Inventive Paris Clothes 1909-1939. A Photographic Essay by Irving Penn

With Text by Diana Vreeland. Photographs by Irving Penn.

The Viking Press. New York. 1977. First edition. Hardback, square small quarto; oatmeal cloth-bound boards, dust jacket. 96 pages. With 70 b&w full-page photographs. English. 270 x 270mm. 0.85kg. 9780670400676. Very good, in very good dust jacket; slight shelf wear, partial fading to front panel, some yellowing to dust jacket, price-clipped; some offsetting to endpapers, no inscriptions.

This striking series of photographs by Irving Penn was inspired by the exhibition The 10s, 20s, 30s at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1973, curated by Diana Vreeland. The clothes in the exhibition were so exquisite in their detail and richness that Penn felt compelled to photograph them and produce a book of his images. A studio was erected for him in The Met and the clothes were placed upon a mannequin. The resulting images bear the hallmark of Penn's finest studio portraits, but here the clothes, rather than the person, are the subject. Vreeland herself provides the commentary on the designers (Poiret, Vionnet, Alix, les Callot, Molyneux, Paquin, Chanel and Schiaparelli) and on the developments in dress during this period.