The Catwalk Cats

For more than 20 years, the fashion powerhouses Grace Coddington and Didier Malige have lived together with a menagerie of incorrigible cats. This delightful, giftworthy book records their relationship through photographs (Malige’s) and drawings (Coddington’s) that document the couple’s highly entertaining private and work lives through the eyes of their feline friends. These include Henri, an old-school, catnip-addicted, surfing chartreuse; his sister Coco, a couture-obsessed chartreuse on a sashimi diet; and her pal Baby, who doesn’t quite share Coco’s discipline, and will, sadly, never fit into a sample size. Then there’s Puff, a mixed-up long-hair from Harlem whose curiosity–anyone for fortune-telling at Dave?–hasn’t killed him yet; and finally Bart, the Persian youngster who would rather sit on the rooftop terrace than in the front row. The Catwalk Cats, a visual diary introduced by the irrepressible Puff, gives us a window into four madcap seasons in the life of this fabulous furry brigade, with sections devoted to the Collections, the Campaigns, and, of course, the Catfights. At once delightful and dishy, it is both a convincing argument for the fundamental similarities between felines and fashionistas and a moving meditation on love and life as a family.