Behind the Scenes at a Fashion Magazine

Volume 1, Issue 1, #ten - 2018

Behind the Scenes with Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Toni Frissell:
Alternative Views of Fashion Photography in Mid-Century America

Past REBECCA ARNOLD

Abstract:

This essay explores the procedure and labour involved in creating fashion editorials. It is focused on the work of Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Toni Frissell, equally case studies of photographers who worked at America's 2 leading fashion magazines: Harper's Boutique and Vogue. Images that show these women "backstage" form the footing of this analysis, to expose the images' compositions and the teams of people involved in their creation. Both photographers worked at a key moment in American fashion, as designers such as Claire McCardell created a simple, interchangeable wardrobe of readymade clothes that catered to the increasingly active lives of centre-form women. They were significant to the "Modern Sportswear Aesthetic" that emerged during this menstruation and which exploited Kodachrome's rich tones to compose alluring images that showed sportswear every bit adjustable and fashionable. Often shot exterior, or using carefully contrived sets, their imagery provides a example study for the ways manner's artistic workers collaborated to construct convincing visions of sportswear'southward emergent mode. Drawing upon Bruno Latour's theories of organization, this article examines these networks of people, working to varied briefs and deadlines to create each magazine issue. From contact sheets and shots of fashion editors and models, to glimpses of the photographers' efforts to find the right angle, this essay uses Dahl-Wolfe and Frissell's photobooks and archival materials, including memos between Bazaar Editor-in-Chief Carmel Snow and Frissell, to challenge the idea of the seamless fashion page and look at the professional work and negotiations necessary to create a successful prototype.

Keywords:

• Louise Dahl-Wolfe

• Toni Frissell

• Diana Vreeland

• mode photography

• American fashion

Life mag'due south 1937 article "Reporting Paris Styles is a Business" showed the Harper'south Bazaar and Vogue manner teams at work. Carmel Snow and her editors are photographed at the shows and equally they organize shoots of garments they have seen at couture salons. Illustrators Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard are depicted drawing the latest fashions on live models, while Jean Moral photographs them out on the streets of Paris. Models are defenseless changing, and a sense of urgency and speed infuses every frame as each must enact her office quickly and efficiently.

       The spread is self-reflexive: a magazine article that analyses mag do, but 1 that is also revelatory in its attention to fashion as a site of work. While Life magazine was a general interest magazine, its fashion pages and covers meant its visual assay of the Paris collections related to its own reportage, besides every bit that of Faddy and Harper's Bazaar's. The article catalogues industry professionals' activity, planning, and labour, as they see, assimilate, and represent a wealth of style information, working to tight deadlines. When seen in relation to other backstage style images of the menstruum, these photographs provide a glimpse into manner as process, and importantly, they likewise nowadays manner as organisation and collaboration. This essay focuses on editorial images, every bit published in magazines, likewise equally photographs that reveal the process of creating fashion shoots, to examine the subconscious relationships between those working on style magazines and the labour and finances that go into their product.

These fashion pages represent designers' and magazine staff's collective imagination deployed in the creation, non just of images, but also of women, or at least their platonic.

This is a collective imagination that requires those working on a shoot to produce imagery that expresses their ain creative ideas, in line with their given brief.

       This assay focuses on two photographers: Louise Dahl-Wolfe atHarper'southward Bazaar and Toni Frissell atVogue.Their work is significant since their careers coincide with a key moment in the crystallization of American style photography and magazine aesthetics and culture. Each worked at a major way title as editors sought to constitute new visual and graphic ideals in light of modern art, design, and popular culture, as well every bit technological modify. When analyzed together, Dahl-Wolfe and Frissell'due south fashion editorials, and images of them working backside the scenes at shoots, betrayal fashion every bit a more complex, nuanced process than these images might imply. Chiefly, they also reveal fashion as work, rather than just fantasy.

