09-05-2025
Tennis, trinkets and tailoring: luxury books for summer 2025
Is beauty ephemeral or is it transience itself that we find beautiful, something that is there one moment, gone the next, like youth, blossom or a sunset? It is this notion that these books explore, how an overgrown tennis court can evoke powerful sense memories of games past, how a pioneering photographic technique was able to capture colours and textures in fashion and fabrics which will themselves now have faded or been lost, the permanence of jewellery — solid and precious — but somehow holding within it all the people that have worn it, all the parties it has been to.
Beauty and ephemerality are also addressed in a monumental monograph on the American Abstract Impressionist, Helen Frankenthaler, who was painting, experimenting, transforming, until her death at 83, her vivid essence still available to us via her transcendently beautiful canvases.
By Cally Blackman, £75, Thames and Hudson
The Lumière Brothers launched the autochrome photography process in 1907, offering an accessible means to capture colour images. The historian Cally Blackman uses this as a lens to examine how fashion changed over the 30 years that autochromes were in use.
The book offers about 370 rarely seen photographs, such as sumptuous images of Fortuny's yellow Delphos dress, a coral satin boudoir gown, cerise embroidered stockings and ivory-coloured lace. We see how fashion evolved from the blouses and extravagant hats of the corseted Edwardian era, via the exotic fringing of the Roaring Twenties, to the unstructured silhouettes and dropped waistlines that emerged later that decade. One of the benefits of the process was the accuracy of its colour representation and its immutability — the image was captured on a glass plate inside the camera and could not be enhanced. But for all their clarity of tone, autochromes possess a gauzy quality, which has influenced our nostalgic vision of the belle époque, Gilded Age and Twenties, when in fact these decades were 'characterised by rupture, speed, industrialisation, mechanisation, modernisation, conflict and change'.To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
• How one night in Paris changed the face of fashion for ever
By Laura Bailey and Mark Arrigo, £50, Rizzoli
Tennis courts are rectangles of paradise that can be found around the world — or in this book. It's a passion project for Laura Bailey and the photographer Mark Arrigo, who travelled Europe seeking out its most benignly located courts: alongside the Tiber in Rome, beneath the mountains of Switzerland, secluded by woodlands in Sweden. There are modest inner-city courts and grand competition courts — all shown empty, which will make players long to get out on them.
The second half of the book has archive shots of famous tennis lovers (Mick Jagger, Audrey Hepburn, Brooke Shields), and testimonials from the game's heroes such as Billie Jean King. Christiane Amanpour writes about the Imperial Country Club in pre-revolutionary Tehran. Bella Pollen recalls the court at her family home in the Cotswolds, overlooked by an encroaching weeping willow, where her father would play in cowboy boots and flared jeans. Sam Taylor-Johnson explains the importance of colour-coordinated socks: 'Jump in the air and feel alive,' she exhorts. A tenth of proceeds go to the LTA Tennis order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
• Super-watches loved by the world's best tennis players
Edited by Helen Molesworth and Rachel Garrahan, £40, V&A Publishing
Maison Cartier has long had an affinity with England, its royals, aristocrats and arrivistes. The story of these interactions form some of the most interesting elements of this book accompanying a show at the V&A.
Cartier opened its first London boutique in 1902. A year later the Dowager Duchess of Manchester, a Cuban-American heiress who had married a British aristocrat, commissioned the Manchester Tiara, with 1,000 brilliant-cut diamonds that exemplified the appeal of Cartier jewels to a new social set. The book includes drawings, essays and glittering images of the jewels — the diamond and onyx panthers, the 1940 Flamingo brooch worn by the Duchess of Windsor, the Williamson Diamond brooch with its rare 23.6ct pink diamond, given to Elizabeth II as a wedding gift.
By the late Sixties and early Seventies the centre of aesthetic gravity had moved to New York, where Aldo Cipullo created his classic Love bangle with its screw motif and the Juste un Clou nail design. Come for the tiaras, stay for the nail bracelet. To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
• Kings of bling — why royals and pop stars all bow down before Cartier
By John Elderfield, £115, Gagosian/Helen Frankenthaler Foundation
This is a vastly expanded update of the MoMA curator and former Princeton lecturer's substantial study of the groundbreaking American abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, first published in 1989. Frankenthaler (1928-2011) created art for six decades, and this learned book spanning nearly 500 pages covers her career with a focus on her artistic progression, 'the processes of her pictorial imagination'.
• The women who prove abstract expressionism was more than just a man's game
Her grand canvases explode with colour and ambiguous meaning and she pioneered new techniques and movements, such as colour field painting. Frankenthaler and Elderfield were friends, and she spent hours talking to him for the book about how she sought to create 'something that looks as if it was born all at once'. Some of the most fascinating paintings here are those inspired by old masters, with the original shown side by side with Frankenthaler's response. But for all their richness, the many colour plates featured can only hint at the extraordinary experience of standing in front of one of the original order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
