthetic.
His father was a British officer and his mother a Chicago ‘patrician’. In 1919 he attended Harrow School, where he met Evelyn Waugh, Francis Rose and, most importantly Cecil Beaton, with whom he formed a longstanding friendship. He was expelled from Harrow for a ‘sexual escapade’.
At the age of nineteen in 1926, Charles James opens his first hat shop in Chicago, using the name of a schoolfriend, ‘Charles Boucherdon’.
In 1928 he left Chicago for Long Island with 70 cents, a Pierce Arrow and a number of hats as his only possessions. He later opened a hat shop above a garage in Murray Hill, New York, beginning his first dress designs.
James showed one of his most successful collections in Paris in 1947. In the 1950s he spent most of his time in New York.
James looked upon his dresses as works of art, as did many of his customers. Year after year he reworked original designs, ignoring the sacrosanct schedule of seasons. The components of the precisely constructed designs were interchangeable so that James had a never-ending fund of ideas on which to draw. He is most famous for his sculpted ball gowns made of lavish fabrics and to exacting tailoring standards, but is also remembered for his capes and coats, often trimmed with fur and embroidery, his spiral zipped dresses, and his white satin quilted jackets.
After the birth of his son, Charles James Jr. in 1956, he also produced a children’s collection.
He designed the interior and several pieces of furniture for the Houston home of John and Dominique de Menil.
After returning to New York City from Paris, Scaasi worked for James for two years. James retired in 1958.
He died alone, of bronchial pneumonia, at the Chelsea Hotel in New York.
If you are a fan of classic movies and pay attention to scenery and costuming, you already know Edith Head. She had THE influence on American style before clothing designers were known. A quick search for her on IMDB will soon have you realizing that her touch was added to most of the films that you know and love. Ladies and gentlemen, Edith Head. Style Icon
BEST KNOWN FOR: Edith Head was one of the most prolific costume designers in 20th century film, winning a record eight Academy Awards.
Edith Head (born October 28, 1897) became chief designer at Paramount Pictures in 1933 and later worked at Universal. Hollywood’s best-known designer, her costumes ranged from the elegantly simple to the elaborately flamboyant. She won a record eight Academy Awards for her work in films such as All About Eve (1950), Roman Holiday (1953), and The Sting (1973).
She became chief designer at Paramount Pictures in 1933 and later worked at Universal. Hollywood’s best-known designer, she was noted for the wide range of her costumes, from the elegantly simple to the elaborately flamboyant. She won a record eight Academy Awards for her work in films such as All About Eve (1950), Roman Holiday (1953), and The Sting (1973).
As part of a series of stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service in February 2003, commemorating the behind-the-camera personnel who make movies, Head was featured on one to honor costume design.
The band They Might Be Giants recorded the song “She Thinks She’s Edith Head,” which was included in the 1999 album Long Tall Weekend and the 2001 album Mink Car. The song is about a girl from the singer’s past, who had changed her persona to be more sophisticated, and compares her new attitude to Head and longtime Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown.
To many viewers of the 2004 Pixar/Disney computer-animated film The Incredibles, the personality and mannerisms of the film’s fictional superhero costume designer Edna Mode suggest a colorful caricature of Edith Head. Edna Mode’s sense of style, round glasses, and assertive no-nonsense character are very likely a direct homage to Head’s legendary accomplishments and personal traits. But the film’s director, Brad Bird, has not yet confirmed or denied this.
Personal Quotes:
“Your dresses should be tight enough to show you’re a woman and loose enough to show you’re a lady.” – Edith Head
“You can have whatever you want if you dress for it.” ― Edith Head
Diana Vreeland was and continues to be the arbiter of style, even after her death 20+ years ago. Do yourself a favor and read “D.V.”: her autobiography/manual of style/name-drop-a-thon. It will seriously change your life. Watch “The Eye Has To Travel,” her documentary. You will start to look at style as something you own, not something you follow and conform to. She will teach you that the sexiest most attractive thing one can have and wear is confidence. Ladies and gentlemen, Diana Vreeland. Style Icon.
NAME: Diane Dalziel Vreeland OCCUPATION: Journalist BIRTH DATE: March 01, 1924 DEATH DATE: August 22, 1989 PLACE OF BIRTH: Paris, France BEST KNOWN FOR: As a fashion journaist, Diana Vreeland was an influential figure in American fashion during the 20th century.
