Buck Ellison

The New York Times

It is an art book. It looks like an IDEA book. But don’t be fooled. The photographs are styled to match the imagery of a bank advertisement or lifestyle catalogue. They are painstakingly staged representations of wealth and privilege. They are so pitch-perfect as to become inseparable from their target.

It is the closeness that is the point; only the exacting accuracy of the copy can illuminate the unconscious machinations of the originals. The blue cotton stripe shirting fabric of the cover is a perfect example. It is a bookcloth, not cotton, but printed with a sewn-weave ink pattern. A facsimile that explains the process of the original that would otherwise be taken for granted.

The Bengal stripe is a popular shirting pattern. It originated in Bengal and was worn by the Bengal Lancers (a regiment of the British East India Company’s armed forces) from the