Women of Singular Beauty

This rare collection of Cathleen Naundorf's high fashion photography-shot exclusively for this book-focuses on Chanel haute couture.

Photographer Cathleen Naundorf gained exclusive access to Chanel's physical archives to handpick gowns and photograph them against theatrical backdrops of her own design. The result: a unique book of ethereal, cinematic photographs that capture the exquisiteness of their haute couture ensembles--creations that entail thousands of hours of handwork, crafting, embellishing, finishing. This is a must-have book for any fashion lover and devotees of the haute couture world.

For over two decades, Naundorf has used her expert photographic skills to pay homage to the haute couture aesthetic. Her seven-year series Un Rêve de Mode, using gowns pulled from haute couture archives of the leading European houses of fashion including Chanel, Dior, Gaultier, Valentino, and Lacroix, was hailed as one of the first great works of fashion photography in the twenty-first century. For this book, she turns her elaborate and cinematic productions to present world of Chanel. Granted exclusive access to the Chanel archives, Naundorf's images capture the magic and exquisiteness of their haute couture creations-works that require thousands of hours of detailed handwork, embellishing, and finishing.

About the Author

The widely traveled and globally renowned Cathleen Naundorf is a French-German photographer who is known for her inimitable and ethereal high fashion photography. Naundorf worked as a photo assistant in New York, Paris, and Singapore in the early 1990s. She then began work in photojournalism, covering tribal cultures and ethnic groups in such places as the Gobi Dessert, Mongolia, Siberia, and Brazil. After meeting Horst P. Horst, Naundorf's career path changed direction toward the fashion industry. In 1997, she began taking backstage pictures at Paris fashion shows for Conde Nast. Since 2005, she has worked on her Haute Couture series Un Reve de Mode, for which she was granted exclusive access to the archives of Chanel, Dior, Gaultier, Lacroix, Elie Saab, and Valentino.

Naundorf's photographs have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers. Her work has been exhibited in Europe and America, including London's Hamiltons Gallery and New York's and Zurich's Edwynn Houk Gallery. Since 2011, Naundorf has worked privately with Valentino on such notable projects as An Italian Story and The New York City Ballet.