This book surveys 80 original images by top illustrators from the 1900s to the beginning of 2000s. Rosemary Torre is a professor at the New York City’s fashion institute with thirty years of experience teaching and research in the field. She offers an authoritative overview on how fashion illustrators portrayed the feminine Ideal, capturing the society’s perception of the New Woman. The text is a study of fashion history based on magazines like Vogue, Harper's Bazar and Vanity Fair. Torre observes that the feminine Ideal is constructed by combining social, political, economic and subjective factors.
What is unique about this book, and separates it from other similar retrospectives, is the profiling which Torre makes on each Feminine Ideal.
