For those who consider “fashion journalism” to be a defining oxymoron, the recently released “The Complete New Yorker : Eighty Years of the Nation’s Greatest Magazine” is the exception to that rule and then some. With 8 CD-ROMs that span the cultural width of the 20’s to the Zeroes, the fashion material is surprisingly bold. This is especially true for the Tina Brown style-driven era when Richard Avedon and Polly Mellen ran amock with Nadja Auermann, Hilton Als crafted one very insidious piece of character assasination via his unkind profile of Andre Leon Talley and Prada got its first piece of obessive cultural veneration. Not to be perverse, but what also turns out to be a massive fashion bonus of the New Yorker set is the archive of fashion ads of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Where else (other than Gallagher’s) can you dig up those masterpiece supermodel Versace ads or for that matter the polymorphous 80’s Dior ads? That said OTM would advise you not to use the very dodgy built in search engine but rather to chronologically nudge out the Fashion Specials which alone are worth the price of admission. Now can you imagine what would happen- if say- French Vogue got into the high tech archival game. We swoon at the thought.