       Bruno Latour'due south ideas on collaboration and institutions enable these images to exist contextualized in relation to the fluid nature of artistic organisation that is intrinsic to fashion magazines. His essay, "'What'due south the Story?' Organizing equally a Mode of Beingness" of 2011 forms the footing of this analysis, since it relates directly to arrangement as reality and idea. While Latour examines his university'south attempts to rethink its meanings and structure, his theories are equally applicable to way magazines' creative work, which besides relies upon a nebulous thought of reputation, inherent qualities, and status. These values are hard to quantify, and in attempting to exercise so, Latour argues that institutions reveal far more fluidity and modify than they perhaps sympathise themselves, or wish to prove to the outside world. In particular, he observes that the nature of organizations, and of organizing, reveals that there are "many different characters inscribed into many contradictory scripts with different deadlines … as to the structure it is never more than what has been inscribed in the script by various authors" (Latour 9). His emphasis on multiple authors, rather than a unmarried auteur, is apt to mode editorial planning and creation, and underscores fashion photography as a product of coordination and collaboration. This interpretation allows for a nuanced view of mag work civilization, since it reveals fashion cosmos within an arrangement as fluid and in movement, or in Latour'due south words, "the whole is ever smaller than its parts — as long every bit we are in the act of organizing." His stress on "parts," in this case the individuals and their interpretations of each cursory, allows united states to think about a fashion magazine as reliant upon constellations of workers, each potentially as significant as the editor-in-master and/or the mag's make. This reconfiguration of emphasis implies that rather thanVogue, for example, resting upon a stable idea of its brand, it is instead in constant flux: its status, aesthetic, and content continually reimagined by its many workers. This dynamic connects with Latour's insistence upon rethinking the common "individual versus the system dichotomy" and considering an organisation, in this example a fashion mag, as a " rhythmic variation." In this mode, the magazine tin be conceived of as ii interrelated elements: its workers' cyclical movements to create content, which is compiled into each individual issue, and, later, each issue which becomes a fabric product that records the rhythmic, monthly reorganization of the whole (Latour 9). A instance study, in this example two photographers' backstage imagery, therefore highlights collective work and organization, with workers responding to a series of briefs and deadlines, to bring focus to editorial mode's commonage nature.

Editing American Fashion Magazines

Vogue was already established as a manner authority in the 1930s, simplyHarper'south Boutique was to evolve during this period, as Carmel Snow assembled a team that could reinvent the title in line with contemporary mores. Snowfall, along with Fashion Editor Diana Vreeland and fine art managing director Alexey Brodovitch, "have ofttimes been described every bit a 'triumvirate.'" However, in authenticityBazaar functioned as a hierarchy, with Snow at the superlative. The fine art director'due south purism was a foil for the fashion editor's exuberance, but the editor-in-main controlled the expect and tone of the mag (Diana Vreeland: The Heart has to Travel 34). Edna Woolman Chase, Editor-in-Chief ofFaddy, and Carmel Snow atHarper's Bazaarneeded to maintain their magazines' identities, despite myriad people working on each issue. The difficulties inherent in such a process are palpable in Chase's correspondence. In her role as Editor-in-Charge ofVogue's American, British, and French editions, Chase sent letters to assert policies for the brand every bit a whole. She was clear, for example about the utilise of plush techniques, and brought economic reality to her creative teams, writing in 1936:

Colour is frightfully expensive. A page of colour must justify itself on 1 of two counts and preferably on both. Either it must be such a lovely thing in itself that it gives you nifty pleasure to wait at itor it should exist so full of actual style information that it fulfils in a practical sense what it may lack in decorative beauty. (Chase and Chase 260)

She was conscious of the magazine's role as mode informant for its readers and, significantly, its need to keep good relations with style houses and advertisers, concerns that prompted memos to contributors, including Bérard, to complain if their imagery lacked attention to a garment'southward details (Chase and Hunt 260).

Fashion magazines constantly counterbalanced between fantasy and reality in their aesthetic and content, and therefore editors had to choose carefully the constellations of artists, writers, and editors that worked on each event.

For Chase, as for Snow, it was crucial to go on a abiding bank check on all aspects of the process to ensure a coherent terminate outcome. It was, of form, also essential that every element of each shot, each editorial, each layout would contribute to individual and overall editors' visions.Faddy's Editor-in-Chief from 1952–63, Jessica Daves, described this residue in relation to those involved in the process of production: "Proficient teamwork is vital. At the aforementioned time, each person in the studio is concentrating on his dissever problem," and this involved the varied, sometimes conflicting concerns of lensman, editor, and model as they focused on each outfit and its representation (Daves 150-1).

