With Soul And With Style

Best known for his haunting novel "The Sheltering Sky," the author and musical composer Paul Bowles was born in New York, left for Paris at 18 and lived most of his years in Morocco with his wife, Jane. For Bowles, the consummate individualist, the North African desert offered liberation from societal constraints. He died last week in a Tangier hospital at the age of 88.

His photo sessions could take days, and their results were unmistakable: the skin of his models smooth as marble, props arranged in careful counterpoint to the figures. Horst P. Horst, born Horst Paul Albert Bohrman in Germany, died last week in Florida at 93. Shooting everyone from Coco Chanel to Andy Warhol, his lens became one of the century's great codifiers of glamour, fashion and celebrity.

Alexander Liberman, who died last week at 87, spent more than three decades as editorial director of Conde Nast and created the almost universal look of today's glossies. He turned Vogue from a book of clothes into a bible of style and Vanity Fair into a magazine as colorful and decadent as its name suggests. Until his semiretirement in 1994, not one cover or major layout in a Conde Nast publication could run without his approval.

© 1999