Robin Muir

Inventive, glamorous, gorgeous - since the beginning VOGUE has set the platinum standard for fashion magazines the world over and has become an icon in its own right. VOGUE's covers sum up the superlative visual ideals of the whole magazine. For the first time, this book brings together in one volume nearly a century of covers both illustrated and photographic. Over two hundred stunning images have been selected from an archive of more than fifteen hundred. What sets VOGUE's covers apart is that each is so bold, so beautiful and so emphatically different. They mark the course of history, chart changing fashions and ideas of beauty and hold up a mirror to the cultural and social revolutions of the twentieth century. Since 1916 VOGUE's covers have celebrated the most striking women of our age, captured by the century's leading photographers, the greatest artists and the most inventive fashion. Brilliant, captivating and full of life, this is the face of the world's most influential magazine and the original style bible.

Throughout history, fashion models have occupied a curious position: while their faces were instantly familiar, virtually nothing else was known about them. But their impression upon Vogue's readership has always been considerable -- they reflect and represent the ever-changing ideal of beauty. It was models such as Barbara Goalen and Fiona-Campbell Walter in Britain and Lisa Fonssagrives and Dorien Leigh in the US, in the 1950s, who were the first to become household names and to achieve the glamour and prestige that came with world fame. The supermodels of the 1990s turned the profession into a billion-dollar industry, and today models like Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer and Gisele Bundchen are brand names. Our fascination with these sublime creatures never seems to wane. Shining a light on these women's lives, Vogue Model uses photographs and illustrations from more than ninety years of Vogue's history to tell the fascinating story of the real faces of fashion.

In more than 2,000 issues, British Vogue magazine has acted as a cultural barometer, putting fashion in the context of the larger world in which we live - how we dress, how we entertain, what we eat, listen to, watch, who leads us, excites us and inspires us. The century's most talented photographers, illustrators and artists have contributed to it. In Lee Miller it had, unexpectedly, its own war photographer; in Norman Parkinson, Cecil Beaton, David Bailey, Snowdon and Mario Testino the greatest portrait and fashion photographers of their generation; and in Beaton and Irving Penn two giants of twentieth-century photography. From 1892, American Vogue chronicled the life of beautiful people - their clothes, parties, houses and habits - and the magazine was exported for intrigued British readers. In 1916, when the First World War made transatlantic shipments impossible, its proprietor, Conde Nast, authorised a British edition. It was an immediate success, and over the following ten decades of uninterrupted publication continued to mirror its times - the austerity and optimism that followed two world wars, the 'Swinging London' scene of the sixties, the radical seventies, the image-conscious eighties - and in its second century remains at the cutting edge of photography and design. Decade by decade, Vogue 100: A Century of Style celebrates the greatest moments in fashion, beauty and portrait photography. Illustrated throughout with well-known images, as well as the less familiar and recently rediscovered, the book focuses on the faces that shaped the cultural landscape: from Matisse to Bacon, Freud and Hirst, from Dietrich to Paltrow, from Fred Astaire to David Beckham, from Lady Diana Cooper to Lady Diana Spencer. It features the fashion designers who defined the century - Dior, Galliano, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, McQueen - and explores more broadly the changing form of the twentieth-century woman.

Vogue 100 : A Century of Style