Language:Chinese.HardCover. Pub Date: October 2011 Publisher: Simon & Schuster 0 Charlotte Smith is Curator of The Darnell Collection. She was born in Hong Kong to an English mother and an American father. She grew up with her brother and sister on the east coast of America and graduated with a degree in Art History from Hollins College in Virginia. Charlotte has worked for art dealers, ran her own business manufacturing decorative lampshades and was the proprietor of a French country antiques shop. Her interests include horse riding, interior decorating, writing and gardening. She has lived and worked in America, England, France and and now resides in Australia, in the Blue Mountains with her daughter. Charlotte's fascination with fashion began with a special vintage dress at the age of three. Since inheriting her godmother's vast vintage clothing collection, her passion for fashion has grown to include the history of fashion and its significant impact on society. Charlotte is involved with exhibitions of her collection around the country, gives lectures and talks, works with fashion and design students and is featured on television and radio. Grant Cowan has worked as an illustrator on magazines like Harper’s Bazaar , Glamour and Red magazine. He studied fashion design and lived in London before moving to Australia to teach fashion illustration. Grant is a freelance fashion illustrator and works with fashion schools in Sydney. I have to confess that when my American godmother Doris Darnell told me her priceless vintage clothing collection was on its way across the world to me, I was more than a little daunted. Doris’s collection had been a lifetime labour of love for her, more precious than any treasure I knew of, and she had chosen me as custodian. Never in my wildest dreams could I have predicted how much this precious legacy would change my life, mind lead me to writing my first book, Dreaming of Dior . It all began when I opened the first box at my home in the Blue Mountains to find an exquisite gossamer silk 1920s evening gown shimmering with the most intricately beautiful beadwork I had ever seen. I had unearthed my first treasure. I was instantly enchanted, as Doris knew I would be. Doris was the ultimate fairy godmother. When I was growing up near Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, I was a regular visitor at Doris and Howard’s townhouse. As soon as I arrived Doris and I would climb the impossibly narrow and steep staircase to the top floor and lose ourselves for an hour or two amid her latest acquisitions and old favourites. For me this was where magic happened, brought alive by Doris’s wonderful stories about the dresses and the women who wore them. Spanning two hundred and five years, from 1790 to 1995, her collection is a journey through fashion history encompassing famous couturiers like Dior, Chanel and Vionnet. But not one piece was purchased by her. They are all gifts from friends and acquaintances who either knew or had heard of her legendary ‘hobby’. As the Quaker saying goes, every piece was ‘given in love and in trust’. Doris was a Quaker her whole life, and while her passion for clothes and accessories was frowned upon as immodest and frivolous by other practising Quakers, her passion remained as irrepressible as her character. Doris devoted the last few decades of her life to sharing her collection with the world. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Doris became well known throughout the East Coast of the United States and beyond for her ‘living fashion’ talks, which she would give in museums, college halls and even on cruises around the world, including the QEII , donating her speaking fees to the Quaker Society of Friends. Doris’s audiences were invariably so enchanted by her shows that they would donate some of their own treasures to the collection. And so the collection continued to grow, more and more stories were added to share, until the baton was passed on to me. The treasures that lay before me were worth a fortune. Selling them would set me up for life, but enticing as that thought was, I could never consider such a thing or the idea of them being broken up by donation to museums or other collections. I still had no idea what to do with the collection, but somehow, like Doris, I would find a way to share it and to keep it growing. Then, among the last of Doris’s boxes, I found her catalogue notes of all her stories, of the dresses and the women who wore them. It was then that the true value of what I had been bequeathed hit home. This wasn’t a mere collection of beautiful things, it was a collection of life. Women’s lives. Tiny snapshots of our joys and disappointments, our entrances and exits, triumphant and tragic. This is how my first book, Dreaming of Dior , was born. It was the perfect way to share these stories, including Doris’s and mine, along with the collection. The response to my book was beyond my wildest dreams. Strangers came up to