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"  If you are Victoria Brynner and your father is the late movie star Yul Brynner, your earliest sartorial memories are much like those of other women: watching your mother transform into some dazzling, fragrant, nearly unrecognizable nocturnal self as she primps to go out for the evening; or studying her impossibly stylish friends, creatures who, with their valley-deep necklines and vertiginous heels, seem more exotic even than she. The particulars, however, are considerably more glamorous. Instead of sitting around a card table playing mah-jongg or bridge, your mother and her crowd were lounging around palatial houses and pools in Gstaad, Lausanne, the Costa del Sol, or the French Riviera. And your father, rather than buying your mother the single cashmere sweater she&amp;#039;d requested, brought her a suitcase full of cashmere twinsets in a rainbow of colors from one of the fancier boutiques in Lausanne.  You remember, at age eight, standing in the bathroom that belongs to your mother, the Chilean-raised model Doris Kleiner (Brynner&amp;#039;s second wife)\u2014a woman for whom dressing was nothing short of a religion and the vulgar nearly a sin\u2014and fastening her Valentino couture gown, a gauzy column of pastel layers, the most exquisite dress you have ever seen. (As you work your way up the bodice, your mother offers a lesson on quality: &amp;quot;Look how incredible, the way each loop fits into each little hook! Notice how beautifully it&amp;#039;s made.&amp;quot;) You remember the socialite Gloria Guinness, a &amp;quot;style dictator&amp;quot; who &amp;quot;tyrannized everybody,&amp;quot; arriving at your Lausanne home dressed entirely in beige, from sweater to shoe, the whole neutral ensemble set off by an &amp;quot;incredible necklace of green emeralds&amp;quot; worn under her sweater\u2014that &amp;quot;little touch&amp;quot; of color making the outfit. You remember Audrey Hepburn, your mother&amp;#039;s best friend, fretting about &amp;quot;big events and what she was going to wear to them,&amp;quot; as though she couldn&amp;#039;t have &amp;quot;worn a trash bag and looked great,&amp;quot; says Victoria Brynner, a handsome woman in her late forties who inherited her father&amp;#039;s immense, soulful eyes. And of course you remember Elizabeth Taylor\u2014&amp;quot;always late&amp;quot;\u2014at home in Gstaad: &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;d be ready,&amp;quot; Victoria says, laughing as we sit talking on a tan toile-print couch in her modest Beverly Hills home, &amp;quot;and we&amp;#039;d go pick her up, and then we&amp;#039;d sit there for two hours while she got ready. Dinner would be at eight, and at ten o&amp;#039;clock we&amp;#039;d be looking at jewelry and deciding what pieces to wear!&amp;quot;  These are but a few of the many women\u2014some of the most stylish in history, it would not be an overstatement to say\u2014who populated Victoria&amp;#039;s girlhood and who are now part of a four-volume collection of Yul Brynner&amp;#039;s photographs being published this fall. (An accompanying exhibition opened at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York on September 12, and another went on view at Galerie du Passage in Paris on September 28.) Though the actor was best known for playing King Mongkut of Siam in The King and I on both stage and screen (he is said to have performed the role approximately five thousand times, and he won both a Tony and an Academy Award for his portrayals), he was also a prolific amateur photographer rarely without his Leica. The collection, titled Yul Brynner: A Photographic Journey, consists of photos snapped by Brynner himself as well as pictures taken of him by celebrated photographers, including Cecil Beaton and Richard Avedon.  Among the many remarkable aspects of Brynner&amp;#039;s work is the unlikely state in which he catches the very famous. These aren&amp;#039;t formal portraits, visual hagiographies arranged by a studio, but neither are they tabloid shots stolen by an antagonistic lens. They&amp;#039;re a kind of sociological wildlife photography in which the subjects are shown in their natural habitats. &amp;quot;How did he capture the usually camera-shy Vanessa Redgrave being so intimate with her two daughters, Natasha and Joely?&amp;quot; asks Bruce Weber, who, in an essay for the book, writes about an image in which a bespectacled Redgrave, chunky rings on two fingers, lit cigarette in hand (a definite period detail), reads to her young daughters. As a member of the lofty milieu he captured on film, Brynner photographed his peers; his pictures, you might say, arose from a contract among equals. &amp;quot;His subjects [are] either oblivious of his presence or so comfortable knowing that nothing of their being would ever be betrayed, knowing that his interpretation of them would be one of beauty,&amp;quot; Victoria writes in her foreword to the book.  The images from Brynner&amp;#039;s private realm, including shots of Victoria and her mother, Doris (who, at 79, is still a manager at the Dior boutique on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris), are organized chronologically: &amp;quot;divided by wives,&amp;quot; as Victoria puts it. (Brynner had four.) &amp;quot;Some people said, `Oh my God! How horrible!&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; Victoria says. &amp;quot;And I said, `No, these are the four women who marked his life and four very distinct periods\u2014different houses, different sets of children, different groups of friends.&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; There is Doris, her dark hair shiny as glass, gamely perched on a countertop for a lesson in martini making from none other than Frank Sinatra. There&amp;#039;s Brynner&amp;#039;s third wife, Jacqueline\u2014white shirtdress, bare tan legs, cigarette, chignon, vanity dog at her side\u2014leaning in seductively to listen as a mustachioed Salvador Dal\u00ED holds forth. On the grand stone steps of the Brynner house in Switzerland, there is a young Victoria, nestled between a dalmatian and Mia Farrow, who sports corduroys and her signature pixie haircut. These are artifacts from an era far more \u00ADelegant than our own.  