Fleur's flight of fancy

These facsimile pages (beautifully printed) from the twelve issues of Flair are a celebration of Fleur Cowles zest for creativity in culture and the arts. The 338 pages must have been a challenge for the Hong Kong printers, they had to cope with various foldout pages, die-cut holes, different paper stock and bind in several short pages, two concertina foldouts and five sixteen-page booklets.

Sumptuous though the book is I feel that Flair is resting in its reputation. To my mind, having worked as a publication art director, the photos, typography and layouts are very conservative and do not show any particular innovative design. Federico Pallavicini was responsible for the design (though uncredited) he was more used to painting and theatre set design rather than typography and page layout. Other magazines and designers were much more creative in the fifties, 'Fortune' with Will Burtin, 'Glamour' with Cipe Pineless, 'Harper's Bazaar' with Alexey Brodovitch and 'Vogue' with Alexander Liberman. Certainly, the covers with their die-cut holes (sadly only six of the twelve are included) and the bound-in booklets were unique to consumer magazines at the time but I think that Flair should be remembered as a magazine concept rather than a magazine full of creativity.

Fleur Cowles writes a short piece about the origins of Flair (handwritten in gold on dark blue paper) but does not give enough detail (I believe each issue involved several printers and binders) and as there were only twelve issues a list of all the articles should have been included. The high price (reassuringly expensive?) and the cloth-covered box the book comes in reflects snob appeal, I agree but I'm still pleased to have a copy.