Throughout his 60-year career, the photographer Richard Avedon created only a handful of portfolios which he presented as complete bodies of work meant to be displayed as one group of photographs. Hamiltons exhibited two of these rare portfolios, La Passante du Siècle and Made in France, marking the first time the former had been exhibited in its entirety.
Made in France is a portfolio by chance. It was assembled after Avedon’s re-discovery of an intact group of 27 of his original engraver prints from the glory years that were 1950s Harper’s Bazaar. During this time Avedon became an ascendant force at the magazine and travelled to Paris twice a year to report on the post-war French couture collections. Out of thousands of Avedon’s (or any photographer’s) published fashion photographs from this period, they are among the few survivors, mounted to their original boards, each with their unique stamps (“Made in France”), mark-ups, printing notes, and captions as they were to appear in the all-important fall issues. These images not only record the couture of the time, but document the process by which the magazine was assembled under Avedon’s “trinity” of European-born American colleagues – Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland, and Alexey Brodovitch.
At about the same time that Avedon rediscovered his earlier Made In France photographs taken in the 1950s, he embarked on the creation of a new portfolio of French designs that would capture the sweep of 20th century women’s fashion, and explicate the complicated evolution of female identity over the course of 100 years. Mixing contemporary and vintage clothing borrowed from various collections, Avedon photographed Stephanie Seymour, a highly expressive model in the tradition of Dorian Leigh, as she would have appeared across time.
Having photographed fashion for 50 years, Avedon understood historical processes and was able to succinctly analyse the concurrent linear and cyclical nature of expression through photography and design. How the hyper-femininity of the early 1900s would re-emerge in altered formats in the 1950s and again in the 1980s. The liberation from the traditionally feminine, which so ardently marked the decade following 1910 (with designers such as Poiret and Fortuny) would not be seen again until the 1960s and get reaffirmed once again in the last years of the 20th century by Comme des Garçons. The theatrical minimalism of the 1920s is echoed by the eternal Chanel in the 1990s. And the dark masculinity of the 1930s and 1940s (which was also indelibly marked by the “uniform” of war) would inspire the decade of the 1970s and Yves Saint Laurent, when “le smoking” came to dominate the global scene.
Richard Avedon, Stephanie Seymour, Robe by Comme des Garcçons, New York, May 1992 © Richard Avedon Foundation
