Icons of Style : Clout. Panache. The 14 women who grace the pages of a new look at--dare we say it?--power had it. And others couldn’t wait to copy them.

The 14 women taste-makers limned in Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins’ fascinating new book, “The Power of Style” (Crown Publishers), have only two things in common: They were all thin, and other women envied them.

Beyond that, they are a diverse lot. Several, such as Rita Lydig, who sat for painter John Singer Sargent, were hauntingly beautiful. Others, including Elsie de Wolfe and Diana Vreeland, were as plain as milk toast. Some--designer Coco Chanel is the premier example--were wildly successful entrepreneurs, while others did little more than manage, albeit spectacularly, the complex households of their wealthy spouses. Some were quietly kind, while others, notably Daisy Fellowes, were upper-crust sadists who turned their yachts into torture chambers with attentive staffs.

What links these women, beyond a penchant for chic clothes, nonstop jewelry, white flowers and small dogs, is their gift for creating a personal style that other women clamored to copy. As Chanel boasted, “If I cut my hair, others did. If I shortened my dresses, so did everyone else.”

You don’t have to have sworn off shaving your legs to wonder if power is quite the right word for a person’s ability to get free fashions, as so many of these women did, because designers knew other women would wear almost anything these icons of style put on their uniformly bony backs.

Power in the larger world means what President John F. Kennedy had--the ability to shape events and institutions. Not what “Power of Style” subject Jackie Kennedy Onassis had--the ability to tug at a nation’s heartstrings and move large numbers of pillbox hats.

But whatever you call the special quality of these women--clout, influence or panache--they left their distinctive mark on their times, even if the vast majority of men are utterly unaware of it. De Wolfe, for instance, who died at 80-something in 1949, single-handedly created the profession of interior decorating. It was she who persuaded millions of American women that the quality of their lives would soar if they only swathed those pesky sofas and easy chairs in yards of cheerful chintz, a design philosophy that persists in many circles today. As Tapert points out, De Wolfe was in the business of selling lifestyle long before such contemporary merchants as Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart.

Edkins, who lives in New Jersey, mined such pop-culture archives as the files of Vogue magazine in whose pages many of these women cast their weird spell to find the photos that contribute so much to the book’s effect. Manhattan writer Tapert supplied the text. “This book is so much about self-invention,” says Tapert, whose other writings include collections of soldiers’ letters and a joint autobiography of Siegfried and Roy, Las Vegas’ white-tiger guys. “We all have two lives: the one you’re given and the one you make.”

Although some of Tapert’s women were born to wealth and some had looks that could be highly leveraged, others fashioned their widely imitated lifestyles out of very unpromising materials indeed. Tapert cites the example of Pauline de Rothschild, who turned her husband’s once neglected French vineyard, Chateau Mouton Rothschild, into a synonym for sophisticated style.

Although she eventually became a baroness, De Rothschild survived a ghastly childhood. Tapert describes how the 12-year-old Pauline, half-starved and weakened by rheumatic fever, was living in a fleabag Parisian hotel “with a mother who was one step up from a hooker.”

Instead of succumbing to despair, Pauline was able to focus on the single object of beauty in that pitiful hotel room, an enormous bouquet of lilies and white lilacs. Those flowers became her signature. As Tapert notes, illness, philandering husbands, losing their fortunes, even the ravages of time did not deter her subjects from their fierce devotion to style. It was their consolation and their revenge as well as their legacy.

When unpleasantness entered her subjects’ lives, Tapert says, “They blocked it out. They moved on.” What quality of character allowed them to become originals is a mystery, Tapert says. She notes that in the course of writing the book, she often found herself asking, “Where did this woman find the confidence to be different?”

In fact, Tapert developed a certain respect for all the women whose lives she examined. “In order to look that good takes an enormous amount of work and a lot of discipline,” she says. Her favorite was Millicent Rogers, a gorgeous blonde best known for her groundbreaking collection of Native American art and a bittersweet affair with Clark Gable.

The only woman Tapert never warmed to was the Duchess of Windsor. “She really was vacuous,” says Tapert, suggesting that the duchess’ best and highest use was keeping the duke from dwelling too much on the throne he had given up for the woman he loved. (Tapert makes note of the rumor that the duchess was really a man.)

While all 14 women succeeded fabulously as makers of taste, they had variable success in that other area so important to most women--as mothers. Several of the women swapped their children for handsome settlements when they divorced, although the truth may be that their husbands used their superior power in arenas other than style to ensure that they got custody.

Daisy Fellowes was one of the non-model mothers. A celebrated socialite of the ‘20s and ‘30s, Fellowes was once walking in the park when she spotted a group of especially well-dressed little girls. “Whose lovely little children are those?” she asked their nurse. “Yours, Madame” was the reply.

Fellowes’ sense of style was evident in even the most tiresome circumstances. Tapert tells the story of the time Fellowes discovered she had caught gonorrhea from one of her many lovers. Fellowes informed the gentleman in a telephone call in which all she did was clap, clap, clap into the receiver.

Although few of today’s women practice the religion of table decoration with the fanaticism of an Elsie de Wolfe, Tapert thinks that many contemporary women have unfulfilled aesthetic needs (how else to explain how Martha Stewart sells magazines by urging them to make their own chocolate cups and Craftsman-style birdhouses?). “There’s a message in the book, a subtle message,” Tapert says. “I think a lot of women are really afraid these days to bring out their aesthetic side. But I think you can be elegant, and I think you can be feminine and still compete. You don’t have to lose it.”

A former actress, Tapert says she wouldn’t want to be any of the women she profiled, but she did find take-home lessons in their lives. In writing the book, she says, “I realized more than ever how far good manners go.”

As a result, she is far less confrontational than she used to be. She also pays much closer attention to the myriad details that add up to stylishness. She spends more time making sure her clothes fit perfectly. “And,” she confesses, “I put everything on satin hangers now.”