       Such comments reflect the fluid and sometimes unpredictable structures and practices that underpin mode magazine production. Latour noted his university colleagues' discussions of the institution's "DNA" or "essence," as though there was a solid cadre of elements "that should 'dictate' our present choice[south]," for new projects and approaches. Yet, he found that this "essence" is not as clear or stock-still as it might seem, and meant different things to each fellow member of staff. It was as well interpreted in relation to varied points within an arrangement'south evolution, as though a specific moment in its history embodied its definitive state and meaning, which prompted Latour to ask "which past to inherit?" (3-four). This suggests that the very idea of organizational "essence" is a mythic ideal of stability that masks constant movement, and multiple interpretations. This complication reflects the means each fashion editorial is a product of a different set of workers' ideas of what the magazine represents and what information technology volition become with each new issue. It too speaks to fashion's inherent demand to look backwards and forwards simultaneously. Fashion magazines must besides grapple with this credible contradiction, as editors accept to. As Latour notes, they must continually "reorganize" to maintain an identity that seems constant, yet is always in flux. While institutions, such as manner magazines, may look to their heritage to imagine their ain present and time to come, in that location are then many people and projects involved in this procedure that a single, stable "essence" is not achievable, or in reality desirable. What Latour instead described is a sequential interpretation of each brief and deadline as diverse team members reply, often acting in different means on separate assignments. His clarification of this procedure as "rhythmic" is apt to fashion magazines, as it reflects their constant reorganization into monthly problems (Latour 9). It also relates to the means art directors program layout; for case, Alexey Brodovitch's exercise of placing all the pages sequentially on the floor, so that he could "meet" each issue'south rhythmic progression between advertising and editorials and text and image. His blueprint practice embedded organization into the mag aesthetically and materially. Like his peers, includingVogue's Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha, he planned each issue's visual footstep, and the rate at which a reader might plough pages. A reader may pause over slower editorials that used more white infinite, for instance, and speed upwardly over a quick succession of brilliant advertisements. However, readers are unlikely to consider the ways this interaction has been guided.

Photographers Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Toni Frissell both captured those hidden moments that awaken u.s. from the fashionable dream that magazines produce, since they allowed themselves to be photographed at piece of work.

In so doing, they provided glimpses of Latour's discussion of constant reorganization, at micro and macro levels inside a magazine's planning and execution. They slipped betwixt the hidden moments of way work and the public, visible fashion product. In both women's photobooks,Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Photographer'southward Scrapbook (1984) andToni Frissell Photographs, 1933–67 (1994), there are a range of such images, juxtaposed with outtakes and shots that were chosen for publication in magazines. It is significant that in each case, they chose to include backstage scenes to assert their working do, alongside the terminal product. Fashion magazines occasionally published such photographs, as well, normally every bit a tiny image sequestered in the "Editor's Invitee Book" page, for instance, which ofttimes functioned more equally an introduction to the private photographer than as a demonstration of the work put into each editorial. Patrizia Di Bello and Shamoon Zamir describe photographs as being like songs, in that they have various existences and incarnations: as prints, reproduced in magazines, in photobooks on an individual photographer, in compilations of images from the period, from a particular magazine, and equally artworks collected and exhibited in museums (Di Bello and Zamir 9-11). In each incarnation we experience them differently, guided past the medium and the environment in which they are presented and aware of their varied visual bear on and materiality.

       This article develops Di Bello and Zamir'south analysis of how context impacts significant and, importantly, how viewing these photographs beyond varied environments exposes the work and organization that goes into their creation, by focusing on Dahl-Wolfe and Frissell's piece of work, equally seen in magazines, photobooks, and as archive material. Photobooks foreground the individual every bit subject, fifty-fifty though in the examples discussed here they simultaneously reveal process and collaboration and thus provide a counter-narrative to straightforward auteurist readings. In dissimilarity, fashion magazines rarely disrupt the myth of creative person-creator, and at this time only the photographer was named on each way spread. Di Bello and Zamir'southward idea of "tactical reading" allows these photographers' work to exist analyzed through a strategic selection of their images beyond varied media. They characterize this approach as: "disrupting or subverting the [photograph]book's sequential development, just as we close the book, all the photographs leap 'dorsum in again and then there should exist no disorder'" (Di Bello and Zamir 12).  Past relating "tactical reading" to the range of contexts identified for photographs in Di Bello and Zamir's essay, images from Dahl-Wolfe and Frissell'southward photobooks, backstage photographs, and portraits of the photographers themselves can be "disrupted" to examine their interrelated meanings.

Backstage Images as Portraits

Figure 1

Portrait of Louise Dahl-Wolfe © Abe Frajndlich, 2017. Abe Frajndlich, 1988, photograph.

       Abe Frajndlich's 1988 photograph of Louise Dahl-Wolfe for Life magazine shows her peering from a clothes rack, sternly assessing her view, photographic camera in manus, the suitcases that frame her suggesting she could accept off at any minute on another photographic mission (see fig. 1). Her leopard print dress and the multi-tone and texture sleeves that push in on her connect her with manner and style fifty-fifty in old age, and assign her status and occupation in a spread on 150 years of photographic history. Although the photograph is staged, it is notable that it aims to look similar a backstage shot, which uses dress, cases, and camera as attributes to illuminate her profession. It is a portrait that seeks not just to expose her likeness and character, simply also to encourage viewers to imagine her practice and past.

