Nostalgia in Vogue 2000-2010

THE fashion world is, with apologies to William Butler Yeats, no country for old men - or for anything old, really. It traffics in the new because it has to: if styles never changed, Barneys and Bergdorf would have nothing to sell us. But its single-minded celebration of the "now" (the latest look, the fresh new face, the next big thing) also betrays a philosophical bias against the "then." Perhaps nowhere has this bias been more memorably expressed than in a quip often attributed to Karl Lagerfeld, whose career with Chanel has consisted precisely in reinventing and refreshing an aesthetic the company's founder developed almost a century ago: "The worst is when friends say, 'Remember the good old days?' Forget about the good old days! . . . What is interesting is now." In this context, Vogue's "Nostalgia" column seems something of an anomaly, for I know of no other forum in fashion journalism in which writers abandon the present - dispensing with current styles, up-to-the-minute trends and decrees about "the new black" - in favor of a vividly remembered past. Each month, "we invite writers, designers, photographers and others to nominate a Vogue image . . . that they remember and that in some cases literally changed the path of their lives," Anna Wintour writes in her foreword to NOSTALGIA IN VOGUE: 20002010 (Rizzoli, $55), explaining how the exercise works. "Revisiting their chosen photographs jump-starts our columnists into remembering what they were doing and thinking and feeling at the moment the picture first appeared." For this magnificent anthology, Eve MacSweeney, Vogue's features director, has selected several dozen of the finest, most engaging articles in the column's 10-year history, and reprinted them alongside the images that first inspired them. Disclosure: A few years back, I was invited to contribute an essay to the column. Although it never ran, I still consider the hours I spent in the extraordinary Condé Nast picture library, hunting high and low for the photographic equivalent of Proust's madeleine, some of the most thrilling I've ever devoted to "research." Chock-a-block with artful Avedons and pulchritudinous Penns, risqué Rittses and naughty Newtons, "Nostalgia in Vogue" offers readers a similar foray into the magazine's photographic archive. What could be better? Well, not much, except perhaps for the actual writing. "Nostalgia in Vogue" is a treasure trove of highly diverse and evocative first-person recollections. Bylines are drawn from literati and glitterati alike, ranging from Lydia Davis and Joan Didion to Anjelica Huston and Mario Testino, from Edmund White and Francine du Plessix Gray to Carly Simon and - wait for it - Karl Lagerfeld. (True to form, Mr. "I Hate the Good Old Days" compares the past unfavorably to what was to come afterward: in 1950, he notes, his native "Germany was not very exciting, and people needed and wanted things other than elegance. . . . Yet I was convinced my future would be a bright one.") The tenor of the pieces, is similarly varied, by turns humorous (Margaret Atwood, for example, on a billowy Balenciaga gown she coveted as a teenager: "I had to watch it with the crinolines, or I'd come out like an ambulatory marshmallow") and heartfelt (Ali MacGraw reflecting on her long and complicated relationship to her own glamour, and "finally realizing that I do, in fact, belong to the Tribe of Woman"). As for the reminiscences themselves, they come across as at once intensely personal and comfortingly universal. A relationship (the director Peter Bogdanovich's, to Cybill Shepherd) founders, is rekindled, fizzles once again. A gawky teenage girl (the model Sophie Dahl) rebels against her glamorous mother, then makes her peace with her. One career (the designer Vera Wang's, as an ice skater) fails and another takes off in its stead. However boldface the names of the people telling these stories, the "Nostalgia" columns attest to the commonality and the timelessness of our essential human concerns: love and loss; autonomy and connectedness; ambition and failure. Whether they took place five minutes or five decades ago, the dramas are evergreen. And so is "Nostalgia in Vogue," where the good old days look forever young. Even Karl Lagerfeld has to approve. - CAROLINE WEBER An Irving Penn photo of Lisa Fonssagrives in Balenciaga, 1950.