Customer Reviews

A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life In Fashion, Art, and Letters

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When you crack open a 500 page book, it better be good. This biography of Harper's Bazaar fashion editor Carmel Snow is everything a heavy tome should be: entertaining, insightful, and thouroughly researched. The writing style is a perfect match for the subject matter: Penelope Rowlands' prose is as sharply defined as a couture garment, and, as a result, reading her book is the next best thing to actually owning a Dior original.

But the most rewarding part of the book is the revelation that elegance is all about gutsiness. In fact, if you look objectively at the clothes women wore back then (the book is rife with photographic documents) all those proper little wool suits and belted silk dresses look quite frumpy in restrospect. But what poise those girls had! Where did their get their attitude? Reading A Dash of Daring is a lesson in real coolness.

This is a handsomely produced book, filled with wonderful photos, about a fascinating woman, the daughter of an Irish immigrant, who traveled the major capitals of the world and transformed Harper's Bazaar into one of the liveliest magazines of the 20th century. Clearly and elegantly written, the book is rife with wonderful anecdotes about major designers, writers, artists, movie stars, and grand eccentrics. Snow's was an extraordinary life, and Rowlands does it full justice while giving us a detailed portrait of the fashion world during its golden age.

"A Dash of Daring" is a biography that offers a comprehensive look at a fashion icon. The life of Carmel Snow should interest fashion connousseurs and others alike. This reader was especialy fascinated by the detailed description of life in war-torn Paris. It is relevant to the world today.

This beautifully produced and perceptive biography of Carmel Snow, arguably the greatest fashion editor who ever lived, is a sheer delight to read. The author focuses our gaze on both the biographical subject and the milieu in which Snow lived and worked. Penelope Rowland's impressive research and extensive interviews, combined with her sure touch as a storyteller, have yielded an engaging and compelling story.

A few years back author Penelope Rowlands published a very good book (a smell handbook) on the Irish designer Eileen Gray. Carmel Snow, also Irish, is the subject of Rowlands' new book, which has been just released in a fantastically designed package from Atria. It is an explosion of chic, with Louise Dahl-Wolfe photos seemingly on every page, and photos of Ms. Snow with Chanel, Balenciaga, this one, and that one. Rowlands interviewed dozens of Carmel Snow's intimates, including many members of her extended family, and seems to have traipsed around in Snow's footsteps for years, digging up the dirt as she found it. Finally, however, it boils down to, who was Carmel Snow? She was the editor of Harpers Bazaar, one of the noted fashion magazines of the 20th century, and she was a player in the world of fashion which showed French designers eventually having to make way for Americans in the field.

The late Richard Avedon, interviewed by Rowlands, sums up the difficulty accurately. Everyonw knows of Diana Vreeland, Snow's opposite number at VOGUE, while Carmel Snow is today a forgotten name. Even people who claim to have heard of her are usually, is pressed, found to have been thinking of someone else the whole time. You can't precisely say that Carmel Snow never did anything, but oddly little of her traces have been felt on history. Rowlands attempts to trace her wake in the various reputations of St. Laurent, Cecil Beaton, Truman Capote, Coco Chanel, Carson McCullers and many of the other bright lights Snow featured in HARPERS. But it isn't very convincing. Rowlands' writing is good, there's just not much there there. You know that song, "Here's to the Ladies who Lunch?" Reading A DASH OF DARING is like listening to that track, on repeat, for three or four days in a row. After you close the book you never, ever want to hear about Carmel Snow again. Or even snow again.

Avedon avers that Snow lived before the culture of celebrity really caught up to itself, so that someone like Diana Vreeland could become famous just for being herself, while Carmel Snow "retired" (translation, was booted out) before the 1960s, and thus she missed her chance at fame just by not being able to stick around as long as haggard ole Diana Vreeland did. However Rowlands is such a talented biographer that I would not be surprised to see a new round of interest in Carmel Snow, perhaps a movie version of her life. A perfect person to play her would be Joanne Woodward, or perhaps Marian Seldes.

I have bought many copies of this book to give to friends. I think it is a very special. It is a fascinating story, beautifully told. It is not just for those interested in fashion. It is a masterpiece of biography.

A very good biography of one of the legendary fashion editors of the 20th century. After reading 'Always in Vogue' by Edna Woolman Chase, her former boss, editor of Vogue and Bettina Ballard's own fashion biography this completes the picture of fashion in the 20th century. I enjoyed it, especially after seeing 'The Devil wears Prada' a couple of months ago. Having been in involved in Fashion as a designer and as a lecturer in design and creative cut for over 50 years it was also a trip down memory lane.
Stuart Aitken

Carmel Snow is an extraordinary subject and Ms. Rolands did a marvelous job in recementing her legendary status in the fashion industry. The research she did for this book is outstanding but her writing skills could be more polished at times. I feel that the size of the book could be trimmed down a little bit, perhaps they should split it into two books, one biography and one coffee table book of photographs and illustrations. Ms. Rolands' view are also very biased throughout the book. She tried to discredit all Carmel Snow's competitors and critics in order to show Snow's greatness. It's unnecessary as Snow's work certainly speaks for itself and her contribution to the fashion industry is unquestionable. I highly recommend this book for fashion historians and fashion students.

Before there was Anna Wintour and Diana Vreeland at Vogue there was Carmel Snow who began at Vogue and went on to make Harper's Bazaar the magazine of its time. (Vreeland began there before moving on to Vogue) Conde Naste took Carmel under his wing until she jumped to the Bazarr owned by his nemesis Wm. Randolph Hearst. The rivalry and poaching of employees back and forth was legendary. Anyone who wanted to be known had to be acknowledged and vetted by Carmel Snow and she covered fashion in Paris & America as if they were her life's blood. She nurtured many careers along the way (the photographer Richard Avedon, the novelist Truman Capote to name but a few.) If you enjoy literary, fashion or photography tidbits as well as magazine publishing in the years of growth and new techniques, this book is of infinite interest. Perhaps a little dry at times and understandably sanitized in the telling from relying on archives and letters for some key information. The fun is in the firsthand accounts along with the delicious stories passed down from the people who knew Carmel Snow and both feared and revered her.

This book has two key faults: the author's unobjective/uncritical assessment of her subject and an asleep-at-the-wheel editor. Carmel Snow seems to have been a fascinating and complex character, but the author's apparent idol/family-worship prevented her from viewing Mrs. Snow critically. That ultimately makes the Mrs. Snow presented in this book a one-dimensional character - "Aunt Carmel who worked like a man, didn't have much time for her family, etc." It would have been interesting to know, for example, why Bazaar's circulation numbers often didn't equal Vogue's, for all of the paeans to Mrs. Snow's editorial genius. What were the real, business reasons for the housecleaning at Bazaar after Mr. Hearst died? Mrs. Snow's alcoholism was almost entirely avoided until the very end, when it was presented as "Mrs. Snow liked to have several cocktails at lunch" and then noted only as the cause of a highly embarrassing social moment. Alcoholism doesn't happen overnight, as it seems to in this book, and it would have been interested to know what effect it had on her work. The book also suffers from the want of a good editor who could have eliminated the author's juvenile asides to the reader, e.g. "how to put it", "Pace, Nigella Lawson" etc.