We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves. —C. S. Lewis
One of my favorite DC Talk songs as a teenager paraphrased Proverbs 31:30 thusly:
Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain
But a woman who fears the Lord, she ain’t playin’
Wise words straight from the Scriptures, to be sure, but with no room for nuance when it comes to the role of beauty. In her poem “Beauty is Vain,” Christina Rossetti ends with this entreaty against vanity, speaking of the end a beautiful woman will meet:
Be she red or white,
And stand she erect or bowed,
Time will win the race he runs with her
And hide her away in a shroud.
So what is the role of beauty in the Christian life?
In his Dialogues, Plato suggested the not-entirely-new idea that the best of the world could be found in the three transcendentals of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Centuries later, Aquinas modified this list so that we had the One, the Good, and the True, to which St. Bonaventure added Beauty. There is, in short, a long and rich Christian tradition of appreciating beauty as essential to the good life, the godly life. The questions Masters of Fashion Illustration poses to Christians run along the lines of whether there is salvific power in beauty. Can it possibly be redemptive, mirroring the best parts of the created order, or is it a harmful distraction? Is beauty only to be found in still life and choral music, or can we see it still today in the power of a sharp line and a bold color, in a dress and a shadow and the curve of the body?
David Downton’s breakthrough fashion assignment came from, of all places, the Financial Times, that serious salmon-colored paper. He went to Paris in July 1996 to draw the couture shows for them and simultaneously solidified his place in the fashion illustration hall of fame when his sketches were met with universal acclaim.
In 1998, Downton began a series of drawings of some of the world’s most beautiful women, including model Carmen Dell’Orefice, who provides the book’s foreword. (I’m sure my call is coming any day now.) Dell’Orefice, who began working as a model just after the end of World War II, remarks that she feels “like the last link to a golden era. I’ve watched the popularity of fashion illustration wax and wane.” Like so many forms of art now rendered inefficient by technology, fashion illustration is certainly on the decline. But David Downton is preeminent among the small band of illustrators working to preserve the art, and his retrospective on the lives and work of the top fashion artists of the 20th century goes a long way in that effort. “I don’t believe there is a frivolous subject for art,” Downton writes in his introduction, undoubtedly anticipating the maelstrom of critics eager to tear apart the fashion world in favor of more “serious” art.
The men—and they are all men—memorialized in this tome are serious artists. It is a tribute to the genre that such variety of style and ambition can be contained within; they are, for instance, ad campaign illustrators (J . C. Leyendecker) and movie poster designers (Bob Peak) and costume couturiers (Tom Keogh). Underneath their various careers, they are fashion artists. They captured the ideals and the lifestyle of the age in which they lived; they translated beauty across the decades.
Giovanni Boldini, for example, was not a fashion illustrator by trade. Born in Italy in 1842, he lived before the time of major design houses and commissioned runway art, but he painted portraits of women that displayed a unique understanding of the female body in motion. Boldini’s line was not as harsh or defining as what was to come in the middle of the 20th century; the edges that he painted dissolved into the background of a gray divan or a darkened doorway. His female subjects look purposeful, their gaze often set straight ahead. There was no game here, no demure society lady bound by the strictures of her time. These women were rising forces on the cultural scene, and Boldini gave them life accordingly.
Two of the biggest players in the world of fashion illustration are still household names: Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. The editors of both throughout the early 20th century (until 1932, at least, when Vogue published its first photo cover) sought the best illustrators of their time to create cover after cover. Perhaps no collaboration was more celebrated in the fashion world than the cover art done by Erté (born Romain de Tirtoff but known by the French pronunciation of his initials, R. T.) for Bazaar. Erté’s career started with an apprenticeship for the French designer Poiret and ended with designing labels for his own brand of bottled water, but in between, he drew over 240 covers for the magazine. His figures are delicate and angular, his backgrounds graphic and clearly delineated, reflecting the Art Deco style that was sweeping the design world on the Continent in the 1920s and ’30s. Carl “Eric” Erickson drew for Vogue longer than any other artist, over 35 years, though he hailed from the unlikely fashion capital of Joliet, Illinois. Eric’s subjects were relentlessly elegant; he could evoke a mood with the curve of four or five lines. He used bright primary colors (critics compared him to Matisse) and long strokes to convey the sumptuous sophistication that reigned over 1930s fashion, hinting at a world of luxury and refinement that most Vogue readers could only imagine—which is, after all, why we still read Vogue to this day.
The death of artist Antonio Lopez of AIDS in 1987 heralded the end of an era for fashion illustration. Lopez was born in Los Angeles in 1943, moved to Spanish Harlem at seven years old, and joined a gang for “self-preservation.” As time went on, he became the preeminent recorder of street style, borrowing more from Op Art than from his predecessors. Where Boldini and Erté integrated their life and their work, they still maintained a separate identity; Lopez was his art—something he shared in common with his friend Andy Warhol. Lopez’s 1965 drawing “Speed Demons” depicts three chic young women, two on motorcycles and one holding a small gun toward the sky; all hooded, eyes obscured, women with places to go and lives to save. Women you didn’t want to mess with. He created illustration after illustration and captured the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s without parallel.
Downton’s book is remarkable, too, for the illustrators who are excluded. Masters of Fashion Illustration omits one of the genre’s best-known and most admired men, René Gruau. In the interview at the end of the book, Downton hints at the outrageous expense of publishing Gruau’s vigorously protected images but calls him “a genius … the greatest.” Gruau was an inspiration for many of the men featured in Masters of Fashion Illustration, his drawings sumptuous in their elegant minimalism. Like Eric, Gruau could work wonders with a few flicks of his wrist. He worked in advertising for decades, including a campaign for the Moulin Rouge that relied heavily on the aesthetic of Toulouse-Lautrec. Gruau’s partnership with the fashion house of Christian Dior was so legendary and symbiotic that John Galliano, Dior’s head designer from 1996 to 2011, said: “To be inspired by Dior is to be inspired by René Gruau.” Lila de Nobili, a noted artist during fashion illustration’s Golden Age (the 1930s and ’40s), was best known for her work as a costume designer; she was well suited to the dramatic. Her Vogue covers were some of the most whimsical ever published, but all of her art maintained a darkening, melancholy undertone. De Nobili’s uncle, Marcel Vertés, is featured in Masters of Fashion Illustration for his lovely and scathing send-ups of society women as well as his costume design for the 1952 film Moulin Rouge, directed by John Huston, which garnered Vertés two Oscars.
In a September 2012 interview with The Telegraph, Downton asked and answered the question that so many in the art world have posed in recent years: “What can fashion illustration do that photography can’t? It can tell an alternative story and hold a mirror up to the times.” This is the value of good art.
A few months, earlier, in the February 2012 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Marilynne Robinson wrote, “The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art.” These fashion illustrations take their place among the myriad outpourings of the mystery of the human condition and the mystery of God. As Downton suggested, illustration (drawn art) has the power to tell a story through a particular lens of perception that is firmly rooted in the time and spirit of the age and the singular vision of the artist.
And our gift as Christian people is to take that vision seriously, to remember that there is no frivolous subject for art, that the lines of a dress painted 70 years ago can, in their mysterious way, point to the glory of the creative God who clothed us before sending us east of Eden. In the words of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “Every experience of beauty points to eternity.”
Laura Ortberg Turner is a freelance writer and editor based in San Francisco. She is an MFA student at Seattle Pacific University.
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