The collection consists of five photograph albums and two scrapbooks compiled by the designer, artist, style arbiter, and Parsons School of Design faculty member, administrator and president Van Day Truex. A third scrapbook, annotated by Parsons faculty member Stanley Barrows, documents Truex's and Parsons School of Design president William Odom's Parisian apartments in the 1930s, but it does not appear to have been compiled by Truex. This scrapbook, along with the other seven albums and scrapbooks were donated to The New School Archives at the same time from the Estate of Adam Lewis, a design historian.

The chronological photograph albums document Truex's travels in Europe (predominantly France and Italy), Mexico, Tunisia, Morocco, and the United States, and depict many friends and acquaintances, leisure activities, and social gatherings in upscale settings. Places, dates and names of individuals in photographs are usually identified in handwritten captions. As Truex emphasizes in his 1971 Smithsonian Archives of American Art interview with Paul Cummings, he "grew up in Paris," residing there from the age of 21 until his mid-30s; the predominance of Europe in the two pre-1940s albums reflects this. Truex left Paris, along with the rest of the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now, Parsons School of Design) administration and students in 1939. He later returned to France, where he renovated a house in the village of Gordes, documented in the post-World War Two albums.

Truex is mainly known for his interior design work and his design work for Tiffany & Company in his later years. This collection documents Truex's facility with the photographic medium, composing shots of friends, interiors, and physical places that would not look out of place in a magazine. They are not ordinary snapshots taken by an amateur photographer; rather they demonstrate an understanding of composition and lighting. New School Archives staff believe either Truex developed the film himself or had it developed by a professional or someone with access to photograph developing equipment and a darkroom.

The albums document international celebrities with whom Truex associated, such as Noel Coward, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and Elsa Schiaparelli; socialites, philanthropists, and designers, many with connections to Parsons School of Design, such as alumnus Joseph B. Platt, and Parsons School of Design trustees, such as Eleanor Brown. Elsie de Wolfe (Lady Mendl) and her husband Charles Mendl are well represented, depicted at gatherings at their home, Villa Trianon. While Truex and many other men of his generation did not publicly self-identify as gay, the albums document an upper class, trans-Atlantic social milieu seemingly outwardly accepting of queer identities. Additionally, the scrapbooks contain numerous photographs of classically attractive men in bathing attire.

Notably absent from the albums are successive New York School of Fine and Applied Art presidents Frank Alvah Parsons (represented in one photograph, reclining in a robe at the Lido in Venice) and William Odom (represented in one set of photographs). This may indicate that Parsons and Odom socialized with a different set of people from Truex.

The scrapbooks are divided topically rather than chronologically. A general scrapbook predominantly documents Truex's career as an artist and illustrator, an often overlooked aspect of his life and career. During his lifetime, Truex's artwork was exhibited in several New York galleries. Scrapbook contents include reproductions of his ink wash drawings, newspaper clippings of reviews, exhibition programs, and photographs of his gallery shows. This scrapbook also contains portraits of Truex, photographs and clippings about his homes, and other print media in which he appears.

A second scrapbook is devoted to the Tennessee-born singer and actress Grace Moore, a client and friend of Truex.

A third scrapbook is of uncertain provenance. It documents residences of Van Day Truex, as well as Parsons School of Design president and design historian William Odom in Paris, and other residential interiors, as well as clippings demonstrating specific European architectural and interior design styles. The compilation by students of clippings depicting furnishings and interior architecture was a standard pedagogical device at Parsons School of Design until the late 1960s. This scrapbook bears annotations by Parsons alumnus and faculty member Stanley Barrows (1914-1995), as the handwriting, underlining, and style of annotation identically matches the same occurences in the Stanley Barrows papers (KA.0002.01). Inscriptions in the scrapbook indicate Barrows purchased the scrapbook in April 1967 from a Parsons School of Design library booksale at a time of curricular upheaval and the architectural styles and furnishings documented in the scrapbook, as well as the acting of maintaining such a visual tool would have been considered outdated by faculty leadership. It is unknown how the scrapbook came into the possession of Adam Lewis or if it ever belonged to Van Day Truex.