Book excerpt: Inventive, glamorous, gorgeous - since the beginning VOGUE has set the platinum standard for fashion magazines the world over and has become an icon in its own right. VOGUE's covers sum up the superlative visual ideals of the whole magazine. For the first time, this book brings together in one volume nearly a century of covers both illustrated and photographic. Over two hundred stunning images have been selected from an archive of more than fifteen hundred. What sets VOGUE's covers apart is that each is so bold, so beautiful and so emphatically different. They mark the course of history, chart changing fashions and ideas of beauty and hold up a mirror to the cultural and social revolutions of the twentieth century. Since 1916 VOGUE's covers have celebrated the most striking women of our age, captured by the century's leading photographers, the greatest artists and the most inventive fashion. Brilliant, captivating and full of life, this is the face of the world's most influential magazine and the original style bible.