Looking for some luscious reading? Or a glamorous book for a gift? Here’s what’s on my current book wishlist relating to jetsetting, style, fashion, the 1920s, and high society…
Swans: Legends of the Jet Society by Nick Foulkes
BUY IT HERE: Assouline’s Swans: Legends of the Jet Society by Nick Foulkes
I’ve been fascinated by historical style leaders and socialites such as Capote’s “Swans” for several years now, and have tracked down several books relating to each of the main characters, including Truman Capote, Babe Mortimer Paley, Slim Keith, Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, CZ Guest, Marella Agnelli, Gloria Vanderbilt, Lee Radziwill, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
So it seems that Assouline have also been inspired to create a book devoted to socialites and jetsetting, in the form of this glossy coffee table tome. I would love to get my hands on it!
Here’s the official blurb:
Conjuring images of exotic global destinations and golden beaches, clandestine ren
dezvous on opulent yachts, and star-studded parties in palatial mansions, the words “jet set were once the epitome of soigne worldly glamour.
Swans, Legends of the Jet Society captures the spirit of this world, the last vestiges of a leisured and cultivated age, a world of taste and culture, elegance and beauty.
From bygone aristocracy to modern mega-wealthy moguls, this stunning volume regales with escapades of travel, money, romance, and adventure.
BUY IT HERE: Assouline’s Swans: Legends of the Jet Society by Nick Foulkes
More in these posts:
Related books:
- Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life by Slim Keith
- The Sisters: Babe Mortimer Paley, Betsy Roosevelt Whitney, Minnie Astor Fosburgh : The Lives and Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters by David Grafton
- Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and His Black and White Ball by Deborah Davis
Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years by Alexander Vreeland
BUY IT HERE: Rizzoli’s Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years edited by Alexander Vreeland
Diana Vreeland is a style icon, not just for what she wore, but her influence on the fashion world through journalism, and her own eccentric personality. She was such a force that the role played by Kay Thompson in Audrey Hepburn’s film Funny Face, was based on her.
She worked for both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and as a special consultant at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her wit and insight was legendary, with many mind boggling comments including:
- I’m sure I chose to be born in Paris. I’m sure I chose my parents. I’m sure I chose to be called Diana. And I’m sure I chose to have a nurse named Pink.
- Why Don’t You…wash your blond child’s hair in dead champagne, as they do in France?
- Why Don’t You…have a furry elk-hide trunk for the back of your car?
- Why Don’t You…own, as does one extremely smart woman, twelve diamond roses of all sizes?
- Unshined shoes are the end of civilization.
- You know the greatest thing is passion, without it what have you got? I mean if you love someone you can love them as much as you can love them but if it isn’t a passion, it isn’t burning, it isn’t on fire, you haven’t lived.
- I adore artifice. I always have.
- Where would fashion be without literature?
- All my life I’ve pursued the perfect red. I can never get painters to mix it for me. It’s exactly as if I’d said, ‘I want rococo with a spot of Gothic in it and a bit of Buddhist temple’—they have no idea what I’m talking about. About the best red is to copy the color of a child’s cap in any Renaissance portrait.
- I always say I hope to God I die in a town with a good tailor, a good shoemaker, and perhaps someone who’s interested in a little quelque chose d’autre.
- Fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world.
Here’s the official blurb:
A look behind the scenes at Diana Vreeland’s Vogue, showing the legendary editor in chief in her own inimitable words.
When Diana Vreeland became editor in chief of Vogue in 1963, she initiated a transformation, shaping the magazine into the dominant U.S. fashion publication. Vreeland’s Vogue was as entertaining and innovative as it was serious about fashion, art, travel, beauty, and culture. Vreeland rarely held meetings and communicated with her staff and photographers through memos dictated from her office or Park Avenue apartment.
This extraordinary compilation of more than 250 pieces of Vreeland’s personal correspondence—most published here for the first time—includes letters to Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, Norman Parkinson, Veruschka, and Cristobal Balenciaga and memos that show the direction of some of Vogue’s most legendary stories. These display Vreeland’s irreverence and her characteristically over-the-top pronouncements and reveal her sharpness about the Vogue woman and what the magazine should be.
Photographs from the magazine illustrate the memos, showing her imagination, prescience, and exactitude. Each chapter is introduced by commentary from Vogue editors who worked with her, giving readers a truly inside look at how Diana Vreeland directed the course of the magazine and fashion world.
BUY IT HERE: Rizzoli’s Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years edited by Alexander Vreeland
More in these posts:
Related books:
- Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel by Lisa Vreeland
- D.V. by Diana Vreeland
- Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
- Diana Vreeland by Eleanor Dwight
- Allure by Diana Vreeland
- Diana Vreeland: Bazaar Years by John Esten and Katherine Betts
One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
BUY IT HERE: One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson has made me laugh out loud regularly in public places, notably in restaurants and on public transport, which tends to make people turn around and stare at me. He’s such a gifted writer, embracing social commentary, solid historical and literary insight, and often travel narrative with an engaging humour and intelligent research.
He was so gracious that when I met him at a book signing and asked him for dinner, he kindly declined but added that if he wasn’t busy, he would have said yes. Who knows whether it was true, but it felt genuine and made me smile.
Here’s the official blurb:
The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet.
Meanwhile, the titanically talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history. In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation.
Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—a new record. The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover.
Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption.
The first true “talking picture,” Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry. The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression.
All this and much, much more transpired in that epochal summer of 1927, and Bill Bryson captures its outsized personalities, exciting events, and occasional just plain weirdness with his trademark vividness, eye for telling detail, and delicious humor.
In that year America stepped out onto the world stage as the main event, and One Summer transforms it all into narrative nonfiction of the highest order.
BUY IT HERE: One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
More in these posts:
Related books:
- At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
- The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson
- The Mother Tongue – English And How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson
- Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
See more suggestions for your own luscious library here via my “books to buy” posts.
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Cheers, Natasha
www.myLusciousLife.com
