Fashion's Front Line: Fashion Show Photography from the Runway to Backstage

What a way to start off the year for books of this genre. Nilgin Yusuf relates the world of fashion as seen through and told primarily by Niall McInernery’s images and via various luminaries of the British fashion world.

McInenery was an active participant in the world and business of fashion for over 30 years and it is he who provided this unvarnished, truthful, and unbiased overview of the supposedly glamourous world of fashion. It is rare than we get a fashion book authored by genuine participants in this sphere who are not designers, and this moment is enhanced with such a stellar accounting.

McInerery and Yusuf speak of fashion as a profession and not a hobby, which means they actually inhabited this world, immediately seting them apart from most authors of this genre as well as from the dilettantes who pretend to be knowledgeable about their subject matter.

Yusuf proves himself to be an articulate historian and chronicler of fashion by offering such a broad perspective of this business while spotlighting so many aspects that are so easily ignored. There are no fawners, no wannabes, no uneducated parties involved with the execution and content of this very worthwhile book.

The reader should be aware that since McInenery is/was primarily a runway photographer; the majority of the photos in the book are not of the glossy retouched editorial variety but actually moments of fashion frozen in time by the click of a shutter. It is this real life facet of fashion that makes this book a must read for fashion neophytes as well as for seasoned fashionphiles.

If there are any shortcomings of this wonderful monograph, one of them would be the misspelling of one Pierre Bergé and not Pierre Berger and the misidentifying of the late Bernie Ozer as the late Kal Ruttenstein or the late Pat Buckley supposedly standing next to supposedly Nancy Kissinger. Although these are minutiae in terms of the big picture they remain as errors that are rather glaring to fashionphiles on an international stage.