November, 5th, 2014

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.Aparté.

In lieu of a #VivienLeigh sober remembering, let us eye how #CecilBeaton the costumier nailed her sense as #Tolstoy #AnnaKarenina – Ever dear to #Hollywood heydays ..

Meanwhile placing himself at the centre of fashionable society in the 1920s, #Beaton was instrumental in presenting and promoting both the Sitwells and their circle and the Bright Young Things that surrounded Stephen Tennant. As published in #Vogue #Tatler and #VanityFair his portraits and fashion plates summed up the dazzling era with elegance and wit.

Ever the aesthete, #Beaton the costumier cultivated a genius for staging compelling scenes. By employing theatrical costumes and props, experimenting with materials and mirrors, and referencing the history of art, he created an extraordinary sense of occasion for each of his sitters.

In the 1920s Beaton became a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines. He developed a style of portraiture in which the sitter became merely one element of an overall decorative pattern, which was dominated by backgrounds made of unusual materials such as aluminum foil or papier-mâché. The results, which combined art and artifice, were alternately exquisite, exotic, or bizarre, but always chic. Many of these portraits are gathered in his books The Book of Beauty (1930), Persona Grata (1953, with Kenneth Tynan), and It Gives Me Great Pleasure (1953).

During World War II, Beaton served in the British Ministry of Information, covering the fighting in Africa and East Asia. His wartime photographs of the siege of Britain were published in the book Winged Squadrons (1942). After the war Beaton resumed portrait photography, but his style became much less flamboyant. He also broadened his activities, designing costumes and sets for theatre and film. He won Academy Awards for his costume design in Gigi (1958) and for both his costume design and his art direction in My Fair Lady (1964). Several volumes of his diaries, which appeared in the 1960s and ’70s, were summarized in Self Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, 1926–1974 (1979). Beaton was knighted in 1972.

#LONDON #MODEDIPLOMATIQUE