       Dahl-Wolfe studied fine fine art in San Francisco and interior and architectural design in New York in the mid-teens, earlier completing her education by travelling through Europe. Her interest in surface patterns and course was honed through this combination of technical preparation and observations made during her travels. From early on she photographed friends, and was fascinated by the ways bodies moved and formed gestures.  She came to mode afterward food photography, portraiture, and department store commissions. She went on to work prolifically for Snowfall, completing eighty-vi covers and a multitude of spreads.

FIGURE 2

Unknown photographer, Toni Frissell sitting, property camera on her lap, with several children standing around her, somewhere in Europe. 1945, photograph, Toni Frissell Collection at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/item/2008680192/ .

       In contrast to Dahl-Wolfe, Toni Frissell was ever depicted equally active and able-bodied, a double to the models she photographed. In this image, she is captured showing children her photographic camera while on assignment equally war photographer for the American Crimson Cross in Europe in 1945(see fig. 2). In 1930, she had started as caption writer forFaddy, although she did not last the full year, since, as she said, "They finally fired me because I couldn't spell … undaunted, I bought a camera and took pictures during the summer at Newport."  AsThe Christian Science Monitor noted in 1943, "She now counts it a happy twenty-four hour period when she was discharged: for information technology was and so that the thought came to her of photographing fashions out doors in their logical settings — an innovation. No one evidently had idea of it before … Experimenting continually, she developed an eye for blending together naturally both model and mural" (Foster). While she was not necessarily the first to photo style outdoors, she was function of an important core of photographers who were rethinking the way modern dress was represented, which also included Dahl-Wolfe, Martin Munkácsi, and Jean Moral. Frissell's first fashion spread, "Beauties at Newport," was published inBoondocks and Country in 1931, and this free way of shooting that brought personal, holiday imagery into the public sphere was to go along throughout her career, lending her work warmth and intimacy. Her afterward work is infused with a sense of immediacy and adventure and demonstrates her commitment to depicting movement, of the trunk but also through travel, which connects her work both to photo-reportage and documentary film of the period.

       Frissell signed a contract withVogue in 1933, and her photographic fashion, based on natural low-cal and an outdoors aesthetic, became increasingly significant to fashion'south gimmicky ethics. It is important therefore to consider the serial of relationships and ideas that link manner photography'due south creators and viewers, and to acknowledge the sequence of collaborations that enable this network of imagery and objects to be formed.

       Dahl-Wolfe and Frissell approached their subjects differently. Dahl-Wolfe reveled in the potential of natural light and balanced compositions, simply tended to show models carefully arranged in static poses, in contrast to Frissell's more naturalistic and dynamic imagery. This can exist seen in each photographer's editorial work. Dahl-Wolfe'due south poignant September 1943Harper's Bazaar cover, for case, viewed the model from behind and assorted her glowing pare with icy silk, to focus on her tanned back while she inspects her reflection. In combination with a snapshot of her "beau" slipped into the mirror's frame, Dahl-Wolfe encouraged viewers to look at the model looking. As and then often in Dahl-Wolfe's piece of work, the magazine's readers are invited to share a moment of stillness and thought, while their eyes are subtly guided to key elements of clothes, accessories, and beauty through lighting and colour.

       In contrast, for Frissell it was the human relationship between sitter and location, activity and emotion that was most compelling. Her firstVogueembrace in June 1937 deployed a snapshot style and dynamic sense of movement, as a swimsuit-clad model reacts to the waves frothing around her, in an image that showed how daydreams of holidays and escape could exist conveyed through elementary set-ups and minimal props.

These covers demonstrate the ways that the ii photographers' ain images connected with their editorials, and thus blurred private and public, life and piece of work, with Dahl-Wolfe as a distanced observer, and Frissell as part of the action she depicted.

In turn, both types of imagery were part of the magazines' identity construction, which was brought together in their shoots, and the personalities involved in their cosmos.

On Gear up: Louise Dahl-Wolfe

Both photographers travelled widely, re-contextualizing American design within exoticized locales. Such trips needed to be planned advisedly, with garments and accessories assembled from designers and manufacturers and locations scouted for suitability. In this photo, Dahl-Wolfe is shown with Fashion Editor Babs Simpson and two models during a trip to Brazil (see fig. 3).

