Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

For decades, Grace Coddington's personal touch has steered wildly imaginative fashion spreads in Vogue magazine. Then came The September Issue , the behind-the-scenes documentary that turned the spotlight on a woman with a no-nonsense attitude and an unerring visual instinct. Overnight, the flame-haired Grace became a heroine for fashion insiders and the general public alike.

Witty and forthright, and illustrated throughout with vintage photographs and exclusive line-drawings, Grace: A Memoir shares the excitement and vision that go into producing so many unforgettable fashion images. Here are the designers, models, photographers, hairstylists, make-up artists and celebrities with whom Grace has created her 'stories in pictures' - whether it be Jerry Hall conquering the USSR or Tom Ford falling down a rabbit hole in Annie Leibovitz's version of Alice in Wonderland .

Grace's own life has been as dreamlike as one of her madcap fashion spreads. Brought up in windswept wartime Anglesey, she arrived in London, aged eighteen, and quickly became a face of the Sixties. The muse behind Vidal Sassoon's Five Point Cut, she posed for Bailey, Donovan, Duffy and Norman Parkinson in Swinging London and jumped into a pool in Saint-Tropez for Helmut Newton. Surviving a serious car-crash, she later became a fashion editor at British Vogue and during the Seventies and the Eighties started to create the fantasy travelogues that would become her trademark.

Friendships bloomed - with Bruce Weber and Calvin Klein, whose offer of a job took Grace to New York. While two early marriages to restaurateur Michael Chow and photographer Willie Christie were brief, her romance with the hairstylist Didier Malige has endured. And her professional partnership with Anna Wintour - with whom she has collaborated for over twenty years - continues to have an astonishing influence on modern style.

