W[omen]. M[en]

First edition, one of 5000. This copy inscribed by Ritts to prominent fashion editor and friend Polly Allen Mellen, as follows "For Polly, A million thanks for sharing your wonderful energy and undaunted spirit with me, You're a one of a kind and a true friend-Much love always and forever-xxxooo, Herb 1989."The first volume is devoted to the female form, the second to the male

Polly Allen Mellen (1924-) was a fashion editor and stylist who worked for Harper's Bazaar (under Diana Vreeland) and later Vogue (under Vreeland and Grace Mirabella), her career spanning over sixty years. She served as a nurse's aide during WWII and moved to New York in 1949. At Harper's Bazaar she met her future longtime collaborator Richard Avedon, who initially found Mellen "too noisy." In time, however, Avedon would describe her as "the most creative sittings editor I ever worked with." Mellen's work at Harper's and later Vogue, Nicolas Ghesquiere has argued, came to "define a new, more modern ethos about clothes and how women wore them. With an almost playful daring, [the ethos] brimmed with a kind of strong, smart, unabashedly celebratory feminine independence-as well as an artful element of provocation and extravagance-that Mellen herself embodied and drew upon in her collaborations" (Ghesquiere, Polly Mellen.) Over the course of her career, Mellen worked with such photographers as Helmut Newton, Avedon, Arthur Elgort, Irving Penn, Steven Meisel, and Mario Testino. Polly and Henry Wigglesworth Mellen (1920-2014) married in 1965. 

Herb Ritts (1952-2002) was known for his celebrity portraiture and evocative nudes of the 1980s and 90s, graduated from Bard, launched his career with images of actor Richard Gere, directed music videos for Janet Jackson, Madonna and Chris Isaak, and died an early death from complications from AIDS. He was honored by a major retrospective show at J. Paul Getty Museum in 2012.