FIGURE 3

Babs Simpson, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and two models, Brazil © Estate of Babs Simpson. 1947, photograph.

Both Simpson and the models article of clothing Claire McCardell dresses, and thus stand for the ideals of dazzler and sense of taste that were to be formulated in the editorial. It is significant that both editor and models article of clothing the style, which links them visually for what may well be a publicity shot of the impending fashion pages, their pared-back look only enhanced by the grand setting. Dahl-Wolfe always sought to develop a strong relationship with her models during sittings and aimed to get a performance from them that would illuminate the outfit in relation to the location or set, as well as piece of work on the magazine page.

       McCardell's aesthetic dominates the photograph, despite her absence from the image. This is a reminder that these are photographs of another'south creation, but a pattern form that needs bodies (and, arguably, space and place) to animate, complete, and realize its potential. Louise Dahl-Wolfe understood and acknowledged the discipline needed to develop this collaboration, albeit unspoken, betwixt the designer and photographer'south visions of femininity. Every bit she said, "A manner photographer is non a gratis agent — you must try to express in the photograph what the designer is maxim without being literal, corny or unnatural" (Dahl-Wolfe 39). This focus can be seen in the range of annotated images on her contact sheets, where she placed accent on organic pose and gesture, with paw-written notes scattered across the page. Bruno Latour described how this manner of working, or rather organizing, within a larger construction means that team members, such every bit Dahl-Wolfe, are "sequentially fabricators and fabricated, and … shift roles at specific deadlines that are themselves scripted" (Latour 7). Dahl-Wolfe therefore acts commencement as fabricator, while subject to a brief from Snow, later negotiating in relation to her own interpretations and in relation to her directly collaborators. The images produced are then returned to the magazine for editing and art direction from Brodovitch, at which point Dahl-Wolfe is fabricated: made into a component of the magazine, with her work recreated in relation to the rest of its content. The serial of relationships that build a successful sequence of manner interchanges has to be organized past Snow, simply moves betwixt a complex serial of "fabricators/fabricated" that work from brief to deadline, from initial pattern to consumption, whether visual or literal. This recalls Latour's idea of a rhythmic process to such piece of work, as the magazine gives command of each brief to its employees, before reincorporating work created into the concluding product. As discussed above, each upshot is as much about its parts as it is the whole, since each are inscribed in this fluid organizational procedure.

       The piece of work and logistics that go into this formation are largely hidden from magazine readers' view. However, Dahl-Wolfe's photobook contains numerous views into this part of her work, from images of administration sewing sofa cushions to make a prepare, to this photograph of her shooting Christian Bérard (see fig. 4).

FIGURE 4

Louise Dahl-Wolfe photographing Christian Bérard. 1946, photograph.

She is shown counterbalanced atop a table, bent in concentration, equally she strains to detect the perfect angle. Readers may suspect the difficulties involved in an epitome's creation, but they are usually excluded from fashion magazines' apparently seamless realm.

       Collaboration underpinned these women's success, and Dahl-Wolfe's work with Diana Vreeland was to produce some ofHarper'due south Bazaar's most celebrated images. A strong chemical element that united them was their shared interest in colour. Carmel Snow stated that Dahl-Wolfe took colour photography "to its ultimate" (The World of Carmel Snowfall 98). This connected dorsum to her training, both in fine arts and interior design, and to her fascination with colour theory. At the San Francisco Institute of Art she was taught by colourism pioneer, Rudolph Schaeffer. As Frances McFadden,Harper's Boutique'southward Managing Editor, noted, "when not faced with a deadline, she worked with her little photographic camera on experiments with Kodachrome, experiments that were to prepare a new standard in colour" (Dahl-Wolfe xii).

       Color was significant in a number of ways during this period, both technically and aesthetically. The 1930s and 1940s saw great strides in manufacturers' ability to dye different fabrics the same colour, which enabled greater coordination of separates, ane of the growing dress categories for modern women. Film stock producers worked on truer representations of varied hues in still and moving film, and printers sought ways to reproduce this on mag pages (Jacob 119). For creators and consumers, this unsaid heady possibilities and turned Dahl-Wolfe's photographic imaginings into rich, polychrome visions.

