Sections
The Early Years of Fashion Photography
The earliest fashion photographs in the Nicola Erni Collection—mostly rare vintage prints—set the scene for what is the bedrock of all that followed.
In the 1910s, photography began to replace fashion illustration in magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and it soon developed into a central and independent genre within the history of photography. Photographers such as George Hoyningen-Huene and his protégé Horst P. Horst became famous with their staged yet elegant fashion photographs that focused on light and shadow, reviving classical forms. In these early years, actresses and society women frequently served as models for fashion magazines.
This same period saw photographers such as Toni Frissell and Martin Munkácsi begin shooting outdoors, celebrating the sporty, self-confident, and increasingly independent women of the time. In November 1933, Hungarian-born photojournalist Martin Munkásci was commissioned by Carmel Snow, fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, to photograph swimwear for the December issue, and Munkácsi indeed shot the first outdoor and in-motion fashion editorial, which proved groundbreaking in the history of fashion photography. In her memoirs Carmel Snow remembered: “The day was cold, unpleasant and dull—not at all auspicious for a ‘glamourous resort’ picture. Munkásci hadn’t a word of English, and his friend seemed to take forever to interpret for us. Munkásci began making wild gestures. ‘What does Munkásci want us to do?’ It seemed that what Munkásci wanted was for the model to run toward him. Such a ‘pose’ had never been attempted before in fashion.”
Revolution!
The 1960s were an era of radical change, mirrored in the fashion photography of the period. Characterized by revolutions in fashion, youth culture, and pop music, the sixties also saw a softening in the class divides of preceding decades. With changing attitudes and the introduction of the Pill, Europe and America witnessed a time of sexual liberation.
The decade saw the birth of models as celebrities. And new types of models like Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, and Veruschka—this last appearing in Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary 1966 film “Blow-Up”—became household names.
Television played a cultural and artistic role on its way to becoming a mass medium in the 1960s, and thanks to the ubiquity of air travel, photographers set to exotic locales for their fashion shoots. Hiro’s famous photograph of Tilly Tizzani with a blue scarf was taken in the West Indies; Franco Rubartelli shot the German model Veruschka in Yves Saint Laurent’s famous safari dress in the Central African Republic. Veruschka appears like a glamazon, reflecting the new image of the women and the zeitgeist of the era: the individualist and independent woman, self-determined, adventurous, and open to the new.
But the epicenter of sixties style, culture, and fashion was “Swinging London,” defined as much by David Bailey and Twiggy as it was by the Beatles and the miniskirt. As the legendary editor-in-chief of US Vogue, Diana Vreeland, summed it up in 1965: “I love London. It is the most swinging city in the world.”
Fiction & Fantasy
Inspired by cinema and Surrealism, fashion photographers such as Tim Walker and Miles Aldridge create elaborate sets and backdrops for their shoots—in close collaboration with set designers and stylists, they bring their ideas to life, making a dreamworld reality. Walker explained: “I want people to look at my photographs the same way they watch movies in the cinema that let them forget their reality for a brief moment and submerge [themselves] in a different, foreign better world.”
Since early childhood, adventure, the circus, costumes, and animals have inspired the fantasy of Esther Haase, a dreamworld that has become the stage for her fashion photographs. Haase describes her fashion shootings as “staged reportages” that are cinematographically arranged and illuminated. Like in a film, the model slips into a role and fills the haute couture robes with vibrant life.
When Cindy Sherman was invited by Harper’s Bazaar in 1993 to showcase the spring designs, she went one step further, transforming herself into a court jester, posing for the camera in Dior high fashion.
These artists’ images present a fantasy world that is the perfect platform for fashion, which itself is so much about escapism and illusion. In much of their work, the fashion becomes secondary, with imagery and narrative taking center stage.
Unfiltered
Natural beauty, rawness, and imperfection marked a new decade in fashion photography. The late 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of the supermodel, a new type of model created and best celebrated by Peter Lindbergh, who was commissioned to do his first shoot for US Vogue in 1988. He asked the stylist to bring simple white shirts and photographed five rising models on Santa Monica Beach in California. The resulting photograph shows self-confident women with their hair tied back and without makeup. With his natural and candid look, Lindbergh gave birth to the supermodel, influential icons and role models who shaped the style for years to come.
Allusions to classical art—with an eye to celebrating the athletic body—are typical of the work of Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and others. The legendary collaboration between Calvin Klein and Bruce Weber—who produced numerous iconic campaigns between 1979 and the mid-1990s—was era-defining. Weber’s striking photograph of Carré Otis riding a motorbike was taken in 1991 for the Calvin Klein Jeans campaign, and the photographer recalled later: “I was lucky to meet and photograph lots of rock groups and I wanted with this campaign to put a little of that life into the pictures.”
The late 1980s also saw a return to black-and-white photography—without the sheen and glamour of, for example, Guy Bourdin’s work of the previous decade. Pure and direct portraits are common in the new photographic artists’ visual language: there is much less staging and stiffness in their work—instead allowing for a simple, fluid, and direct dialogue between artist and model.
