Joe Eula: Master of Twentieth-Century Fashion Illustration

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The first, and sure to be definitive, collection of the iconic work of Joe Eula, the foremost illustrator of the late twentieth century, featuring more than 200 gorgeous black-and-white and full-color sketches and illustrations, the majority of which have never been published before.

An illustrator, graphic artist, costume designer, stage director, and tastemaker, Joe Eula lived at the center of the high fashion and art worlds. In a career that spanned five decades, he sketched for every major couture house, from Chanel and Givenchy, to Dior and Yves Saint Laurent. He illustrated album covers and/or show posters for Miles Davis, Liza Minnelli, Marilyn Monroe, and the Supremes. He designed costumes for the choreographer Jerome Robbins. He directed a television special with Lauren Bacall. In the 1960s, with the photographer Milton Greene, he formed one of the most progressive studios of the era, responsible for producing tantalizing images—including Faye Dunaway as a stylish Bonnie Parker—in magazines like Life. His friendships were no less extensive, from Coco Chanel, with whom he used to treat to movie dates in Paris, to Andy Warhol, Bette Midler, and Elsa Peretti. If modernity was the hallmark of Halston’s fashion in the 1970s, it was Eula, as the label’s creative director, who helped clarify it with his spare drawings and fluent ideas.

This stunning volume brings together a selection of his finest work. New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn’s extensive introduction illuminates Eula’s development as an artist and his contributions to the worlds of fashion, design, arts, and entertainment, relating numerous personal anecdotes, interviews with those who knew him well as well as citations from his personal writings.

Lovers of fashion and illustration will delight in the range of art and the famous clientele on display in this collectible volume.