       Colour pages added to magazines' visual luxury and the number in each edition began to grow. This added another dimension to their look and feel, and required further skills from lensman and way editor, who now needed to exist enlightened of how color worked within an outfit, on a model, in relation to the setting, as well equally in the photograph and the eventual impact on the printed page. In her biography of Diana Vreeland, Amanda McKenzie Stuart described the process of shaping a style editorial and the significance of colour within the choices made:

The colour photographs in each issue were expensive, and were allocated to dress by advertisers and designers whom Snow and Diana agreed were important. Snow and Brodovitch, meanwhile, deliberated on how the images should be placed in the issue. Once Diana had selected the pieces, and Snowfall approved, Diana and Dahl-Wolfe agreed between them what the mood of the image should exist. (Stuart 132)

Dahl-Wolfe, who published her showtime colour photograph forHarper's Bazaar in 1937, always best-selling Vreeland'southward importance to her fashion spreads, and stated that:

No one knew color, no one could pull a sitting together like Diana. AtBazaar, we had to photograph wearing apparel we chosen "pearls of little toll." That meant they were from manufacturers who advertised. The more they spent on advertising, the bigger the pic … Sometimes, you lot'd go these clothes and y'all only wouldn't know what to do. But Diana always managed to make it work, and Carmel would say, "Just hibernate equally much equally you tin."  (Duka 6)

Vreeland's understanding of the ways an ensemble'southward various elements worked on the body was crucial to Dahl-Wolfe's visual style as a whole. It was as well significant to the emergence of the American Look equally a mode mode and as a guide to American women and their international peers. Vreeland embodied this ideal of proficient taste, although she preferred to wearable French couture herself. It is perhaps almost accurate to say that she embraced hybridity. She was widely travelled and constantly inspired to re-create and accommodate what she saw, whether sandals from Pompeii or taking note of the way Elsie de Wolfe arranged her flowers (D.V.). Vreeland'south ingenuity and flexibility were crucial to her vision. Photographer Lillian Bassman remembers her standing in forepart of the mirror and "becoming the model"; Vreeland thus embodied what she wanted to then projection on fix, while Dahl-Wolfe was able to translate this into something visual (Vreeland, Jorgen-Permutt, and Tcheng).

       Vreeland saw fashion in purely aesthetic terms and was quick to learn the power of imagery to create new ideas of what fashion was and could be.

Her ability to style fifty-fifty the "pearls of fiddling price" and nowadays them to viewers as office of an aspirational portfolio of fashion demonstrated her skill and the dynamic she established with Dahl-Wolfe.

As McFadden said, "In Diana Vreeland she constitute the perfect teammate. When faced by an outfit that seemed utterly hopeless to Louise, Diana would save the day by redoing a coiffure, twisting a scarf a new way, adding the gleam of an earring" (Dahl-Wolfe xiii).

       TheHarper's Boutique team thus helped to shape the ways women might vesture readymade garments, and furnished them with visual cues for their ain approach to shopping and dressing. Collaborative thinking transferred from backside the scenes at a sitting, onto the fashion page, and, potentially, into the readers' ain self-fashioning. For a multi-page shoot set in Arizona published in Jan 1942, Vreeland combined section store sportswear's simple, clean silhouettes with rich, bawdy tones, punctuated with dark separates and bright accessories that harmonized with Frank Lloyd Wright's use of organic materials at Taliesin Due west and Arizona'south parched landscape. Indeed, Vreeland'southward apotheosis of the stylistic ideal was made manifest in the final spread, when she modelled for one of the shots herself. She is pictured confronting a stonewall, with a scarf wrapped effectually her hair, a decorative bear on she oftentimes used when styling professional models.

       One of Vreeland's nigh well-known model discoveries was Lauren Bacall, who, describing her feel of working with the editor and Dahl-Wolfe, noted how their approaches complimented each other's to create a harmonious set and productive piece of work environs:

It was fun working with these two ladies. Diana would be there through the sitting, making sure the apparel were on straight, that the pilus was the way she wanted it. Louise would snap away. They worked perfectly together. I'd say almost anything that came into my head … A lot of it made them laugh — though all through it, Dahl-Wolfe never looked up from the camera, never really took her mind off what she was doing. A total professional. (Bacall 95)

Dahl-Wolfe was thus able to capture the temper conjured by Vreeland for her model in her images. In contrast, Bacall described working with photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huene equally hard, since "he posed me like a statue" (Bacall 95).  Such formality is again evident in his photographs, which demonstrate precision and stylized gestures, even when photographing sportswear. Snow could shape the results of each editorial brief through her choice of creative team, to produce a more classical, contemplative mood with Hoyningen-Huene, or a more relaxed, though nonetheless carefully composed, image with Dahl-Wolfe. Her recognition of each employee'south difference in approach to collaboration is again part of the delicate balance of people and ideas that was continually reconfigured for each issue. Her discernment was crucial in organizing editorial shoots that had to conform sufficiently to the magazine'due south outlook, nonetheless continue to evolve, like fashion itself.