Magazine to Artwork
The genre of fashion photography dates back to the 1910s, when photography gradually replaced fashion illustration in magazines such as Vogue (founded in 1892) and Harper’s Bazaar (founded in 1867).
American Vogue hired its first full-time fashion photographer in 1914. The first photograph on a Vogue cover was published in 1932—a color photograph by Edward Steichen. In the years that followed, pioneers such as George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, and Erwin Blumenfeld created iconic images that combined fashion, art, and the avant-garde. Fashion photography interacted with art movements such as Surrealism. Art directors—including Alexander Liberman and Alexey Brodovitch—also had a significant influence on the look of fashion photography by placing photography in the context of layout and typography and setting the style with their avant-garde aesthetic. Even today, fashion photography is a collaborative process involving not only fashion photographers and art directors but also fashion designers, editors, and stylists.
Even though fashion photography is still commercial—published in fashion magazines or used in advertising campaigns—important figures have emerged over the course of the twentieth century to pave the way from magazine work to autonomous works of art.
Photographers such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn shaped the aesthetic of fashion photography in the 1940s and 1950s. Later, in the 1970s, such talents as Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin revolutionized the visual language of fashion photography, which from then on went far beyond the mere depiction of fashion: fashion photographers used the medium to tell stories, reflect on social issues, or create experimental aesthetics.
In the early 1980s, the artist Cindy Sherman pioneered the crossover between contemporary art and fashion, and in 2009 the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm translated the artistic idea of his “One Minute Sculptures” into an editorial with Claudia Schiffer for German Vogue.
The twentieth century has witnessed the boundaries between art and fashion photography become increasingly blurred, and fashion photography not only established itself as a genre in the history of photography, but also found a rightful place within the art world.
Street Style: The Beginnings
While fashion photographers focused on high fashion, street style in this early period was captured by renowned street photographers who, in contrast to idealized fashion images, depicted real life and everyday fashion.
Street style in Paris and the Côte d’Azur—elegant and casual looks—is captured in pictures by Jacques Henri Lartigue. One of Lartigue’s favorite models was his wife Florette, whom he married in 1942. He often shot her in spontaneous poses and tracked her fashion style. As a regular visitor to the Côte d’Azur, he took many of his finest pictures in Nice, Cannes, Antibes, and Monaco. But he also photographed anonymous ladies walking along the avenues, capturing the changing fashions, culture, and street life of Paris in the early twentieth century.
Helen Levitt depicted women on the streets of New York City in the early 1940s, capturing fleeting moments and everyday life in neighborhoods such as Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem and the Bronx. American photographers Homer Page, Frank Paulin, and Vivian Maier were attentive observers of how inhabitants of different social backgrounds moved through the city, producing works that are particularly evocative as they document real life.
Street Style: 1960s-70s
Beginning in the second half of the 1960s, self-confident women felt sufficiently liberated to expose more of their bodies, and the fashion of the day reflected this cultural development. We see bell-bottoms and miniskirts became ubiquitous, era-defining fashion statements.
Garry Winogrand is one of the photographers said to have captured American society in the 1960s and 1970s at the height of feminism and the sexual revolution, capturing the figure of the confident, free, rebellious, and beautiful woman on the streets in a snapshot aesthetic. Shooting with a 35mm Leica camera in public spaces, Winogrand published this series in a 1975 book titled “Women are Beautiful”.
Since the 1960s, celebrity models became paragons for women everywhere, and fashion magazines influenced their style and way of life. Prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) made it possible for a wider audience to dress fashionably. As the British fashion designer Mary Quant said in 1966: “The whole point of fashion is to make fashionable clothes available to everyone.” Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro, and Yves Saint Laurent were among the European designers who successfully translated a couture aesthetic to ready-to-wear—producing bold and futuristic designs for young people to dress in every day.
Unreal
Inspired by cinema and Surrealism, fashion photographers such as Tim Walker and Miles Aldridge create elaborate sets and backdrops for their shoots—in close collaboration with set designers and stylists, they bring their ideas to life, making a dreamworld reality. Walker explained: “I want people to look at my photographs the same way they watch movies in the cinema that let them forget their reality for a brief moment and submerge [themselves] in a different, foreign better world.”
Since early childhood, adventure, the circus, costumes, and animals have inspired the fantasy of Esther Haase, a dreamworld that has become the stage for her fashion photographs. Haase describes her fashion shootings as “staged reportages” that are cinematographically arranged and illuminated. Like in a film, the model slips into a role and fills the haute couture robes with vibrant life.
When Cindy Sherman was invited by Harper’s Bazaar in 1993 to showcase the spring designs, she went one step further, transforming herself into a court jester, posing for the camera in Dior high fashion.
These artists’ images present a fantasy world that is the perfect platform for fashion, which itself is so much about escapism and illusion. In much of their work, the fashion becomes secondary, with imagery and narrative taking center stage.
