The name Phyllis Posnick is synonymous with Vogue and the extraordinary fashion editorials the magazine's audience loves.

Posnick is best known for creating photo editorials to illustrate the magazine's Beauty and Health articles, but cast off any ideas you have about close-ups of lips and eyelashes. Instead, picture models bathed in paint or posing next to cuts of fresh meat. This collection invites readers to glimpse the complex production process — and the collaboration and creativity — behind each extraordinary editorial.

The book features images by a who's who of legendary photographers: Irving Penn, Steven Klein, Annie Leibovitz, Mario Testino, Patrick Demarchelier, Tim Walker, Anton Corbijn and Helmut Newton.

The book includes a foreword by Anna Wintour and is punctuated by Posnick's personal memories and irreverence.

About the Author:

Phyllis Posnick began her career as an assistant to Diana Vreeland at Vogue and has been the executive fashion editor since 1987. She lives in New York City.

This book, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title (Milan, Spring 2009), is produced in collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana.

Always audacious, sometimes outrageous, Vogue’s images distinguish themselves by their willingness to explore the limits of contemporary ideas of beauty and they are created by the greatest photographers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The one hundred or so featured prints reveal profoundly sensual and highly provocative narratives that bear witness to complex cultural attitudes toward female appearance and self-expression.

From the neoclassical figures of Edward Steichen to the unconventional nudes of Annie Leibovitz, the aggressive portraiture of Helmut Newton, and the modernism of Steven Klein, the photographs in this volume consider the evolving female subject, in all her strength and contradiction. An entire section is devoted to Irving Penn, who transforms the face and body into images of extraordinary imaginative and aesthetic power.