The Power of Style, Signed to Ed Victor (The Swans)
[Signed to Literary Agent Ed Victor] Tapert, Annette. The Power of Style: The Women Who Defined the Art of Living Well. First Edition. 1994. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. This copy is inscribed, “For Carol & Ed, My favorite couple who have the greatest combination of all—style with extreme, sublime substance.” Co-written with Diana Edkins.
Published in the mid-1990s, this stylish group portrait helped renew interest in the women who had turned taste into a form of power. Truman Capote’s “swans” had never entirely disappeared from view, but here Babe Paley, Gloria Guinness, Slim Keith, and C. Z. Guest are given pride of place in a special section of their own, introduced with tribute by Truman Capote. They are joined by a broader pantheon of twentieth-century style, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Daisy Fellowes, Millicent Rogers, Pauline de Rothschild, Diana Vreeland, Coco Chanel, and Elsie de Wolfe. Well illustrated and highly readable, the book is less a conventional fashion history than a study of self-invention, showing how certain women used clothes, houses, jewels, manners, and mystique to make themselves unforgettable.
“[The Swans] have enjoyed a renewed currency as style icons. Their clothes have been copied by designs, and a great many people now know what is meant by a Babe Paley luncheon shift or the Slim Keith trouser look or a C.Z. Guest twin set.”
--Annette Tapert