Japanese Beauties (Icons)

Rating:
Summary: Eastern glamor
Review: Taschen continues their inexpensive pictorial Icons series with this edition devoted to Far Eastern ladies taken from Japanese printed material. It covers images from 1900 to 1970 and basically concentrates on faces but the surrounding Japanese typography and graphics are also included from the original printed source.

Author Alex Gross writes in the introduction that the use of women in print took off in the Taisho period (1912 to 1926) and it became common to see smiling beauties used to sell products. By the sixties, as in the West, glamour was a standard ingredient to promote anything but because of many years of American forces occupation advertising and marketing developed a sort of hybrid East West beauty.

As is usual with the Icon series there are no captions to the dozens of pictures so you'll just have to guess what faces belong to ads, posters, packaging or magazine covers but it is clear looking through the pages to see the changes from a traditional looking Japanese beauty (the hairstyle is a giveaway) to a more modern looking miss.

This all-color little paperback will interest designers and pop culture fans.

Rating:
Summary: Eastern glamor
Review: Taschen continues their inexpensive pictorial Icons series with this edition devoted to Far Eastern ladies taken from Japanese printed material. It covers images from 1900 to 1970 and basically concentrates on faces but the surrounding Japanese typography and graphics are also included from the original printed source.

Author Alex Gross writes in the introduction that the use of women in print took off in the Taisho period (1912 to 1926) and it became common to see smiling beauties used to sell products. By the sixties, as in the West, glamour was a standard ingredient to promote anything but because of many years of American forces occupation advertising and marketing developed a sort of hybrid East West beauty.

As is usual with the Icon series there are no captions to the dozens of pictures so you'll just have to guess what faces belong to ads, posters, packaging or magazine covers but it is clear looking through the pages to see the changes from a traditional looking Japanese beauty (the hairstyle is a giveaway) to a more modern looking miss.

This all-color little paperback will interest designers and pop culture fans.