Elephant in the Room

Richard Avedon helped to define the post WWII woman with his imagery of impossibly elegant women, theatrically posed within Avedon’s signature theatric narrative style. Dovima with Elephants is one of Avedon’s most well-known photographs featuring the model Dovima dressed in couture at the Cirque d’Hiver of 1955 in Paris. Although not a

Read More

Barbie World

To showcase swimsuit styles of the season, German-born photographer Horst P. Horst enlisted model Lisa Fonssagrives to crouch, conform and contort her body into letters that spelled out the word “Vogue.” Perhaps taking a cue from the aerial-style imagery of synchronized swimmers choreographed into configuration, Fonssagrives appears in multiples as though

Read More

Chaise Lounging Around

Under the moniker of Horst P. Horst, German born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann would photograph the beau monde and Parisian café society of the interwar years. The year Horst would meet Gabrielle Chanel, he took the most memorable and well-known photograph of the fashion designer’s life; an image that came to typify

Read More

Tower Above Them All

In 1939, Erwin Blumenfeld photographed a reportedly unharnessed Lisa Fonssagrives whose Lucien Lelong dress billowed in the winds atop the Eiffel Tower. The location for the French Vogue photo shoot was strategic, chosen in celebration of the monument’s fiftieth anniversary. Soon after Blumenfeld’s photograph, the city would see the havoc and ravages of war

Read More

Moved to Tiers

A precursor to the contemporary crop of limited edition, collectable publications, La Gazette du Bon Ton, or the Journal of Good Taste, boasted hand-colored fashion plates and exclusive designer features at the steep annual subscription fee of 100 francs per year for the monthly publication. Along with the designs of couture houses Redfern, Doucet

Read More