The representation of the dragon in Chinese dress was historically reserved for the emperor and his circle since the beginning of the Song Dynasty. More recently, the motif has become a pervasive element in traditional Chinese dress styles. For the 1934 film Limehouse Blues, costume designer Travis Banton dressed Anna May Wong, one
Toni Frissell is acknowledged as the first major female fashion photographer for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, known for her carefree, relaxed aesthetic. Frisell would take her models out of the studio and place them within nature, promoting a healthy active lifestyle which embodied the American woman. Having previously photographed an underwater editorial for Vogue in 1939, in
Often looking to the surreal and fantastical, Melvin Sokolsky would play with proportion and perspective by incorporating miniature or blown up props into his fashion editorials. In 1963, Sokolsky photographed the model Iris Bianchi in series of images in which she is perched, seated on or climbing on top of an oversized chair for Harper’s Bazaar. 47 years later,
The bustle or dress improver experienced two waves of popularity in the 19th century; the first bustle period ranged from the end of the 1860s into the 1870s and the second took place ten years later in the 1880s. The steel cage of the bustle was an understructure, worn beneath
Amedeo Modigliani’s modern aesthetic was characterized by his subject’s mask-like faces, which drew inspiration from African art, and his elongated figures. In 1919, Modigliani painted the polish woman Lunia Czechowska, in Woman with a Fan. Two years before the painting was stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Peter Lindbergh photographed Julianne Moore wearing a marigold Calvin
In the fall of 2012, Yves Saint Laurent announced the appointment of its new Creative Director, Hedi Slimane, who subsequently renamed the brand as a part of a creative overhaul. Silmane rebranded Yves Saint Laurent to Saint Laurent Paris, garnering great criticism and industry backlash on the grounds that Slimane
Robert Campin is often acknowledged as the first of the great Flemish painters, praised for his most-well known work of art, The Mérode Altarpiece, which is housed at The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Alexander McQueen looked to Campin’s The Thief to the Left of Christ, in his FW 1997 collection entitled
An offshoot from the Vienna Secession, The Wiener Werkstätte was developed in 1903, under the direction of Josef Hoffman. Founded on the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, the workshop’s mission was to develop fine, well-made products in a wide range of goods to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art.
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai is one of Japan’s most well-known prints of the Edo Period. The woodblock print (a method also used to print textiles) features a tremendous wave towering over a seemingly minuscule Mount Fuji, a mountain that is traditionally presented as a compositional focus. For Christian Dior’s Spring 2007 couture show, John
A proponent of the Surrealist and Dada movements, Man Ray would build a prolific body of work as an artist and photographer. Inspired by Ingres’s La Grande Baigneuse, Man Ray photographed Alice Ernestine Prin, better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, a social fixture of the bohemian culture of Paris in the 20s (who also