       The total extent of the Arizona shoot by Dahl-Wolfe and Vreeland demonstrated this. Although contained in a single portfolio, varied moods, locations, and models produced images that displayed contemporary gear up-to-wear within a Western theme, with pictures that ranged from bright butterfly-scattered dresses to stark blackness and white shots of tailored coats. Vreeland and Dahl-Wolfe'southward use of line and texture, colour and light invigorated the magazine'due south pages and appealed to viewers through such subtle shifts in settings and fashions. Brodovitch then advisedly laid out the spread, collecting some images together and assuasive others to fill full pages to organize the reader'due south experience.

On Set up: Toni Frissell

Figure 5

A fashion model underwater with a diver in a dolphin tank at Marineland, Florida, 1939. Toni Frissell Collection at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

As her trunk plunges into night waters, the model twists slightly, curving to turn her face up away from the photographic camera, to emphasize the dissimilarity between her stake wearing apparel and waterlogged hair (see fig. 5). Taken at Marineland in Florida in 1939, Toni Frissell's paradigm emphasizes the magazine viewer's experience of inbound fashion's glossy realm. Readers are required to suspend their sense of disbelief and escape onto a plane of shared imaginings and desires. Frissell'south image is simultaneously realistic and fantastical; we can experience the sensation of cool water on our peel, the lightness as it supports the trunk'south weight, the dreamlike shimmer of sunlight on the pool's surface. And nonetheless this illusion is broken. In the corner of the frame, hovering beneath this mermaid vision is a diver. His heavy suit and shadowy presence tells the states that this is a construction, and that the model needs air, and safety precautions must be taken on fix.

       This "backstage" chemical element was included in the terminal spread and breaks the quaternary wall. It provides an breach event as jarring equally when a motion-picture show actor stares directly into the camera. In this print, this is furthered by the photograph'south visible edges; it is possible to run into across the frame, outside the crop that eventually made it onto the published folio. Chinagraph pencil markings show the archivist's work, and the color and shade bands warning the viewer to the attempt that goes into printing and correcting. This image illuminates style photography's being in several media and locations: as a photographer'southward vision, as negatives, every bit print, its destiny on the magazine folio, and, ultimately, its acquisition into the archive, in this case Toni Frissell'southward collection at the Library of Congress. Thus, the contradiction between way's credible ephemerality and the photo's longevity are made visible. Chiefly, the dual presence of model and diver likewise suggests process, the work that goes into these imaginings, and the hidden network of creators, performers, viewers, and archivists that create and preserve fashion works.

       Frissell also shows these contradictory moments in her photobook, as a counterpoint to her fashion images' usual sense of stop. In this image, she is seen photographing a skiwear scene, while her husband and daughter lie in the grass in a moment of downtime (encounter fig. 6).

FIGURE half-dozen

Frances McLaughlin-Gill, Toni Frissell, her husband Mac, and daughter Sidney © Estate of Frances McLaughlin-Gill. Frances McLaughlin-Gill, photograph.

This family snapshot was taken past her assistant Frances McLaughlin-Gill and encroaches on fashion'southward fantasy, as it heightens the sense of applesauce at building a set in a summery field in order to shoot wintertime sportswear in natural light. Readers' sensual experience of the final fashion image elides such discrepancies and the subconscious manufacture they represent. There is a tacit agreement by all members of an organization: all must believe in this seamlessness.

       Despite Frissell'south conscientious planning and system of each shoot, she yet allowed for spontaneity on fix, which might reveal accidental gestures and configurations of people, animals, and mural. This led to slippage between domicile and work, in terms both of relationships, lifestyle, and aesthetics, even to the extent thatTheChristian Science Monitor noted that Frissell often took props from shoots abode with her and integrated them into her everyday life (Foster).

       While Dahl-Wolfe's collaboration with Vreeland is well-documented, information technology is more difficult to trace Frissell's work with specific editors. However, it is interesting to read Bettina Ballard'south description ofVogue Fashion Editor Emerge Kirkland in low-cal of Frissell's work for the magazine. It reveals the stable of editorial signatures each magazine strove to acquire and, once once again, how personal manner could potentially translate from designers, editors, and photographers onto the magazine page. Ballard began with a sketch of Kirkland'south physical presence: "She had a wonderful, loose-jointed, slapstick quality to her lanky long-legged college-girl effigy that was … exaggerated by Claire McCardell'south bailiwick of jersey sheathes worn with a wide Phelps belt covered with silver motifs" (Ballard 159-sixty). This description relates closely to many of the models used by Frissell in her shoots, and to the style her spreads were styled to encapsulate the low-fundamental fashions that emerged from 7th Avenue at the time.

