Book Review: Something to Keep the Coffee Table Company

The World in Vogue: People Parties Places

edited by Hamish Bowles and Alexandra Kotur
Knopf, 400 pp., $75

In the spirit of unwitting perversity common in young girls, my favorite reading material for midnight feasting was always my mother's copies of Vogue magazine. Plowing through Monster Tacos and french fries, I would arrive at the party pages to moon over sophisticated waifs with bold-type names. The exact length of Princess Diana's stride as she hurried toward her host, the tilt of Pat Buckley's head, the arrangements of giant peonies, all were washed down with Big Red, then fervently filed away for future reference.

The World in Vogue: People Parties Places – a retrospective boasting 400 color and black-and-white photos with accompanying text that have appeared in the magazine since the 1960s – is both time travel and history lesson. We've all seen pictures of Truman Capote's Black and White Ball, arguably the most notorious social event of the century, but seeing them here is like being that party's version of Cinderella at its famous midnight buffet.

Vogue has been lauded for pioneering fashion photography as a genre almost since Condé Nast acquired the magazine in 1909. Most of the commonly regarded pantheon of great photographers have shot for the magazine. Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, Alexander Liberman, Horst P. Horst, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton – all owe their legendary status to their body of work in Vogue and then beyond. Their work gathered here, shoulder to shoulder, is a stunning collage. Another longtime hallmark of Vogue coverage is the same upmarket-dish journalism, a cocktail of what was called a "think piece" and juicy, inside-the-bubble reporting, which would eventually make fellow Condé Nast title Vanity Fair the powerhouse monthly it is today. As a result, here we are not simply treated to the large glossies that made Vogue legendary but also to the articles by people such as Joan Juliet Buck on Paloma Picasso and Hamish Bowles on the Venice balls in 1999, as they were originally published.

Large retrospectives of venerable periodicals are commonplace but don't always deliver a true sense of the magazine. This effort, designed by Charles Churchward and groaning with 9½-inch-by-12½-inch images, is an experience that belongs under the tree for someone special this year. One consumer warning, however: If enjoyed late at night, you may experience cravings for fast food.

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