Incomparable - Women Of Style

Incomparable - Women of Style (2012) by Rose Hartman – Antique Collectors’ Club

Some people wear clothes.

Other people enter a room and somehow make everybody else aware that they have done so.

Incomparable: Women of Style by Rose Hartman, published by Antique Collectors’ Club in 2012, is a celebration of the second category.

Hartman spent decades photographing fashion, society and celebrity at close quarters, capturing the people who made style look effortless while the rest of us were still trying to decide whether a jacket technically matched the trousers.

This book brings together a striking selection of women whose presence, taste, confidence and sheer visual impact helped define their eras.

And this is not merely about expensive clothes.

Style, unfortunately for those of us hoping to solve it with a credit card, is rather more complicated than that.

It is posture.

Timing.

Attitude.

A certain ability to stand under terrible lighting and still look as though the entire evening has been organised around your arrival.

Hartman’s photographs capture fashion in motion rather than as something frozen inside a showroom. These are women at events, parties, openings and social occasions, inhabiting clothes rather than simply modelling them.

That distinction matters.

A dress on a hanger is fabric.

A dress on the right person can become history.

The book spans decades of fashion and celebrity culture, drawing on Hartman’s access to glamorous rooms, famous faces and the sort of occasions where nobody appears to have been worried about parking.

There is a pleasing intimacy to the images.

You get the sense not only of what people wore, but how they carried themselves, how they interacted and how style worked in the real world of flashbulbs, crowds and late nights.

Fashion books can sometimes become very serious indeed.

Hemlines are discussed like geopolitics.

A change in silhouette becomes a revolution.

A handbag acquires ideological significance.

Incomparable is far more enjoyable than that because the photographs do much of the talking.

You can simply look.

Admire.

Judge.

Change your mind.

Then quietly wonder how anybody ever managed to look that polished before digital photography made it possible to take 400 pictures and delete 399 of them.

The book should appeal to anyone interested in fashion photography, celebrity culture, social history, glamour, portraiture or the strange alchemy by which certain people become permanently associated with a particular look.

It is also a fine reminder that “style” is one of those words everybody understands until somebody asks them to define it.

This copy is in As New condition and, unusually, is still unopened in its original plastic wrapping.

So while many of the people inside became famous for being seen, this particular copy has managed the opposite approach and has spent its life avoiding exposure entirely.

Ideal for collectors of fashion books, photography enthusiasts, lovers of twentieth-century style or anyone who appreciates a beautifully produced book that has not yet suffered the indignity of fingerprints.

It would also make an excellent gift, especially for somebody who has strong opinions about clothes and even stronger opinions about how everyone else is wearing them.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where glamour is rare, plastic wrapping is treated with suspicion, and this book is considerably more stylish than the average packing box.

ISBN: 9781851496990
Condition: As New
Notes: Unopened and still sealed in the original plastic wrapping.

Keep browsing: See more Art books Other books by Rose Hartman