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i On Growing Up In which the winds howl, the waves crash, the rain pours down, and our lonely heroine dreams of being Audrey Hepburn. There were sand dunes in the distance and rugged monochrome cliffs strung out along the coast. And druid circles. And hardly any trees. And bleakness. Although it was bleak, I saw beauty in its bleakness. There was a nice beach, and I had a little sailboat called Argo that I used to drift about in for hours in grand seclusion when it was not tethered to a small rock in a horseshoe-shaped cove called Trearddur Bay. I was fifteen then, my head filled with romantic fantasies, some fueled by the mystic spirit of Anglesey, the thinly populated island off the fogbound northern coast of Wales where I was born and raised; some by the dilapidated cinema I visited each Saturday afternoon in the underwhelming coastal town of Holyhead, a threepenny bus ride away, where the boats took off across the Irish Sea for Dublin and the Irish passengers seemed never short of a drink. Or two. Or three or four. For my first eighteen years, the Trearddur Bay Hotel, run by my family, was my only home, a plain building with whitewashed walls and a sturdy gray slate roof, long and low, with the unassuming air of an elongated bungalow. This thirty-two-room getaway spot of quiet charm was appreciated mostly by holidaymakers who liked to sail, go fishing, or take long, bracing cliff-top walks rather than roast themselves on a sunny beach. It was not overendowed with entertainment facilities, either. No television. No room service. And in most cases, not even the luxury of an en suite bathroom with toilet, although generously sized white china chamber pots were provided beneath each guest bed, and some rooms--the deluxe versions--contained a washbasin. A lineup of three to four standard bathrooms on the first floor provided everyone else's washing facilities. For the entire hotel there was a single chambermaid, Mrs. Griffiths, a sweet little old lady in a black dress and white apron equipped with a duster and a carpet sweeper. I remember my mother being quite taken aback by a guest who took a bath and rang the bell for the maid to set about cleaning the tub. Why wouldn't the visitors scrub it out themselves after use? she wondered. Our little hotel had three lounges, each decorated throughout in an incongruous mix of the homely and the grand, the most imposing items originating from my father's ancestral home in the Midlands. At an early age, I discovered that the Coddingtons of Bennetston Hall, the family seat in Derbyshire, had an impressive history that included at least two wealthy Members of Parliament, my grandfather and great-grandfather, and stretched back sufficiently into the past to come complete with an ancient family crest--a dragon with flames shooting out of its mouth--and a family motto, "Nils Desperandum" (Never Despair). And so, although some communal rooms remained modest and simple, the dining room was furnished with huge, inherited antique wooden sideboards decorated with carved pheasants, ducks, and grapes, and the Blue Room contained a satinwood writing desk hand-painted with cherubs. A large library holding hundreds of beautiful leather-bound books housed many display drawers of seashells, and various species of butterfly and beetle. There was a grand piano in the music room (from my mother's side of the family), and paintings in gilded frames--dark family portraits--hanging everywhere else. Guests would rise with the sun and retire to bed at nightfall. If they needed to use the telephone, there was a public booth in the bar. There was a single lunchtime sitting at one o'clock and another at seven p.m. for dinner, with only two waiters to serve on each occasion. Tea was upon request. Breakfast was served between nine and nine-thirty in the dining room--and certainly never in the bedroom. There was also a games room with a Ping-Pong table where I practiced and practiced. I was good. Very good. I would beat all the guests, which didn't go down too well with my parents. The sand on the long, damp beige ribbon of beach in front of the hotel was reasonably fine-grained but did get a bit pebbly as you approached the icy Irish Sea slapping against the shore. You could, however, paddle out for a fair distance before it became freezingly knee-deep. Throughout my childhood I longed for the lushness of trees. Barely one broke the rocky surface on our side of the island. Only when we paid the occasional family visit to my father's aunt Alice in her big, shaded house on the south side would we ever see them in numbers. My great-aunt was extremely frail and old, so I always think of her as being about a hundred. Her house was close to the small town of Beaumaris, which had a huge social life in the 1930s. My parents met there, as my mother lived nearby with her family in a sprawling house called Trecastle. Flanking our hotel on one side was a gray seascape of cliffs, rocks, and bulrushes, then acres of windswept country and a lobster fisherman's dwelling, and on the other Trearddur House, a prestigious prep school for boys. Once I reached the age when boys became of interest, I used to linger shyly, watching them play football or cricket beyond the gray flinty stone wall bordering their playing fields until I arrived at the bus stop and took off on my winding journey to school. We were open from May to October but the hotel was guaranteed to be one hundred percent full only during the relatively sunny month of August, the time of the school summer holidays. Many vacationing families from the not too distant towns of Liverpool and Manchester made the effort to come and stay with us because, although it might have been easier for them to reach the more accessibly popular holiday spots of North Wales, our charming beach and village were that much more individual. At other times we were mostly empty or visited by parents who had come to join their sons for special events at the school. Each year tumultuous clouds and fierce equinox gales announced the end of summer. A mad scramble then ensued to rescue all the little wooden sailing boats about in the bay belonging to the locals that bobbed. Llewellyn, the lobster fisherman, was in charge of having them hauled out of the sea and beached beneath the protective seawall. All winter long, while we were closed, thick mists enveloped us and rough seas pounded our shoreline. The entire place became desolate. On foggy nights you could hear the sad moan of a foghorn coming from the nearby lighthouse. It hardly ever snowed, but it rained most of the time: a constant drizzle that made the atmosphere incredibly damp, the kind of dampness that gets into your bones. So damp that, as a child, I swear I used to ache all over from rheumatism. In the afternoons, I took long walks along the cliffs with Chuffy, my mother's Yorkshire terrier, and Mackie, my sister's Scottie. Stormy waves foamed and crashed over the gray rocks along the seafront, and if you missed your timing, you were liable to come in for a complete drenching whenever you dashed between them. Throughout the endless weeks of winter, the hotel was so deserted it wasn't worth the bother of switching on the lights. My sister and I would play ghosts. Wrapped in white sheets, we hid along the dark, empty corridors, each containing many mysterious, shadowy doorways from which you could jump out and say, "Boo!" We would wait and wait, the silence broken only by the tick-tock, tick-tock, of our big grandfather clock. But in the end, I couldn't stand the gloom, the suspense of waiting, the sinister ticking. It was too scary, so I usually fled to the warmth and comfort of the fireside. I was born on the twentieth of April 1941 in the early part of World War II, the same year the Nazis engulfed Yugoslavia and Greece. I was christened Pamela Rosalind Grace Coddington. My elder sister Rosemary, or Rosie for short, was the one who choose Pamela as my registered first name, which then became abbreviated to Pam by most people we knew. Marion, my maternal grandmother, was a Canadian opera singer who had fallen in love with my grandfather while visiting Wales on a singing tour. He followed her back to Canada, where they married and where my mother and her brother and sister were born. For a while they lived on Vancouver Island, which was heavily wooded and filled with bears. Then they moved back permanently to Anglesey, where my grandmother grew more and more morose and wrote terribly sad poetry. I'm told my grandfather was somewhat extreme when it came to what he perceived as correct behavior. Apparently, he once locked my grandmother in the downstairs bathroom--which he had designated for gentlemen only--for an entire day when she had used it in an emergency. Janie, my mother, inherited this strict, no-nonsense Victorian attitude and believed that children should be seen and not heard. She demanded absolute obedience but never lost her temper or raised her voice. It was a given that I would make my bed and tidy my room, and that I had my chores to fulfill. She was the strong, stoic one who held our family together. Photographs of her from the 1920s show a sleek and prosperous-looking woman. She drew and painted rather well in watercolors and played the piano and the Spanish guitar. Welsh--although she preferred to think of herself as English--she could trace the family lineage back to the Black Prince. (In fact, we weren't encouraged to think of ourselves as Welsh at all; more as foreigners, émigrés from Derbyshire.) Excerpted from Grace: A Memoir by Grace Coddington All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