Street Style: 1980s to now
The sociocultural approach of Amy Arbus, shooting subcultures in New York in the 1980s, and Anthony Hernandez, capturing people on Los Angeles’s iconic Rodeo Drive, contrasts with photographs taken by Bill Cunningham, Scott Schuman, and Tommy Ton. Considered the godfather of street style photography, Cunningham searched the New York City streets for ordinary people in stylish clothes, summarizing that “the best fashion show is definitely on the street. Always has been, always will be.”
Cunningham anticipated style bloggers Scott Schuman and Tommy Ton by decades. The latter two photographers have depicted fashionistas on the streets or during international fashion weeks in Milan, Paris, London, and New York since 2005, when the fashion industry’s obsession with street style began.
Scott Schuman launched his famous street style blog “The Sartorialist” in 2005, paying homage to street fashion and how it is worn. Unlike fashion photography in glossy magazines, which carefully stage the ideal of female beauty, street style photography depicts those who are not necessarily models, but chic and styled people such as Franca Sozzani, former editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, and other strikingly dressed visitors to fashion shows or just people in daily life who dress creatively and exceptionally.
Today, fashion blogs and street style photographers have conquered the realm of the classical fashion magazine through social media and the Internet.
Carte Blanche
Under the legendary editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani, Vogue Italia achieved a unique position in the fashion world between 1988 and 2016. Transforming the magazine into a platform for experimental and often provocative fashion photography, Sozzani was well aware of the power of visual media: “I believe in the power of images, but also in the power of those who interpret those images.” Sozzani granted photographers unparalleled creative freedom (carte blanche), allowing them to experiment with innovative concepts and radical visual styles.
The prime example of this unconventional spirit of collaboration was Steven Meisel, who under Sozzani’s leadership exclusively photographed every Vogue Italia cover. She did not hesitate to raise socially relevant or controversial issues such as racism, environmental degredation, or cosmetic surgery within the fashion industry. Under her aegis, Vogue Italia became an intellectual and artistic platform that often defined and changed the zeitgeist of the fashion industry.
The nearly four hundred covers that Steven Meisel shot for Vogue Italia between 1988 and 2016 bear witness to the important creative interaction between the editor-in-chief and the photographer. These now iconic covers are being exhibited for the first time in a unique arrangement of original photographs. It is an archival synthesis of the art, initiated as a commission from Nicola Erni and realized by photographer Steven Meisel.
Silvie Fleury – Solo Focus
Geneva-based artist Sylvie Fleury is known for her staging of glamour, fashion, and the luxury items of the modern world, and for arranging them in new contexts. She poses fundamental questions about the power of the status symbols that have become fetishes of consumption. Falling somewhere between Pop appropriation and Minimalist aesthetics, Fleury’s pieces blur the lines between art, advertising, and fashion, thereby challenging stereotypes and consumer culture. But her work is perhaps not without ambiguity, as she herself loves consumption as much as she might expose it. With her alluring appropriation of fashion codes and readymade compositions, she calls out our consumerist desires and fetishistic ideas in a kind of Neo-Pop glam. This ensemble of different works by Sylvie Fleury conveys a juxtaposition of contemporary art—in the form of her installations, wallpapers, and objects—with fashion photography as appropriation art.
The New Look
In the European postwar environment, Christian Dior revitalized haute couture in Paris with his “New Look” in 1947. Nipped-in waists and extravagantly full skirts emphasized the elegant and feminine silhouette. Dior’s “New Look” celebrated elegance, female grace, and a sensual vision.
Irving Penn, who photographed the haute couture collections in Paris for Vogue, was still working in the studio in a formal manner, focusing on couture dresses and depicting the silhouette of the garments, their textures and details.
Though still connected to the classicism of the preceding decades, the great photographers of this new era created an innovative look of their own, consciously breaking away from the formality and elitism of their predecessors. In the 1950s, photographers such as Frank Horvat and William Klein took their models out of the studio and into the urban streets of Paris, Rome, and New York. William Klein remembered: “I accepted the obligation of showing the clothes. Sharp, all the buttons, pleats and whatever. As long as I did that, I found I could do pretty much what I wanted with the rest—backgrounds, attitudes, situations.… Whatever, I guess the editors didn’t care as long as the reader didn’t flip the page too fast.”
This decision, creating a fresh look in fashion photography, was disseminated around the world through magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, titles that, for the first time, were reaching much wider audiences.
Sex & Provocation
In the post-sexual revolution years, provocative and sexually charged images moved from the underground and countercultural press into the mainstream. In the 1970s, photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton pushed the limits of fashion photography with images that included not only nudity but also references to the world of fetish and fantasy—something that would have been unthinkable only a decade prior. These images appeared not in Playboy magazine but, remarkably, in Vogue.
Helmut Newton produced work that fetishized high heels and powerful women—and explored the complex and shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bourdin created images that focused more on surreal narratives and tableaux. His iconic and much-referenced campaigns for fashion designer Charles Jourdan made the shoe a fetish object.
