I don’t really care — as I’m sure you don’t either — whether Duchess Kate agrees to a photoshoot or whether Dolce and Gabbana will show up at the gala centenary dinner. But you will when you read Alexandra Shulman’s Inside Vogue: A Diary of My Hundredth Year (Penguin Fig Tree, £16.99). In a candid, introspective, generous and witty way, Vogue’s editor shows the slog, guts and diplomacy that are needed to produce the magazine — often to the detriment of family life. The eventual results of a year’s long-planned coups are page-turners.
The people of Thierry Coudert’s The Beautiful People of the Café Society: Scrapbooks by the Baron de Cabrol (Flammarion, £75) are surely anything but café — château and yacht more like. Beginning in the 1930s, Fred de Cabrol painted faux-naif watercolours of the grandest European houses, gardens and resorts, which he enlivened with invitations, menus, cuttings and découpé photographs of their frequenters at balls, races, hunts, weddings and on the beach. It’s a lavish panoply of the elegant style, decor and beauty of a long-forgotten world. One of its most serenely elegant beauties was Fred’s wife Daisy, shown wearing a simple couture creation franfreluché — delicious word meaning ‘with ribbons’.
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