The celebrated designer’s latest book, devoted to gleaning design inspiration from the personal scrapbooks and notebooks of great women of style—including her own. Interior designer Charlotte Moss has spent years collecting as well as creating scrapbooks—a pastime both meditative and instructive about her own ideas regarding design and style. In this unique book, Moss brings together her own scrapbooks along with those of notable women, both contemporary and historical, whose flair for style inspires us, including interior designer Elsie de Wolfe and society doyenne Gloria Vanderbilt—all never before published. Organized by theme—home, garden, travel, entertaining, and fashion—each chapter includes examples of Moss’s signature style mingled with excerpts from the scrapbooks of these great women. From the ambassador’s wife and bon vivant Evangeline Bruce, we learn that she preferred accessorizing tabletops with simple florets of broccoli in biscuit tins. And from the iconic Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, we see her notes and menus from the legendary White House dinners she threw. One piece (among many) of sage advice includes perfecting one extraordinary meal and serving it again and again, rather than experimenting endlessly.
Scrapbook “Book” Have been a fan of Charlotte Moss for ages and have purchased all of her books. This last one is particularly interesting because I have been doing scrapbooks for a very long time. Beautiful book with gorgeous photographs – also many beautiful photos of France and gardens and chateaux. A must buy!
Take the title seriously. It really IS fundamentally a scrapbook full of collages if you like that sort of thing If you are both a scrapbooker and a fan of the designs of Charlotte Moss, you will probably truly love this book. Although I adore her design work, I don’t really care for the scrapbook/collage format. Although I admired many of the individual images, I found the scrapbook/collage format rather messy and overwhelming, with pages that often appeared to be somewhat “thrown together”. I can’t say I wasn’t warned, however: the words “scrapbooks, collages”, etc. are in the title, so it is…
the perfect gift, in several senses What a wonderful find! Charlotte Moss’s “A Visual Life: Scrapbooks, Collages, and Inspiration” is a book that offers us, and anyone to whom we gift it, the inspiration to enrich our lives with color, visual juxtapositions, and a use of resources both sublime and mundane. Indeed, it is so likely that we will return to it innumerable times that we should be grateful that the publisher embedded the colorful covers right into the book’s structure rather than opting for a fragile dust…