Ellen von Unwerth’s work offers a female perspective on “Sex & Provocation”. Her photographic signature is characterized by her view of women: “I always wanted to create this glamorous girl but capture her in a very natural way. That’s the way I see women. They look beautiful and sexy to me, but also strong and in control of their image—free and confident.”
This section reveals that sexiness is a concept that, ever since the 1970s, can be endlessly redefined.
Romanticism
As a counterpoint to the shiny glamour and conspicuous consumption of the late 1970s and 1980s—reflected in the fashion photography of this era—photographers like Sarah Moon and Deborah Turbeville established a new style, one steeped in nostalgia and romanticism. Their work, and that of the other artists in this section, references painting as much as it does photography. “Painting, photography, music, cinema, literature, life… everything I loved influenced me,” stated Moon in an interview with Nicola Erni. Sarah Moon is particularly famous for her Polaroids—shrouded in blur, her images are romantic, out of time, and closer to dreamlike fantasy than real life. Turbeville’s work has a melancholic and cinematic quality that evokes an emotional response from the beholders—a rare thing in fashion photography.
Paolo Roversi, a gifted colorist and visual poet, produces work that feels as close to painting as it does to photography. His fashion photographs are timeless, and his distinctive style is largely achieved through long-exposure manipulation of light. His work can be characterized by a rich interplay between shadow, color, and light, and a mood of painterly romance.
The artists in this section often refine their printing techniques by using Polaroids, Fresson prints, carbon prints, platinum prints, or toned gelatin silver prints to achieve a wider color range and a soft surface, reflecting their romantic approach.
Next Generation
Fashion photography—like fashion itself—is constantly changing. New talents continue to emerge in the fields of both fashion design and photography; indeed, the two are fundamentally intertwined.
Diversity and gender fluidity are relevant themes in contemporary fashion and photography and reflect the current zeitgeist.
Tyler Mitchell and Nadine Ijewere emerged from the New Black Vanguard, fusing the genres of fine art and fashion photography to break down long-established boundaries. Known for his images celebrating the beauty of Black American life, Mitchell had already begun to introduce an original visual language to fashion photography when, in 2018, he became the first African American photographer to shoot the cover of US Vogue.
Alasdair McLellan resisted using digital photography, employed by almost all of his peers, and his aesthetic is in tune with the sports chic favored by the urban youth. And Harley Weir celebrates modern femininity and the female gaze through the intimacy and color of her images.
Yet the future is wide open, and the next chapter of artificial intelligence (AI) has just begun. For the May 2023 issue of Vogue Italia, Dutch photographer Carlijn Jacobs set out to create backgrounds using artificial intelligence. Collaborating with AI artist Chad Nelson, Jacobs took on the challenge of translating her creative vision into keywords for the AI program: “The creation of these hybrid images turned out to be more complex and time-consuming than expected. And to finish the work in a reasonable time, I ended up photoshopping most of the images obtained with AI.”
Hassan Hajjaj – Solo Focus
Known as the “Andy Warhol of Marrakech,” Anglo-Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj combines elements of high fashion with Moroccan tradition and street culture. With colorful compositions, patterned backdrops, textiles, and typical Moroccan plastic mats, he creates his own universe blending not only photography and contemporary art, but also the Orient, the Western world—and Pop Art. This commissioned room installation is a stand-alone “Mix and Match” of art, fashion, and photography.
The Early Years of Fashion Photography
The earliest fashion photographs in the Nicola Erni Collection—mostly rare vintage prints—set the scene for what is the bedrock of all that followed.
In the 1910s, photography began to replace fashion illustration in magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and it soon developed into a central and independent genre within the history of photography. Photographers such as George Hoyningen-Huene and his protégé Horst P. Horst became famous with their staged yet elegant fashion photographs that focused on light and shadow, reviving classical forms. In these early years, actresses and society women frequently served as models for fashion magazines.
This same period saw photographers such as Toni Frissell and Martin Munkácsi begin shooting outdoors, celebrating the sporty, self-confident, and increasingly independent women of the time. In November 1933, Hungarian-born photojournalist Martin Munkásci was commissioned by Carmel Snow, fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, to photograph swimwear for the December issue, and Munkácsi indeed shot the first outdoor and in-motion fashion editorial, which proved groundbreaking in the history of fashion photography. In her memoirs Carmel Snow remembered: “The day was cold, unpleasant and dull—not at all auspicious for a ‘glamourous resort’ picture. Munkásci hadn’t a word of English, and his friend seemed to take forever to interpret for us. Munkásci began making wild gestures. ‘What does Munkásci want us to do?’ It seemed that what Munkásci wanted was for the model to run toward him. Such a ‘pose’ had never been attempted before in fashion.”
Street Style: The Beginnings
While fashion photographers focused on high fashion, street style in this early period was captured by renowned street photographers who, in contrast to idealized fashion images, depicted real life and everyday fashion.
