On the Edge: Images from 100 Years of Vogue

The history of Vogue spans the twentieth century and is a history of society and culture as well as fashion, of shifts in taste and profound changes in the way women view the world and are viewed by it. Vogue's version of the story is filtered through the sensibilities of some of the century's most talented photographers. Edward Steichen was the magazine's chief photographer for fifteen years. Irving Penn has been associated with Vogue since 1943. Cecil Beaton and Helmut Newton and Bruce Weber all found a place there. Richard Avedon created some of his most famous images for Vogue. "As befits a flamboyant and creative enterprise," Kennedy Fraser writes in her introduction, "Vogue's history is full of ambitious, impossible romantics," brought together by the voracious needs of a magazine that for many years produced an issue every two weeks. It was a creative stew that worked, and, as Fraser notes, "in spite of — because of — its emotional intensity, Vogue has been able to... sustain successive generations of photographers and editors, even while goading them along the dizzying edge of shock and risk." On the Edge: Images from 100 Years of Vogue records that collaboration.

Published in 1992 by Random House

296 pages / Hardcover