Description:
Remember the day you knew you looked your very best, and someone grabbed a camera to immortalize your wonderfulness? Height of Fashion is a beguiling, utterly original album of 231 enlarged snapshots of kids, teens, and adults showing off their Easter outfits, their party finery, their funky fashion and designer suits, their shags and Afros and punk dye jobs. Not to mention, when the occasion warrants, their birthday suits. Sometimes that "height of fashion" feeling derives from proximity to fame (posing with the Beatles, or Ronald Reagan, or Miss Wyoming), but more often it comes from the importance of a particular event--a bar mitzvah or a wedding or the day a beauty salon owner just felt like doing a handstand while roller-skating at the beach in a vintage dress. (Quotes from the subjects of some of the photos evoke snippets of memory--and offer some wry observations about style aspirations.) Who are all these people? Well, a few are celebrities, many occupy large and small positions in the worlds of fashion, design, and film, and some may be "just folks." But since everyone is identified by name only, fame takes a back seat to sheer nostalgia. Whether the subject is a windblown Faye Dunaway in a black dress and a convertible, on her way to meet Marcello Mastroianni, or a small, beaming woman posing on a Miami sidewalk in the Jackie Kennedy-style suit she made for her 1964 wedding, what matters is that somebody is having a moment of personal glory and that somebody else can't resist taking a picture. Fashion is fickle, but these snapshots evoke the enduring power of dreams and fantasies in our lives. --Cathy Curtis
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