The Art of Fashion: Customs & Culture

The journey of a collector through the Art of Fashion, as with any subject, can take some interesting twists and turns through the history and development of the medium.

 

Curiosity around different ways of living, customs and dress ran mostly parallel to the first dedicated fashion magazines, which began to feature photography rather than illustrations from the late 1930's onwards. 

The full diversity of popular culture at home and abroad found a forum instead in the new mass communications of that time. A 'Golden Age' of Photojournalism celebrated stories of everyday lives as well as celebrity figures, through the richly printed pages of Life Magazine in the US from 1936 onwards, the new format photo-essays of the Picture Post in the UK from 1938, and later in the School of Humanist photography. 

 

Click each image below to explore available works, view pricing details and to see each piece on a wall.

The photojournalists were united by a desire to witness and express the human spirit and condition, in all its fascinating variations. The humanists in particular sought to elevate and celebrate ordinary lives, and capture moments of beauty and poetry to uplift and console through the extremes and aftermath of war. In 1947 the Magnum Photo Agency was formed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David 'Chim' Seymour and George Rodger, as Cartier-Bresson described, placing equal importance on not only what is seen but also the way one sees it:

 

"There's no standard way of approaching a story. We have to evoke a situation, a truth. This is the poetry of life's reality"

 

The fine art of these endeavours culminated in the landmark exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art , New York in 1955. This ambitious exhibition, which brought together hundreds of images by photographers working around the world, was intended as a 'forthright declaration of global solidarity in the decade following World War II'. Organized by noted photographer and director of MoMA’s Department of Photography Edward Steichen, the exhibition took the form of a photo essay celebrating the universal aspects of the human experience, and included works by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, René Groebli, Willy Ronis, and Sabine Weiss. The exhibition toured the world for eight years, attracting more than 9 million visitors.

The fine art of these endeavours culminated in the landmark exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art , New York in 1955. This ambitious exhibition, which brought together hundreds of images by photographers working around the world, was intended as a 'forthright declaration of global solidarity in the decade following World War II'. Organized by noted photographer and director of MoMA’s Department of Photography Edward Steichen, the exhibition took the form of a photo essay celebrating the universal aspects of the human experience, and included works by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, René Groebli, Willy Ronis, and Sabine Weiss. The exhibition toured the world for eight years, attracting more than 9 million visitors.

The work of Irving Penn, who also participated in The Family of Man exhibition, became an early and enduring point of convergence - between the social ideals of the photojournalists, and the artists who had arrived to push boundaries and challenge conventions in the pages of high fashion magazines.

 

Penn's"Christmas in Cuzco" was published in 1949, "The Quest for Beauty in Dahomey," in 1967,  and "The Veiled Mystery of Morocco," in 1971, all reproduced in color. He later returned to these series after many years of experimenting and perfecting the process, to create his stunning platinum and palladium exhibition prints, as seen below with an equally luminous silver gelatin print.

 

As the Museum of Metropolitan Art, New York writes, 

 
“Celebrated for sixty years of masterly work at Vogue magazine beginning in the 1940s, Irving Penn was a superb photographer of style. And yet his attention to fashion was merely one aspect of his lifelong study of face and figure, attitude and demeanor, adornment and artifact..."