Or maybe it was just more exacting. &amp;quot;They all had very specific dos and don&amp;#039;ts,&amp;quot; says Victoria, referring to her mother, Guinness, Hepburn, the socialite Marella Agnelli, et al. &amp;quot;How rigorous they were in their life and their homes,&amp;quot; she adds, dispelling any notion that the aesthetics in these photos were accidental. &amp;quot;It was a commitment. There was a wardrobe code for every occasion. Back then, if you were just casually at home, you dressed a certain way, and you slept in a certain nightgown, and there was what was appropriate in terms of hair, makeup, and what kind of shoes.&amp;quot; For her own mother, this code meant mainly Balenciaga or Val\u00ADentino, along with Balenciaga gloves \u00AD(&amp;quot;always in cream or white,&amp;quot; Victoria says), made-to-measure Roger Vivier shoes, Car\u00ADtier bags, and on more laid-back days, capri pants (&amp;quot;bought at a place in Beverly Hills called Jack&amp;#039;s&amp;quot;) worn with ballet flats (&amp;quot;ballerinas&amp;quot;) and &amp;quot;little tops,&amp;quot; such as a polo shirt from Lacoste. &amp;quot;Everything was just impeccable,&amp;quot; says Victoria, using a word she often employs to describe her mother&amp;#039;s well-\u00ADcurated world. &amp;quot;I mean, every sweater was folded around a piece of tissue paper.&amp;quot; I ask whether these &amp;quot;strict guidelines&amp;quot; were expressly articulated or osmotically absorbed. &amp;quot;They said them,&amp;quot; Victoria replies, in a near whisper. &amp;quot;I remember wanting to go out to dinner with a bag that was too big and my mother telling me, `You don&amp;#039;t go out to dinner with a big bag that you&amp;#039;ve worn at work, during the day, or at school,&amp;#039; or wherever I&amp;#039;d just been.... It just wasn&amp;#039;t done. It wasn&amp;#039;t done.&amp;quot; More that was &amp;quot;not done&amp;quot;: Watches were never to be worn with evening gowns. Makeup was to remain light. Hair was always neat and pulled back off the face. Nail polish, except maybe on the toes in the summer, was verboten. Going barefoot was the ne plus ultra of chic, perhaps because it conveyed a bohemian free-spiritedness combined with an aristocratic nonchalance: What, me, have obligations that require shoes? Details like this were meant to project an aura of leisure, of sportiness\u2014of not having to try too hard. Ironically, of course, in its artfully unstudied ease, the entire uniform was actually quite studied. Not to mention time-consuming and expensive to achieve. Its point was to signal (perhaps mostly to other women) membership in a certain class and, more rarefied than that, a certain crowd: one with loads of free time and even more money.  As we tour Victoria&amp;#039;s art-filled home\u2014there&amp;#039;s a Warhol lithograph of an American Indian (&amp;quot;My mother and I, we went to New York, and we visited the Factory&amp;quot;) and several of Konstantin Kakanias&amp;#039; irreverent &amp;quot;Mrs. \u00ADTependris&amp;quot; watercolors that feature Victoria and Doris as characters\u2014I wonder aloud how intimidating it must have been to spend one&amp;#039;s youth flanked by international style icons. &amp;quot;It was just my mom and her friends,&amp;quot; Victoria says, shrugging off that idea. Later, I ask again: Didn&amp;#039;t living amid such gods and goddesses affect her self-esteem? &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t compare myself to them,&amp;quot; she insists. &amp;quot;If I&amp;#039;d been the daughter of a famous actress, maybe things would&amp;#039;ve been different. My mom has an incredible personality and style and her own notoriety, but I found my own path.&amp;quot; (Victoria and her husband head Stardust Visions, a print and commercial production company whose client list includes many luminaries of the art and fashion worlds, from Annie Leibovitz to Nick Knight to V \u00ADMagazine.)   But insecurity can manifest in various and subtle forms. At one point, Victoria e-mails me a few thoughts: &amp;quot;How was one supposed to grow up and keep it together the way they did, and how would we or could we ever develop our own style?&amp;quot; she asks rhetorically. She admits that she often feels &amp;quot;ruffled, messy, crinkly&amp;quot; next to women for whom there is &amp;quot;never a bad hair day, never a sloppy sweat pant or stained Ugg boot&amp;quot; and has struggled to develop a look that departs from the received dictates of her mother. &amp;quot;I think I became quite hesitant for a while,&amp;quot; she tells me. &amp;quot;I was \u00ADalways thinking, Is this chic or is this not chic?&amp;quot; Her solution has been to forgo her mother&amp;#039;s flats for ultrahigh heels, even at the office\u2014she calls the epiphany that led to this shift one of the great &amp;quot;fashion moments of freedom&amp;quot; of her adult life\u2014as well as to wear lots of black, to the horror of her color-loving mother. Small rebellions, to be sure, but then how many aren&amp;#039;t? I can&amp;#039;t help but think about my own mother, in all ways impeccable (to borrow Victoria&amp;#039;s term) and the rumpled, slightly frayed, I-have-more-exalted-cares style I have cultivated in response, while still adhering to her strict regimen of skin cleansing and eyebrow plucking, and never managing to shed her cares about the opinions of others. A peek inside Victoria&amp;#039;s closet reveals, on neat rows of padded hangers (&amp;quot;I never have the hangers from the dry cleaners&amp;quot;) Chanel jackets, Rick Owens pants, and numerous pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes. The uniform is there, only the designers&amp;#039; names have changed. In the next room, we scan the meticulously organized closet of her four-year-old daughter, Isabella. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t put that many rules on her.... She has her own taste, and she dresses herself in the morning,&amp;quot; Victoria says, as she opens a drawer containing pair after tiny pair of shorts, lined up like pastel candies in a box. Inevitably, unavoidably, we are our mothers&amp;#039; daughters. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/personal-style/a11404/the-queen-i-509749/>