From the Library: Height of Fashion

Height of Fashion, published in 2000 by Greybull Press and edited by Roman Alonso and Lisa Eisner, isn’t a fashion book in the traditional sense. There are no runways here, no models posing under blinding lights. Instead, it’s a collection of moments—personal, messy, radiant —where people believed that they looked just right. Each contributor, famous or not, submitted the photograph in which they felt most fashionable. The result is a mosaic of self-belief and self-styling: more emotional than aspirational, more memory than magazine.

From the very first pages, Height of Fashion makes a quiet statement about what style really is. The editors let the contributors define their own peak moment, flipping the usual hierarchy of the fashion world upside down. Instead of dictating trends, the book listens. It’s as if Alonso and Eisner asked, “When did you feel like yourself?” and then arranged the answers in the language of images. The tone of the book—its sequencing, its design—feels like walking through a house party where every room hums with a different decade, a different self, a different idea of style.

That’s the beauty of Height of Fashion. It makes you realize that fashion isn’t about perfection—it’s about presence. It’s about the exact second you felt radiant, even if no one else noticed. Some pages are glamorous, some are ridiculous, and many are both at once. There’s joy in that range; the same way there’s joy in looking through old family albums. One moment you cringe, the next you smile so hard it hurts.

Lorraine Wild’s brilliant design and layout amplifies that rhythm: color next to black-and-white, crisp prints beside faded snapshots. You can almost hear the hum of time between them. Some photos pulse with color—lipstick red, electric blue, the flash of metallic lamé. Others fall into shadow, soft and quiet. It feels choreographed but never stiff, more like a playlist than a gallery.

And perhaps that’s what Alonso and Eisner achieved: a kind of democratic archive of beauty. They’re not glorifying fashion’s upper crust but celebrating its grassroots—every person who has ever stood before a mirror and thought, “Yes, this is it.” The “height of fashion” turns out not to be a label or a moment in history but a feeling: confidence captured on film.

Published twenty-five years ago, before every photograph was comprised of pixels and lived in the cloud rather than physical albums, one might wonder if a book like Height of Fashion could be made in 2025. The concept is contemporary, but the materiality of each individual photograph is anything but. Today, we casually document everything because we can. The devices in our pockets contain thousands of choices to answer the book’s prompt. With that gluttony of choice, how does anyone select that one outfit, that one moment so perfect it needed to be preserved in emulsion on paper.

Text by David Kasprzak

Published by Greybull Press, 2000, Hardcover, 232 pages, 9.25” x 10.75”