Vogue: Like a Painting

Vogue: Like a Painting is a lavish celebration of the intersection between the worlds of fashion photography and European art historical tradition. Compiling 67 carefully selected images from the Vogue archive, the volume explores fashion photographs of the last eight decades that take their inspiration from classical painting--those images that have become only marginally related to selling clothes (or perhaps all the better at it for their painterly invocations). Sometimes explicitly--we see direct homages to Vermeer and Hopper, for example--and sometimes more subtly, these images culled from Vogue's pages reference Spanish painting from the Golden Age, Dutch portraiture, Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings and various schools contained in European royal collections. Traces of Constable, Zurbarán and Sorolla can be found within this volume, which brings together names from classic photography and those from more recent generations: Irving Penn, Erwin Blumenfeld, Horst P. Horst, Annie Leibovitz, Tim Walker, Paolo Roversi, Steven Klein, David Sims, Erwin Olaf, Mario Testino, Michael Thompson and Peter Lindbegh, to name a few. While some of these photographs are about direct mimicry, others are similar to painting only in technical approach--and some simply share the goal of revering women rather than sexualizing or objectifying them. With a gorgeous tipped-on cover and text by Lucy Davies, editor at The Telegraph, Vogue: Like a Painting is a volume produced as beautifully as its photographic contents.