In My Fashion, Signed by Bettina Ballard
[Signed by Bettina Ballard] Ballard, Bettina. In My Fashion. Second Printing. 1960. Book is in very good condition; dust jacket is in very good minus condition—there is minor discoloration to the endpapers, and jacket shows minor tears, fraying to the spine ends, and fading to the spine.
Before Diana Vreeland arrived at Vogue, she was fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar. Her counterpart at Vogue was Bettina Ballard, whose engaging memoir offers a rare insider’s account of the fashion world during its most glamorous era. Ballard joined the magazine in 1934 after Edna Woolman Chase admired a satirical piece she had written for The New Yorker, and she soon found herself in Paris navigating both high society and haute couture. What distinguishes this memoir, however, is its candor. Published just a year before Ballard’s death, it is filled with shrewd and often unsparing assessments of the figures who shaped twentieth-century fashion, including Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior, Carmel Snow, Babe Paley, Valentina, and Diana Vreeland herself. Few observers were better positioned to tell the story, and few told it so honestly.
“Nothing, no matter how extravagant, that Diana Vreeland ever says is nonsense. It is painting with words and gestures, and her gestures are often more imaginative than her words. She makes you see and feel and smell what she is talking about…. She is the one person in the American fashion field who understands with every bone in her body what the word elegant really means.”
--Bettina Ballard