Diana Vreeland began her career atHarper’s Bazaar in 1936. Her column “Why Don’t You…?” was famous for offering outlandish fashion and lifestyle tips for the times. Vreeland later became the magazine’s fashion editor and established herself as one of the country’s leading arbiters of style. In 1962, Vreeland joined the staff of Vogueand continued to be a powerful force in the fashion world.
Fashion journalist. Born Diana Dalziel on March 1, 1924, in Paris, France. Diana Vreeland was an influential figure in American fashion during the twentieth century. The daughter of wealthy parents, she spent her early years in France before moving to New York as a teenager.
Diana Vreeland began her career as a columnist for Harper’s Bazaar in 1936. Her column “Why Don’t You . . . ?” was famous for offering outlandish fashion and lifestyle tips for the times. Few could afford in the Depression follow her advice. Moving up the editorial ladder, Vreeland became the magazine’s fashion editor, a post she held until the early 1960s. At Harper’s Bazaar, she established herself as one of the country’s leading arbiters of style.
In 1962, Diana Vreeland joined the staff of Vogue, another influential fashion magazine, as editor in chief. At Vogue, she continued to be a powerful force in the fashion world, often able to identify the coming trends, such as the popularity of the bikini. Vreeland also worked with many well-known photographers, such as Richard Avedon, in making the magazine.
While she left Vogue in 1971, Diana Vreeland did not leave the fashion world. She worked as a consultant for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, putting together fashion exhibitions. Vreeland died on August 22, 1989. Married to T. Reed Vreeland since 1924, she had two sons, Thomas R., Jr., and Frederick.
Personal Quotes:
“People who eat white bread have no dreams.”
“Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola.”
“Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.”
“I always wear my sweater back-to-front; it is so much more flattering.”
Christy Turlington has taken her luck of the gene pool and used it to make the world a better place. It was never in question that she has been a beautiful person for as long as we can remember and we are learning that her beauty emanates from deep inside her. Ladies and gentlemen, Christy Turlington. Style Icon.
BEST KNOWN FOR: Christy Turlington is one of America’s most successful models. Best known for her work for Maybelline, she has appeared on more than 300 magazine covers.
Christy Turlington Burns[2] (born January 2, 1969) is an American model best known for representing Calvin Klein from 1987 to 2007. She has worked on dozens of modeling contracts with companies including Maybelline Cosmetics and Versace. Turlington starred in her fashion documentary Catwalk and Isaac Mizrahi’s Unzipped. She was added on as the fourth model investor, after Elle Macpherson, Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer of the now defunct Fashion Cafes.
In 2005, she began working with the international humanitarian organization CARE and has since become their Advocate for Maternal Health.[citation needed] She has also been an Ambassador for (RED) since their launch in 2006.[citation needed] Her work on behalf of CARE and (RED) inspired her to pursue a Masters in Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School where as of 2009, she is a student.
In 2008, Turlington began working on a documentary film, No Woman, No Cry, profiling the status of maternal health worldwide. The film, Turlington’s directorial debut, tells the stories of at-risk pregnant women in four parts of the world, including a remote Maasai tribe in Tanzania, a slum of Bangladesh, a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala, and a prenatal clinic in the United States. No Woman, No Cry made its world premiere at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, and the US television broadcast premiere aired on the new Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) on May 7, 2011. The documentary earned Turlington a nomination for the Do Something With Style Award from the VH1 Do Something Awards. Concurrent with the debut of her documentary, Turlington launched ‘Every Mother Counts’, an action and mobilization campaign designed to educate and support maternal, newborn and child health. Turlington is pursuing a master’s degree in public health at Columbia University’sMailman School of Public Health. Christy currently serves on the Harvard Medical School Global Health Council and as an advisor to the Harvard School of Public Health Board of Dean’s Advisors, Mother’s Day Every Day and the White Ribbon Alliance.
Personal Quotes:
“I’d rather go naked than wear fur.” – Christy Turlington
“So much of religion is exegesis. I would rather follow in the footprints of Christ than all of the dogma.” – Christy Turlington
She recently completed her first ING NYC Marathon, running with Team Every Mother Counts to raise awareness for maternal and child health.