Street style in Paris and the Côte d’Azur—elegant and casual looks—is captured in pictures by Jacques Henri Lartigue. One of Lartigue’s favorite models was his wife Florette, whom he married in 1942. He often shot her in spontaneous poses and tracked her fashion style. As a regular visitor to the Côte d’Azur, he took many of his finest pictures in Nice, Cannes, Antibes, and Monaco. But he also photographed anonymous ladies walking along the avenues, capturing the changing fashions, culture, and street life of Paris in the early twentieth century.
Helen Levitt depicted women on the streets of New York City in the early 1940s, capturing fleeting moments and everyday life in neighborhoods such as Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem and the Bronx. American photographers Homer Page, Frank Paulin, and Vivian Maier were attentive observers of how inhabitants of different social backgrounds moved through the city, producing works that are particularly evocative as they document real life.
The New Look
In the European postwar environment, Christian Dior revitalized haute couture in Paris with his “New Look” in 1947. Nipped-in waists and extravagantly full skirts emphasized the elegant and feminine silhouette. Dior’s “New Look” celebrated elegance, female grace, and a sensual vision.
Irving Penn, who photographed the haute couture collections in Paris for Vogue, was still working in the studio in a formal manner, focusing on couture dresses and depicting the silhouette of the garments, their textures and details.
Though still connected to the classicism of the preceding decades, the great photographers of this new era created an innovative look of their own, consciously breaking away from the formality and elitism of their predecessors. In the 1950s, photographers such as Frank Horvat and William Klein took their models out of the studio and into the urban streets of Paris, Rome, and New York. William Klein remembered: “I accepted the obligation of showing the clothes. Sharp, all the buttons, pleats and whatever. As long as I did that, I found I could do pretty much what I wanted with the rest—backgrounds, attitudes, situations.… Whatever, I guess the editors didn’t care as long as the reader didn’t flip the page too fast.”
This decision, creating a fresh look in fashion photography, was disseminated around the world through magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, titles that, for the first time, were reaching much wider audiences.
Revolution!
The 1960s were an era of radical change, mirrored in the fashion photography of the period. Characterized by revolutions in fashion, youth culture, and pop music, the sixties also saw a softening in the class divides of preceding decades. With changing attitudes and the introduction of the Pill, Europe and America witnessed a time of sexual liberation.
The decade saw the birth of models as celebrities. And new types of models like Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, and Veruschka—this last appearing in Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary 1966 film “Blow-Up”—became household names.
Television played a cultural and artistic role on its way to becoming a mass medium in the 1960s, and thanks to the ubiquity of air travel, photographers set to exotic locales for their fashion shoots. Hiro’s famous photograph of Tilly Tizzani with a blue scarf was taken in the West Indies; Franco Rubartelli shot the German model Veruschka in Yves Saint Laurent’s famous safari dress in the Central African Republic. Veruschka appears like a glamazon, reflecting the new image of the women and the zeitgeist of the era: the individualist and independent woman, self-determined, adventurous, and open to the new.
But the epicenter of sixties style, culture, and fashion was “Swinging London,” defined as much by David Bailey and Twiggy as it was by the Beatles and the miniskirt. As the legendary editor-in-chief of US Vogue, Diana Vreeland, summed it up in 1965: “I love London. It is the most swinging city in the world.”
Street Style: 1960s-70s
Beginning in the second half of the 1960s, self-confident women felt sufficiently liberated to expose more of their bodies, and the fashion of the day reflected this cultural development. We see bell-bottoms and miniskirts became ubiquitous, era-defining fashion statements.
Garry Winogrand is one of the photographers said to have captured American society in the 1960s and 1970s at the height of feminism and the sexual revolution, capturing the figure of the confident, free, rebellious, and beautiful woman on the streets in a snapshot aesthetic. Shooting with a 35mm Leica camera in public spaces, Winogrand published this series in a 1975 book titled “Women are Beautiful”.
Since the 1960s, celebrity models became paragons for women everywhere, and fashion magazines influenced their style and way of life. Prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) made it possible for a wider audience to dress fashionably. As the British fashion designer Mary Quant said in 1966: “The whole point of fashion is to make fashionable clothes available to everyone.” Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro, and Yves Saint Laurent were among the European designers who successfully translated a couture aesthetic to ready-to-wear—producing bold and futuristic designs for young people to dress in every day.
Sex & Provocation
In the post-sexual revolution years, provocative and sexually charged images moved from the underground and countercultural press into the mainstream. In the 1970s, photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton pushed the limits of fashion photography with images that included not only nudity but also references to the world of fetish and fantasy—something that would have been unthinkable only a decade prior. These images appeared not in Playboy magazine but, remarkably, in Vogue.
Helmut Newton produced work that fetishized high heels and powerful women—and explored the complex and shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bourdin created images that focused more on surreal narratives and tableaux. His iconic and much-referenced campaigns for fashion designer Charles Jourdan made the shoe a fetish object.