"Don't expect me to be in it," was what Coddington, Vogue's creative director, said when her boss Anna Wintour told her that R.J. Cutler was making a documentary about the fashion bible (2007's The September Issue). Coddington, ever shy and diligent, was not only in it, but became the film's heroine by standing for creative expression and old-fashioned practices rooted in her deep appreciation for the fundamentals of fashion (she's one of the few remaining fashion editors to dress her own models). This preciously illustrated and honest memoir is written in a delightful colloquial style that will appeal to fashion insiders and average readers. Coddington weaves a story with fairytale beginnings (she clipped modeling school coupons while poring over outdated issues of British Vogue.), some drama (A car accident almost took her life, led to five surgeries and ended her modeling career.), and humorous tidbits (a "raccoon incident" during lunch with Wintour at the Four Seasons, or the time Coddington, who has never asked for a raise in her life, was mistaken for an assistant during an early visit to Conde Nast.) What's a woman who has worked with all the top photographers and models to do? Keep creating the exquisite fantasy worlds she's known for, of course. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Coddington, creative director of the American Vogue magazine, has much to impart (which she has done before in Grace: 30 Years of Fashion at Vogue, 2002, and The Catwalk Cats, 2008). Fashionistas, rejoice, because not only does she chronicle the life and times of a former model turned editor; she also discusses those whose names appear in any celebrity column photographers such as Annie Leibovitz and Bruce Weber, models like Naomi Campbell, and the Calvin Klein and French couture maitres. What saves this from becoming a download of the activities of the rich and famous is, first, her amazing candor. We learn, for instance, that marriages don't agree with her, that her sister Rosemary died of a combination OD-hospital malfeasance issue, and that editor-in-chief Anna Wintour is not as portrayed in The Devil Wears Prada. And, second, her charming and lively pen-and-ink illustrations grace every chapter and almost every page. Just what you would ask for from a revered behind-the-scenes magazine editor is what you get here.--Jacobs, Barbara Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

A lively glimpse of the fashion industry and the characters behind it from American Vogue creative director Coddington. The author begins with her childhood in Wales, but the memoir really comes to life when she describes her modeling days in London. Her big break came early, when a contest landed her in Vogue. Coddington expresses nostalgia for the carefree world of fashion in the 1960s, before the supermodels and celebrities arrived. During that time, there were no makeup artists, and models arrived with a suitcase of their own hair products and accessories. Coddington's descriptions and illustrations bring that world to life. Even though her modeling career was interrupted with a disfiguring car accident, she dove back in once she healed. Her stylist career started with British Vogue, and she later moved to Calvin Klein in America and then to American Vogue when Anna Wintour became the editor-in-chief. The author provides intriguing portraits of Karl Lagerfeld and other big names, but she focuses mostly on Wintour's public persona. Coddington's personal life plays second fiddle to her role in the fashion industry. She mentions her boyfriends and her two husbands, but she glides through her relationships with them. Coddington's tone is incredibly blunt. For example, she lets her envy of Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, another stylist at American Vogue who was also in favor with Wintour, seep through the narrative. Great read for those interested in events in the fashion industry and the personalities who shape it.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.