Gian Paolo Barbieri: Beauty Case

Gian Paolo Barbieri: Beauty Case is a luxurious two-volume survey of postwar fashion as seen, staged and documented by Gian Paolo Barbieri, the Italian photo-virtuoso whose Taschen books Equator, Madagascar, Tahiti Tattoos, Exotic Nudes and Tahiti Tattoos (among others) became best-seller classics of contemporary photography and made him a worldwide publishing star. The two volumes contained in Beauty Case, History of Fashion I and History of Fashion II, gather together work done for a wide variety of fashion magazines between 1965 and 2005. They are presented inside an elegant limited-edition soft leather box (with two pockets for the books, a leather handle and a brass clasp), which doubles as a unisex beauty case. Reflecting and complementing the concise sumptuousness of Barbieri's own photography, it is a certain collector's item and an essential summation of a rich and celebratory body of work.Since 1964, the photographs of Gian Paolo Barbieri (1938) have appeared in the world's most influential fashion and pop-culture publications, such as Vogue, GQ and Vanity Fair. Barbieri's feeling for painterly atmospheres (often particularly suggestive of Gauguin) has lent his work a unique flavor, referencing as it does not only fashion, but anthropology, cinema, the nude, portraiture and landscape.