OVER THE TOP
Helena Rubinstein: Extraordinary Style
Beauty, Art, Fashion, and Design
By Suzanne Slesin

This lavishly illustrated volume opens a window onto the world of the most extravagant and wide-ranging stylemaker of the last century, a pioneer in the cosmetics industry who was celebrated for the daring and prescience of her art collecting, her home decoration, and her personal couture. Four hundred glorious images and a meticulously researched text, as well as sixteen short essays by renowned experts, authoritatively trace the life of Helena Rubinstein.

Rubinstein's bold and influential flair for decor—sleekly modern at times, and at other times a wildly eclectic sampling from different eras—was showcased globally in her beauty salons and in her sprawling residences in New York, Paris, and in glamorous rural locales. On these projects “Madame” worked with prominent architects and designers such as Donald Deskey, Paul Frankl, Ernö Goldfinger, David Hicks, and Louis Suüe. An astute art collector, she invested in artists just as they began their ascent: her vast selection included tapestries by Picasso and Rouault, paintings by Degas, Dufy, Matisse, Miró, Modigliani, and Monet, murals by Dalí, dozens of sculptures by Elie Nadelman and Brancusi, and ground-breaking collections of Primitive paintings, opaline glass, period furniture, and African tribal figures.

Her striking instinct for fashion (she wore Worth and Poiret at first, and Balenciaga and Saint Laurent sixty years later) and her famous overscaled jewelry kept her in the public eye, decade after decade. Rubinstein's vibrant character is captured here in works by photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Brassaï, André Kertész, Dora Maar, and Man Ray—many of them never-before- published images.

Flamboyant and decisive, Helena Rubinstein died in 1965 at the age of ninety-four, and her huge collections were quickly dispersed. But in these pages her world comes alive again: Over the Top is a unique record of nearly a hundred years of the passionate life and style of this self-made entrepreneur.

 

Suzanne Slesin is an internationally known home-design journalist. She was a reporter and an editor for the Home section of the New York Times before becoming Design Editor of House & Garden and Editor-in-Chief of HomeStyle. She was the co-author of High-Tech and the Style Books series including French Style, English Style, Caribbean Style, and Japanese Style, all published by Clarkson Potter. She was also the co-author of the Every Day Things series for Abbeville Press and Harry N. Abrams. Slesin lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

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