STEPHEN CALLOWAY

Now available for the first time in paperback, this extraordinary book examines the ‘culture of excess’ in all its twentieth-century manifestations. Fashion, film, photography, design and decoration: all feature in Stephen Calloway’s consideration of the colourful, the opulent and the theatrical. The author examines early examples of Baroque excess – by the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean and others – as well as the darker Baroque spirit of the wartime Neo-Romantics or film-makers such as Fellini and Jarman. Tracing the Baroque tendency into the 1990s, he shows how ideas have cross-fertilized, providing links between such unlikely bedfellows as Leon Bakst and Luis Buñuel, Coco Chanel and Nigel Coates, Liberace and Lacroix. Illustrated with a wealth of photographs, this book provides a celebration that is truly Baroque.