NOVEDADES

Nothing compares to the Alps” wrote the great French historian Jules Michelet in 1868. At the very heart of Europe, the gigantic Alpine mountain range includes some of the most grandiose natural sites in the world, such as Mont Blanc, the Jungfrau, the Matterhorn, and their glaciers. Tourism began in the late 1800s and grew tremendously over the next centuries, especially with the rise of winter sports. This book offers a charming tour of a bygone era, when the first mountain trains and cog railways were carrying men in lederhosen and women in long dresses to the foot of the glacier, when local guides accompanied tourists riding on mules; a time when the first alpinists were considered mad, and skiers were a curiosity.

The Kisokaido route through Japan was ordained in the early 1600s by the country’s then-ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu, who decreed that staging posts be installed along the length of the arduous passage between Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Kyoto. Inns, shops, and restaurants were established to provide sustenance and lodging to weary travelers. In 1835, renowned woodblock print artist Keisai Eisen was commissioned to create a series of works to chart the Kisokaido journey. After producing 24 prints, Eisen was replaced by Utagawa Hiroshige, who completed the series of 70 prints in 1838.

In the 1980, fashion wanted to make a statement and found in legendary British fashion photographer David Bailey its perfect chronicler. After Bailey shaped the style of the Swinging Sixties, fashion in the eighties posed a new challenge: brighter colours, higher glamour, statuesque models, extreme makeup, spandex, lycra, jumpsuits, power dressing, big hair, and as Grace Coddington puts it in her introduction, “jackets with padded shoulders over the shortest mini-skirts and dangerously high-heeled shoes.”