Ellen von Unwerth’s work offers a female perspective on “Sex & Provocation”. Her photographic signature is characterized by her view of women: “I always wanted to create this glamorous girl but capture her in a very natural way. That’s the way I see women. They look beautiful and sexy to me, but also strong and in control of their image—free and confident.”
This section reveals that sexiness is a concept that, ever since the 1970s, can be endlessly redefined.
Fiction & Fantasy
Inspired by cinema and Surrealism, fashion photographers such as Tim Walker and Miles Aldridge create elaborate sets and backdrops for their shoots—in close collaboration with set designers and stylists, they bring their ideas to life, making a dreamworld reality. Walker explained: “I want people to look at my photographs the same way they watch movies in the cinema that let them forget their reality for a brief moment and submerge [themselves] in a different, foreign better world.”
Since early childhood, adventure, the circus, costumes, and animals have inspired the fantasy of Esther Haase, a dreamworld that has become the stage for her fashion photographs. Haase describes her fashion shootings as “staged reportages” that are cinematographically arranged and illuminated. Like in a film, the model slips into a role and fills the haute couture robes with vibrant life.
When Cindy Sherman was invited by Harper’s Bazaar in 1993 to showcase the spring designs, she went one step further, transforming herself into a court jester, posing for the camera in Dior high fashion.
These artists’ images present a fantasy world that is the perfect platform for fashion, which itself is so much about escapism and illusion. In much of their work, the fashion becomes secondary, with imagery and narrative taking center stage.
Unreal
Inspired by cinema and Surrealism, fashion photographers such as Tim Walker and Miles Aldridge create elaborate sets and backdrops for their shoots—in close collaboration with set designers and stylists, they bring their ideas to life, making a dreamworld reality. Walker explained: “I want people to look at my photographs the same way they watch movies in the cinema that let them forget their reality for a brief moment and submerge [themselves] in a different, foreign better world.”
Since early childhood, adventure, the circus, costumes, and animals have inspired the fantasy of Esther Haase, a dreamworld that has become the stage for her fashion photographs. Haase describes her fashion shootings as “staged reportages” that are cinematographically arranged and illuminated. Like in a film, the model slips into a role and fills the haute couture robes with vibrant life.
When Cindy Sherman was invited by Harper’s Bazaar in 1993 to showcase the spring designs, she went one step further, transforming herself into a court jester, posing for the camera in Dior high fashion.
These artists’ images present a fantasy world that is the perfect platform for fashion, which itself is so much about escapism and illusion. In much of their work, the fashion becomes secondary, with imagery and narrative taking center stage.
Unfiltered
Natural beauty, rawness, and imperfection marked a new decade in fashion photography. The late 1980s and 1990s saw the rise of the supermodel, a new type of model created and best celebrated by Peter Lindbergh, who was commissioned to do his first shoot for US Vogue in 1988. He asked the stylist to bring simple white shirts and photographed five rising models on Santa Monica Beach in California. The resulting photograph shows self-confident women with their hair tied back and without makeup. With his natural and candid look, Lindbergh gave birth to the supermodel, influential icons and role models who shaped the style for years to come.
Allusions to classical art—with an eye to celebrating the athletic body—are typical of the work of Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, and others. The legendary collaboration between Calvin Klein and Bruce Weber—who produced numerous iconic campaigns between 1979 and the mid-1990s—was era-defining. Weber’s striking photograph of Carré Otis riding a motorbike was taken in 1991 for the Calvin Klein Jeans campaign, and the photographer recalled later: “I was lucky to meet and photograph lots of rock groups and I wanted with this campaign to put a little of that life into the pictures.”
The late 1980s also saw a return to black-and-white photography—without the sheen and glamour of, for example, Guy Bourdin’s work of the previous decade. Pure and direct portraits are common in the new photographic artists’ visual language: there is much less staging and stiffness in their work—instead allowing for a simple, fluid, and direct dialogue between artist and model.
Street Style: 1980s to now
The sociocultural approach of Amy Arbus, shooting subcultures in New York in the 1980s, and Anthony Hernandez, capturing people on Los Angeles’s iconic Rodeo Drive, contrasts with photographs taken by Bill Cunningham, Scott Schuman, and Tommy Ton. Considered the godfather of street style photography, Cunningham searched the New York City streets for ordinary people in stylish clothes, summarizing that “the best fashion show is definitely on the street. Always has been, always will be.”
Cunningham anticipated style bloggers Scott Schuman and Tommy Ton by decades. The latter two photographers have depicted fashionistas on the streets or during international fashion weeks in Milan, Paris, London, and New York since 2005, when the fashion industry’s obsession with street style began.
Scott Schuman launched his famous street style blog “The Sartorialist” in 2005, paying homage to street fashion and how it is worn. Unlike fashion photography in glossy magazines, which carefully stage the ideal of female beauty, street style photography depicts those who are not necessarily models, but chic and styled people such as Franca Sozzani, former editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, and other strikingly dressed visitors to fashion shows or just people in daily life who dress creatively and exceptionally.
