Flamboyant poses and melodramatic airs in 'Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World'

Cecil Beaton’s “The Second Age of Beauty is Glamour,” shot for the February 1946 issue of British Vogue, is reproduced from Holiday Gift Staff Pick Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World—published to accompany the exhibition on view through January 2026 at the National Portrait Gallery, London. A beautifully produced monograph featuring portraits, magazine editorials, fashion photography, war reportage and illustrations by Britain’s celebrated renaissance man about town, this oversized volume features a lovely Swiss binding, more than 250 color and black-and-white reproductions and a wealth of pithy Beaton quotations that contextualize the images. “My pictures became more and more rococo and surrealist,” he wrote in the third volume of his diary, The Happy Years, published in 1972. “Society women as well as mannequins were photographed in the most flamboyant poses, in ecstatic or mystical states, sometimes with the melodramatic air of a Lady Macbeth caught up in a cocoon of tulle…”

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Published by National Portrait Gallery, 2025

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Holiday Gift Guide 2025: For the Fashion Forward

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Spanish publisher La Fábrica was founded in Madrid in 1995, and has since become known for its impeccably designed and produced books on photography, art and contemporary literature. New this week, I Hear Music in the Streets: New York 1969–89, a pitch-perfect ode to New York City's music scenes and subcultures from 1969 to 1989, edited by Guillermo M. Ferrando and featuring work by Arlene Gottfried, Peter Hujar, Stephen Shames, Bruce Davidson, Susan Meiselas, Joseph Rodriguez and 60 other photographers.

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