Just Looking

Fabulous fashion, decadent design, lurid lifestyles-booked.

by A.D. Amorosi

If my coffee table leans to one side this holiday, it’s merely the weight of fashion-forward, backward-peering tomes on flashy subjects.

Like:

Hollywood (Assouline, 256 pp., $75), by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, shows off the Italian designers notorious for pushing the envelope of urban culture with their sleek, sinewy couture -- opulent, body-gripping materials and frame-forming lines accentuated garishly but without the bloat of Versace. These maximal minimalists have truly reconstructed the clothed images of Gwyneth and Nicole from gawky to queen-like. The book reveals -- through stunning images of private sittings, notes from clients and the designs themselves -- the duo's efforts to build a new, cutting-edge Hollywood modeled after the old, and it proves two things: that D&G have an evil hold over celebrity, and that it's they who fucked over models by making "stars" their sales tools. Get 'em, girls.

Body-conscious ladies' designs that men would wear didn't start with D&G. In Judith Watt's Ossie Clark 1965-1974 (Victoria & Albert Museum, 128 pp., $37.50), we see the British mod '60s as envisioned by Clark, whose free-flowing, chemise fabulousness predates both the hippie etherealism of the late '60s and bodice-popping pre-glam of the early '70s, and who's now an inspiration to new Brits like Stella McCartney.

If the thought of guys in gals' clothing is a turn-on, look no further than Andrew Bolton's Bravehearts: Men in Skirts (Victoria & Albert Museum, 160 pp., $40). Beyond the metrosexual, Bolton discusses the serious sociology of designers (Westwood, Gaultier, van Beirendonck), dukes (numerous sirs and princes), dead presidents (Washington) and daring Davids (Bowie, Beckham) truly "bending it."

Where bending, twirling and curling is concerned, French hairstylist Odile Gilbert is the queen. Her sculptural styles and collage-like creations use bits of concrete, jewels, feathers and dirt, while remaining conscious of the worth of collaborators in design (Lagerfeld, Lacroix) and photography (Mondino, Demarchelier). She shows it all off with delicious glee in Her Style (D.A.P., 264 pp., $68).

What D&G is to Italian fashion, Vico Magistretti -- the man and the book -- is to the world of Op-to-Pop Italian design. As viewed through Beppe Finessi's colorful volume (D.A.P., 146 pp., $27.50), the Milanese designer experimented with plastic seating in the late '60s, went on to design the Gaudi stackables of the '70s, the slit-seat Mauna Kea chairs of the early '90s and scads of innovative light fixtures -- all of which gave way to each and every expensive fixture and furnishing you buy today.

The architecture of the fashionable is examined, in all its supple simplicity, in Amy Spindler's Diane von Furstenberg (Assouline, 80 pp., $18.95). Here, the Times' witty style editor peers into the life and design of von Furstenberg's irksomely easy, elegant design: 1972's giant collared, knit-jersey wrap dress and its current tinier-collar version, which to most (and to Spindler) represented, in its time, liberation and female empowerment. Sheez, a jersey wrap meant power.

Where power goes, so go the rites of the bejeweled: dripping diamonds, runaway rubies, towering topaz. That means Tiffany in Fashion(Abrams, 272 pp., $60), John Loring's giant-sized look at how the world-famous baby-blue-boxed "& Co." came to prominence -- with the help of design houses like Halston, Blahnik and Kors, photographers as far-flung as Man Ray and Mapplethorpe and fashion stalwarts Hiro and Avedon. As much as Hollywood, Tiffany in Fashion reveals the slow-burning history of single-minded designers utilizing the faces and frames of their times: Avedon's architectural shot of Liz Taylor's naked shoulders dripping with cultured Tiffany pearls, sperm-like ropes of gold snapped by Mapplethorpe, Steichen's Vogue take on a gem-encrusted, turban-topped Gwili Andre holding a ruby-cluttered vanity case with 606 diamonds on her wrist. They, Tiffany, made the moment rather than following it.

Whether seriously assaying the glamour of the rich and famous or, perhaps, making hilarious light of their weighty opulence, society photographer Slim Aarons got there first and most fabulously, as noted in the too-too colorful Once Upon a Time (Abrams, 240 pp., $75). Like David Hockney on a free-fall through Town & Country, Aarons found the good life of Southampton, Palm Beach, Newport and Manhattan's Upper East Side at its devastating greatest from the '50s to the '70s. "I didn't do fashion," Aarons said when discussing the book in this month's Vanity Fair. "I did the people in their clothes that became the fashion." That rarefied air of old-money "haves" that drifts throughout Aarons' snapshots of the politically empowered and genuine high society -- as opposed to the current wealth of one-time "have nots" -- is what gives Time weight. His ice-blue palatial mansions and devastatingly lush gardens are portraits of a paradise lost, where endless cash flow and totems of abundant wealth meant privacy, safety and eternity -- not tax fraud, bling bling and jail time.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)