Today, fashion blogs and street style photographers have conquered the realm of the classical fashion magazine through social media and the Internet.
Romanticism
As a counterpoint to the shiny glamour and conspicuous consumption of the late 1970s and 1980s—reflected in the fashion photography of this era—photographers like Sarah Moon and Deborah Turbeville established a new style, one steeped in nostalgia and romanticism. Their work, and that of the other artists in this section, references painting as much as it does photography. “Painting, photography, music, cinema, literature, life… everything I loved influenced me,” stated Moon in an interview with Nicola Erni. Sarah Moon is particularly famous for her Polaroids—shrouded in blur, her images are romantic, out of time, and closer to dreamlike fantasy than real life. Turbeville’s work has a melancholic and cinematic quality that evokes an emotional response from the beholders—a rare thing in fashion photography.
Paolo Roversi, a gifted colorist and visual poet, produces work that feels as close to painting as it does to photography. His fashion photographs are timeless, and his distinctive style is largely achieved through long-exposure manipulation of light. His work can be characterized by a rich interplay between shadow, color, and light, and a mood of painterly romance.
The artists in this section often refine their printing techniques by using Polaroids, Fresson prints, carbon prints, platinum prints, or toned gelatin silver prints to achieve a wider color range and a soft surface, reflecting their romantic approach.
Magazine to Artwork
The genre of fashion photography dates back to the 1910s, when photography gradually replaced fashion illustration in magazines such as Vogue (founded in 1892) and Harper’s Bazaar (founded in 1867).
American Vogue hired its first full-time fashion photographer in 1914. The first photograph on a Vogue cover was published in 1932—a color photograph by Edward Steichen. In the years that followed, pioneers such as George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, and Erwin Blumenfeld created iconic images that combined fashion, art, and the avant-garde. Fashion photography interacted with art movements such as Surrealism. Art directors—including Alexander Liberman and Alexey Brodovitch—also had a significant influence on the look of fashion photography by placing photography in the context of layout and typography and setting the style with their avant-garde aesthetic. Even today, fashion photography is a collaborative process involving not only fashion photographers and art directors but also fashion designers, editors, and stylists.
Even though fashion photography is still commercial—published in fashion magazines or used in advertising campaigns—important figures have emerged over the course of the twentieth century to pave the way from magazine work to autonomous works of art.
Photographers such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn shaped the aesthetic of fashion photography in the 1940s and 1950s. Later, in the 1970s, such talents as Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin revolutionized the visual language of fashion photography, which from then on went far beyond the mere depiction of fashion: fashion photographers used the medium to tell stories, reflect on social issues, or create experimental aesthetics.
In the early 1980s, the artist Cindy Sherman pioneered the crossover between contemporary art and fashion, and in 2009 the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm translated the artistic idea of his “One Minute Sculptures” into an editorial with Claudia Schiffer for German Vogue.
The twentieth century has witnessed the boundaries between art and fashion photography become increasingly blurred, and fashion photography not only established itself as a genre in the history of photography, but also found a rightful place within the art world.
Romanticism
As a counterpoint to the shiny glamour and conspicuous consumption of the late 1970s and 1980s—reflected in the fashion photography of this era—photographers like Sarah Moon and Deborah Turbeville established a new style, one steeped in nostalgia and romanticism. Their work, and that of the other artists in this section, references painting as much as it does photography. “Painting, photography, music, cinema, literature, life… everything I loved influenced me,” stated Moon in an interview with Nicola Erni. Sarah Moon is particularly famous for her Polaroids—shrouded in blur, her images are romantic, out of time, and closer to dreamlike fantasy than real life. Turbeville’s work has a melancholic and cinematic quality that evokes an emotional response from the beholders—a rare thing in fashion photography.
Paolo Roversi, a gifted colorist and visual poet, produces work that feels as close to painting as it does to photography. His fashion photographs are timeless, and his distinctive style is largely achieved through long-exposure manipulation of light. His work can be characterized by a rich interplay between shadow, color, and light, and a mood of painterly romance.
The artists in this section often refine their printing techniques by using Polaroids, Fresson prints, carbon prints, platinum prints, or toned gelatin silver prints to achieve a wider color range and a soft surface, reflecting their romantic approach.
Magazine to Artwork DEMO
American Vogue hired its first full-time fashion photographer in 1914. The first photograph on a Vogue cover was published in 1932—a color photograph by Edward Steichen. In the years that followed, pioneers such as George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, and Erwin Blumenfeld created iconic images that combined fashion, art, and the avant-garde. Fashion photography interacted with art movements such as Surrealism. Art directors—including Alexander Liberman and Alexey Brodovitch—also had a significant influence on the look of fashion photography by placing photography in the context of layout and typography and setting the style with their avant-garde aesthetic. Even today, fashion photography is a collaborative process involving not only fashion photographers and art directors but also fashion designers, editors, and stylists.