I am a sucker for huge glasses, truth be told. You have got to OWN your look, make it yours, and do not hide from it. Become know by it and your “style” becomes stylish and copied. Ladies and gentlemen, Carrie Donovan. Style Icon.
Carrie Donovan (March 22, 1928 – November 12, 2001) was fashion editor for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The New York Times Magazine. Later in her life she became known for her work in Old Navy commercials where she wore her trademark large eyeglasses and black clothing, often declaring the merchandise “Fabulous!”. In almost all of the commercials, she appeared alongside Magic the dog and various other stars from TV and fashion.
When Donovan was just 10 years old, she mailed her own sketches for a design collection to the actress Jane Wyman, who replied with a handwritten letter. She later attended the Parsons School of Design, graduating in 1950. She worked as a journalist for 30 years but always wrote her copy out by hand, because she never got the hang of the typewriter.
“Fashion is entertainment. That’s why these top models are so fascinating to kids. They’re dying to know about Naomi and Christy, or whoever we’ve declared the new one this afternoon.”
One of her best talents was her ability to flit easily between high society and the common masses, both in her personal life and as a style professional. She helped bring Donna Karan and Perry Ellis to fame, and she united Elsa Peretti with Tiffany’s, feeling sure that Peretti would open the doors to a new demographic for the upscale company. Even her work with Old Navy gave new fashion credibility to the casual-wear company. Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland told her: ”My dear, you’ve got the common touch!”
She was portrayed as a parody by Ana Gasteyer on an episode of Saturday Night Live.
Maybe I have not ever explained what criteria I use when assigning people the “Style Icon” and “Not So Secret Obsession” status?
Style Icons are assigned to people I admire, if it is simply beauty or fashion, it is most likely unconventional and risky choices that provoke conversation. They are artists, writers, musicians, politicians, humanitarians, architects, activists, actors, directors, fashion designers, scientists, basically anyone whose life work fascinates me and I admire. They are almost always dead because it is my moderate worry that dead people will be forgotten and keeping an ongoing list of them is my effort to remember them. If, along the way, someone else likes them and discovers someone that fascinates them, even better.
Not So Secret Obsessions are usually things or events. I am obsessed with Hardy Boys books and the 1968 Sears Holiday catalog for their retro goody-goody aesthetic. I am obsessed with political street art: you can be walking down the sidewalk and be visibly reminded that Republicans thing that some rape is OK.
For the month of February (and maybe a bit of a spill-over into March) I will be focusing only on Style Icons. One a day, like a multivitamin, I will be dosing you with people that inspire me. The format is straight-forward: I will write a bit at the top of the post about what it is that inspires me about the person, followed by their details. I will do my best to include links to additional reading at the bottom of the post.
Anna Maria Piaggi (22 March 1931 – 7 August 2012) was an Italian fashion writer and style icon.
Piaggi was born in Milan in 1931. She worked as a translator for an Italian publishing company Mondadori, then wrote for fashion magazines such as the Italian edition of Vogue and, in the 1980s, the avant-garde magazine Vanity. She was known especially for double page spreads in the Italian Vogue, where her artistic flair was given free expression in a montage of images and text, with layout by Luca Stoppini.
Since 1969, she used a bright red manual Olivetti Valentine typewriter for her work. Piaggi had a large clothes collection, including 2,865 dresses and 265 pairs of shoes, according to a 2006 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She dressed in an exuberant, unique and eclectic way, never appearing in the same outfit more than once in public. Such was her influence and knowledge in the fashion world, Manolo Blahnik dubbed her “The world’s last great authority on frocks”.[citation needed]
Her associates in the fashion world included the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld (from the 1970s), who has often sketched her, and Manolo Blahnik, who is the designer of many of her shoes. She was the muse of British milliner Stephen Jones. She was also an admirer of British clothes designer Vivienne Westwood and her hats, made by Prudence Millinery. She lived in New York and visited London and Italy periodically since the 1950s. Piaggi appeared in the documentary Bill Cunningham New York on the New York Times fashion and social photographer Bill Cunningham.
