Seeing fashion

Library Journal

Marvelously inventive fashion photographer Melvin Sokolsky began at Harper's Bazaar in 1959 at the age of 21, making him a contemporary of Hiro, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon. He immediately established a reputation for bizarre, highly imaginative ideas, often placing his nonchalant models in spatially dislocated settings, such as oversize furniture, upside-down rooms, abandoned buildings, and floating stairways--visuals that were sometimes too daring for editors to publish. Most memorable among his concepts was a plastic bubble in which his models seemed to float through the air, down a street, and across the Seine. In tribute to that signature device, the book designers created a bubble-shaped layout for the essay by Martin Harrison, an authority on fashion photography who has written about Lillian Bassman, Patrick Demarchalier, and David Bailey. The first retrospective of Sokolsky's fashion photography, this book takes us right back to the 1960s, with Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Ali McGraw, Natalie Wood, Zero Mostel, Dustin Hoffman, Suzie Parker, Julie Christie, and more all shown in fine-grain, highly saturated color close-ups, astonishing theatrical settings, and the bouffant hair, false eyelashes, and clothes that distinguish that decade. From these pages, we can see why Sokolsky won a large number of Art Directors Club Awards and how he influenced such fashion photographers as David Lachapelle, Bruce Weber, and Sheila Metzner. Sokolsky, who lives and works in Los Angeles, now directs television commercials and has won 25 Clio Awards. Recommended for art and photography collections.--Kathleen Collins, Bank of America Corporate Archives, San Francisco Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.