The Sartorialist
by Scott Schuman
(Penguin, $25)
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Since 2005, Scott Schuman’s blog, The Sartorialist, has been an arresting antidote to “what we so mindlessly call ‘celebrity style,’” said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. Now the New York photographer’s popular website has become one of this year’s most popular photo books. Schuman’s great talent is his ability to spot unsung exemplars of personal style on streets around the globe. That sort of panache can be exuded just as effortlessly by an “old-school” barber as by “young, leggy model types.” (Also available in a $175 hardcover edition.)
Avedon Fashion: 1944–2000
(Abrams, $100)
Richard Avedon’s fashion photography ranks with the best of “American vernacular art,” said Mark Stryker in the Detroit Free Press. “A kicky joy” characterizes the images in this six-decade retrospective. Beginning in the 1970s, Avedon’s work got “heavier, even pretentious.” But at his peak he brought the “imaginative eye” and “emotional force” of fine-art photography to the business of selling couture. Indeed, he “invented fashion photography as we know it.”
Resort Fashion
by Caroline Rennolds Milbank
(Rizzoli, $65)
Flipping through the pages of this gorgeously “sunny” book is almost as good as a getaway to Ibiza, said Emily Kropp in StyledOn.com. Compiled by a fashion historian, it traces the evolution of culottes, the bikini, and the jet set itself, as resort fashion comes to represent “the most covetable luxuries one can imagine.” Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and scores of other luxe icons appear here in the fashion industry’s “most playful and frivolous” clothes. It’s a volume “sure to lighten even your grayest of days.”
Who Shot Rock & Roll
by Gail Buckland
(Knopf, $40)
Gail Buckland describes rock photos as “the cheat sheets for modern culture,” and she’s right, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. This “love letter” to rock’s finest photographers runs end to end with “excellent and unexpected” images of the music’s trendsetting performers. Buckland enlivens the tour through time with “witty, moving, and sometimes acerbic prose.” Whatever she writes, I want to read. “I love this book.”
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