Born in Ohio in 1912, John Rawlings attended the local Wesleyan University, and upon graduation in the early 1930s he relocated to New York, where he became a freelance store window dresser. After buying a Leica to photograph his work and show it to potential clients, Rawlings discovered that he enjoyed taking pictures and eventually started to photograph some of the aristocratic clients themselves, alone or with their dogs. A few of those shots found their way to the desk of Nast, who decided to offer Rawlings a job at the Vogue studios as prop builder, studio hand, and apprentice to the legendary masters Beaton and Horst. The young Midwestener was so dedicated and worked with such unbridled enthusiasm that four months later he not only was promoted to first assistant to the masters but also got his first photo published in the September 15 issue of Vogue. Impressed by his precocious talent and visual style, Nast and Chase rewarded him in 1937 with a job at the British Vogue studio in London, where he would train and work until the early 1940s.
Although his early work for British Vogue showed the strong influence of Hoyningen-Huene and Horst, Rawlings would slowly depart from their style. “Rawlings was certaily th first major Conde Nast photographer to demonstrate a truly American eye… John Rawlings’ photography has a practical, no nonsense feeling…he focused his lens on the vibrant world surrounding him,” writes Charles Dare Scheips Jr., former director of the Conde Nasr Archives, in his introduction to Kohle Yohannan’s book John Rawlings: 30 Years in Vogue. “Rawlings brought a realistic visual style, presenting fashion as a force rather than a decoration.”
During his trainin in England, Rawlings had the opportunity to explore new photographic and lighting techniques without censorship from his masters. He went back to daylight, taking more descriptive and informative shots, incorporating the environment in the shoot, starting to experiment with mirrors, and combining natural and artificial lighting. “Enjoying an amount of autonomy he would never have been granted had he remained an assistant in New York, Rawlings produced such impressive work during his first months in London that, in a break from standing tradition, many of his British editorial pages found their way (with increasing regularity) in the international circulation of both French and American Vogue“, writes Yohannan. Rawling’s London trainin proved to be excellent preparation when he was called back to New York, which in the early 1940s was becoming the center of world culture. His return to Manhattan coincided with a cultural shift in which commercial photography was quickly catching up with art. Rawlings seized the moment to break with the artificial status-based formula of fashion photography inspired by Horst and to achieve a fresher, more American and lifestyle-driven look. ” Once back on native soil as the American rising star,” says Yohannan, “Rawlings began almost instinctively to realign himself with the markedly less-labored glamour of the American ideal of beauty, what Christian Dior had offhandedly termed ‘Le Look sportif’.”
The personal and independent path that Rawlings had created for himself led him to clash with the photographers of the time, who he said underestimated sunlight, did not crop enough, and always got themselves in the picture. Above all he criticized the ones who took themselves too seriously; without naming names, Cecil Beaton was surely on the list because, among his other eccentricities, he worked in the studio in his beret and cape, to proclaim his artistic and aristocratic standing. Like many of his colleagues, Rawlings had a list of favorite models. In the late 1930s and the early 1940s these included Dana Jenney, Helen Bennett, and Betty McLauchlen. Meg Mundy, whom he discovered by chance in a waiting room at the CBS studios, proved to be an all-time favorite, and he helped her greatly when she jumped from singer-model to Broadway actress.
A few months later Rawlings would start a new creative stage at Vogue when he became the first photographer to systematically associate fashion with Hollywood celebrities.
Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba (December 11, 1927 – May 3, 1990), later known as Dorothy Horan, and best known as Dovima, was an American model during the 1950s.
Born in New York City, Dovima was discovered on a sidewalk in New York by an editor at Vogue, and had a photo shoot with Irving Penn the following day. She worked closely with Richard Avedon, whose photograph of her in a floor-length evening gown with circus elephants—”Dovima with the Elephants”—taken at the Cirque d’hiver, Paris, in August 1955, has become an icon. The gown was the first evening dress designed for Christian Dior by his new assistant, Yves Saint-Laurent.
Dovima was reputed to be the highest-paid model of her time. She had a cameo role as an aristocratic-looking, but empty-headed, fashion model with a Jackson Heights whine: Marion in Funny Face (Paramount, 1957).
Dovima gave birth to a daughter named Alison on July 14, 1958, in Manhattan. Alison’s father is Dovima’s second husband, Alan Murray.
She died of liver cancer on May 3, 1990 at the age of 62.