Even though fashion photography is still commercial—published in fashion magazines or used in advertising campaigns—important figures have emerged over the course of the twentieth century to pave the way from magazine work to autonomous works of art.
Photographers such as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn shaped the aesthetic of fashion photography in the 1940s and 1950s. Later, in the 1970s, such talents as Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin revolutionized the visual language of fashion photography, which from then on went far beyond the mere depiction of fashion: fashion photographers used the medium to tell stories, reflect on social issues, or create experimental aesthetics.
In the early 1980s, the artist Cindy Sherman pioneered the crossover between contemporary art and fashion, and in 2009 the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm translated the artistic idea of his “One Minute Sculptures” into an editorial with Claudia Schiffer for German Vogue.
The twentieth century has witnessed the boundaries between art and fashion photography become increasingly blurred, and fashion photography not only established itself as a genre in the history of photography, but also found a rightful place within the art world.
Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Erwin Blumenfeld, Horst P. Horst, Peter Knapp, Annie Leibovitz, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Tyler Mitchell, Norman Parkinson, Irving Penn, Herb Ritts, Franco Rubartelli, Cindy Sherman, William Silano, Larry Sultan, Mario Testino, Tim Walker, Erwin Wurm
Carte Blanche
Under the legendary editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani, Vogue Italia achieved a unique position in the fashion world between 1988 and 2016. Transforming the magazine into a platform for experimental and often provocative fashion photography, Sozzani was well aware of the power of visual media: “I believe in the power of images, but also in the power of those who interpret those images.” Sozzani granted photographers unparalleled creative freedom (carte blanche), allowing them to experiment with innovative concepts and radical visual styles.
The prime example of this unconventional spirit of collaboration was Steven Meisel, who under Sozzani’s leadership exclusively photographed every Vogue Italia cover. She did not hesitate to raise socially relevant or controversial issues such as racism, environmental degredation, or cosmetic surgery within the fashion industry. Under her aegis, Vogue Italia became an intellectual and artistic platform that often defined and changed the zeitgeist of the fashion industry.
The nearly four hundred covers that Steven Meisel shot for Vogue Italia between 1988 and 2016 bear witness to the important creative interaction between the editor-in-chief and the photographer. These now iconic covers are being exhibited for the first time in a unique arrangement of original photographs. It is an archival synthesis of the art, initiated as a commission from Nicola Erni and realized by photographer Steven Meisel.
Next Generation
Fashion photography—like fashion itself—is constantly changing. New talents continue to emerge in the fields of both fashion design and photography; indeed, the two are fundamentally intertwined.
Diversity and gender fluidity are relevant themes in contemporary fashion and photography and reflect the current zeitgeist.
Tyler Mitchell and Nadine Ijewere emerged from the New Black Vanguard, fusing the genres of fine art and fashion photography to break down long-established boundaries. Known for his images celebrating the beauty of Black American life, Mitchell had already begun to introduce an original visual language to fashion photography when, in 2018, he became the first African American photographer to shoot the cover of US Vogue.
Alasdair McLellan resisted using digital photography, employed by almost all of his peers, and his aesthetic is in tune with the sports chic favored by the urban youth. And Harley Weir celebrates modern femininity and the female gaze through the intimacy and color of her images.
Yet the future is wide open, and the next chapter of artificial intelligence (AI) has just begun. For the May 2023 issue of Vogue Italia, Dutch photographer Carlijn Jacobs set out to create backgrounds using artificial intelligence. Collaborating with AI artist Chad Nelson, Jacobs took on the challenge of translating her creative vision into keywords for the AI program: “The creation of these hybrid images turned out to be more complex and time-consuming than expected. And to finish the work in a reasonable time, I ended up photoshopping most of the images obtained with AI.”
Silvie Fleury – Solo Focus
Geneva-based artist Sylvie Fleury is known for her staging of glamour, fashion, and the luxury items of the modern world, and for arranging them in new contexts. She poses fundamental questions about the power of the status symbols that have become fetishes of consumption. Falling somewhere between Pop appropriation and Minimalist aesthetics, Fleury’s pieces blur the lines between art, advertising, and fashion, thereby challenging stereotypes and consumer culture. But her work is perhaps not without ambiguity, as she herself loves consumption as much as she might expose it. With her alluring appropriation of fashion codes and readymade compositions, she calls out our consumerist desires and fetishistic ideas in a kind of Neo-Pop glam. This ensemble of different works by Sylvie Fleury conveys a juxtaposition of contemporary art—in the form of her installations, wallpapers, and objects—with fashion photography as appropriation art.
Hassan Hajjaj – Solo Focus
Known as the “Andy Warhol of Marrakech,” Anglo-Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj combines elements of high fashion with Moroccan tradition and street culture. With colorful compositions, patterned backdrops, textiles, and typical Moroccan plastic mats, he creates his own universe blending not only photography and contemporary art, but also the Orient, the Western world—and Pop Art. This commissioned room installation is a stand-alone “Mix and Match” of art, fashion, and photography.
