'Tis the season for coffee-table books, all gussied up in their cloth bindings and marbled endpapers and ribbons. A good chunk are about fashion houses and fashion icons, many serving as brand extensions of today's top luxury names. If I had a nickel for every vapid, tree-killing "behind-the-scenes" style tome, oh, the bookshelves I could build! These do little else but burnish existing myth and legend – I'm looking at you, Van Cleef & Arpels, which is published by Assouline, the granddaddy of lavish doorstoppers.
As cravenly promotional as that book may be, however, it isn't the greatest Ouroboros of the season. That honour goes to Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute: Parties, Exhibitions, People, for which the magazine's peripatetic Hamish Bowles wrote the copy, another staffer on Vogue's payroll did the editing and their boss (Anna Wintour, natch) penned the intro. It is not a history of the storied Costume Institute, but, as the title suggests, a rehash of all the swish, celebrity-studded CI galas held since 2001, when Vogue began its promotion of the annual May extravaganza in earnest.
Others are a little better. Halston & Warhol: Silver and Suede is a compendium of a spring exhibition put on by the Andy Warhol Museum to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Lesley Frowick, one of Halston's six nieces, helped organize the show. She is also the author of the sentimental new Halston: Inventing American Fashion, for which she had access to the designer's partner-in-crime, Liza Minnelli, who provides the foreword. It isn't purely decorative, presenting a more personal, family-oriented side to Halston, although without much new information or appraisal.
The pictorial-driven memoir Elsa Schiaparelli's Private Album, meanwhile, is by the designer's granddaughter, Marisa Berenson. It's a good read, as salty and insightful as Berenson herself. Monsieur Dior: Once Upon a Time, by Parisian writer Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni, is also relevant, balancing access to the Dior archives with more revealing, often indiscreetly acidic interviews with the vendeuses, society clients and models of the designer's heyday.
By contrast, To Audrey With Love, from Imagine Editions, an inconvenient French micropublisher, is a puzzling illustrated book in which Hubert de Givenchy, 87, attempts to repackage himself by annotating 150 new fashion sketches drawn solely for the purposes of this volume, which is ostensibly dedicated to his late friend and muse, the actress Audrey Hepburn (who died, by the way, in 1993).
Clearly, the temptation to cash in on the legacy or cachet of a style icon – whether a designer or institution's own or by association – can be great (Manolo Blahnik, apparently, is working on a memoir, to be published by Rizzoli next year). But doing so can also be a mixed blessing for a brand. Look at the recent biopic Yves Saint Laurent, which was backed by the foundation of Saint Laurent's long-time partner, Pierre Bergé – and dismissed by many critics as hagiography. And just as Chanel was staging its lavish Métiers d'Art show in Austria last week, a new investigation detailing founder Coco's collaboration with the Nazis during the Second World War was aired on French TV. The company promptly responded that more than 70 biographies of Chanel have been produced to date, offering varying, shaded versions of her life. That Nazi thing, however, refuses to go away.
On second thought, there may be little downside for brands to blatantly promotional tomes, which at least compete with if not crowd out the critical stuff. Just be aware of who is selling what and why when you tuck those volumes under the tree this year.
Nathalie Atkinson