Description

Presenting a Cooling Image

By Hélène Alexander and Russell Harris

Through expertly-restored photographs from the Lafayette Archive of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the beautifully-preserved fans from The Fan Museum, Greenwich, this book presents a parallel history of fans from Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Year of 1897 to interbellum court portraits of 1925.

From the luxurious languor of Lady Ashburton, photographed as Tennyson’s Enid and “clothed… in apparel like the day” for the Devonshire House Ball of 1897, to the understated elegance of Miss Mary Latta’s fashionable attire for presentation at court in 1923, the Lafayette archive records the transformation of fashion from the rigid corsetry of Queen Victoria’s epoch to the fluid dropped waists of the 1920’s flapper.

Photography by the Lafayette Studio of Bond Street and Fans from The Fan Museum, Greenwich