Andy "Durandy" Golub is a Duran Duran archivist, blogger, and haver of vast knowledge, and his book Beautiful Colors: The Posters of Duran Duran comes out this month. (Check durandy.com for details.) Culled from eBay and fan sites and Durandy's distant travels, the book's posters feature everything from the ritziest glossies to the far rarer flyers, duplicated with copy machines and updated with handwriting when the band was still an opening act. Durandy's been gathering these and other memorabilia for decades. In his Bellevue storage unit, you'll find: luxury satin tour jackets, a hilariously complicated Duran Duran board game, and, to promote a single, a sealed bottle of hot sauce from 1985 that has settled into a watery gasoline-yellow fluid that looks "like a discharge," Durandy says.

There are also trillions of articles and promo pics, of course, organized by date and size and country of publication. The earliest images show the members folded neatly inside the New Romantic fashion movement, back when people couldn't decide whether to be transsexuals or punks or gypsies or harlequins or frilled-out French revolutionaries, and just went for them all at once. Duran Duran made the look a little preppy, too, because why not—throwing in pastels and pleat-front khakis and rolled-up sleeves alongside the musketeer blouses, cravats, and side-knotted pirate-sash headbands cinching their feathery bales of hair.

Separately, the guys looked just as great. In his own book, bassist John Taylor mentions the "skintight leopard-print ski pants with loops under the boots" that Simon Le Bon wore when he auditioned for lead singer. "I thought anyone who looks that stupid... is positively the one," keyboardist Nick Rhodes is rumored to have said. Taylor tucked the cuffs of his black latex pants into chunky white scrunch socks. And Rhodes loaded on the lip-wear: "He was into Perfectly Lancome #5 Pink Gloss Lipstick," says Durandy.

Rhodes was also Andy Warhol's favorite member, and he famously told The Face journalist Fiona Russell Powell, "I masturbate to Duran Duran videos." They were always so exquisitely crafted. Moment after moment, glamorous things kept appearing: lone saxophonists on tropical shores, hair styles a-swirl in ocean breezes, bikinied women leaping sexily around, and the men's pretty faces, tarted up with cosmetics, cast in the slatted shadows of venetian blinds. recommended