       In contrast to Vreeland, who embodied a European manner, "No figure ever looked more completely removed from Paris [than Kirkland]. She had her own distinct kind of chichi, an un-Vogue look that was like a strong, fresh cakewalk blowing through theVogue corridors as she walked" (Ballard 160). This mirrors comments on Frissell and, indeed, sportswear designers such as McCardell. AVogue profile on Frissell, then aged sixty-six, commented on her "slender, racy build" (McClean 144). In gimmicky profiles and memoirs, these women were written well-nigh in relation to mid-century ideals of American femininity. This network of women, images, and words drew a portrait of modernistic life that echoed through the magazine pages, and was recreated not just through dress, styling, and limerick, merely by pose: "The reflection of this fresh viewpoint could be seen in the pictures she produced that turned the out-of-doors and move into important elements of every page she worked on. Girls stood with their legs wide apart, their mouths open, happily yelling at someone, in what Edna Chase must accept thought 'Vulgar' stances, but which brought life intoVogue" (Ballard 160). Both Hunt and Snowfall, though the former with more reluctance, employed editors and commissioned photographers who could bring visions of newness to magazines congenital on a more static couture style. While this was new to editorial pages, it had been a growing strand inside society pages, where the international elite was shown at leisure. Editors had to reverberate the shift to more active lifestyles, but simultaneously maintain the "Old Globe" style of studio-bound shots. Frissell's nonchalant approach was platonic; from the start of her career, she had combined athletic poses and bodies with elite resorts and awe-inspiring landscapes that developedVogue's existing aesthetic into outdoors settings.

Effigy seven

Contact sheet from photoshoot past Toni Frissell in Bermuda. 1945, contact canvas, Toni Frissell Drove at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Her personal arroyo to models was likewise important to this vision, and is reflected in contact sheets from her shoots that testify her sitters chatting with her, as she puts them at ease and photographs their movements and expressions as they talk to her. In these examples, it is possible to come across a model, photographed in Bermuda in 1946, running through a series of gestures that reveal a bathing costume'south sinuous lines as her body moves against an expansive beach location(meet fig. 7).

       Even so such idyllic scenes mask the realities of edifice a career in the highly competitive manner earth. In 1944, after mounting tensions with management, Frissell resigned fromFaddy and went on to work atHarper's Bazaar, although in a restricted capacity, since Louise Dahl-Wolfe would not countenance her producing style pages for the mag. This rivalry further illuminates Latour's point that an organisation is continually subject to collaborators' tensions and potentially conflicting aims and ideas.

The editors-in-chief had to maintain equilibrium between employees to ensure that the magazine was open to new creative input, without disrupting its existing staff.

In Latour's vision of the system, individuals, and the magazine as a whole, must be continually balanced and reconfigured, without such conflicts disrupting its progress. Letters in Frissell'due south archives at the Library of Congress attest to varied bug, including problems with Dahl-Wolfe, which Snow had to negotiate diplomatically to ensure new editorials for her magazine without upsetting her established team. In a alphabetic character to Frissell dated July 6th, 1945, Snow acknowledges that "Louise refused to take any September pictures … unless I assured her I would not use you lot" ("Letter to Toni Frissell" 1945). She suggests that Frissell could create fashion editorials for the new magazineJunior Bazaar, since Dahl-Wolfe was too associated withHarper's Boutique's identity to work for its younger title.

         One time Frissell did start to contribute in that location were more mundane bug to hash out, which reflect photographers' ongoing demand to finance trips and editors' concerns most keeping to budget and balancing a particular edition'southward content. In a letter of the alphabet of Apr 7th, 1947, for example, Snow painstakingly recounts a previous verbal agreement with Frissell about costs for a shoot in St. Moritz and states that the mag volition pay "… $225 per page instead of the usual $200, and that the extra money was to embrace such things as excess weight, car rentals etc." This was clearly in response to Frissell's request for further upkeep to cover such expenses, and also to endeavour to secure her pale in that calendar month'south issue, as Snow goes on to say, "Please remember, Toni, I never asked you to have this trip to St. Moritz, but told you that naturally nosotros would exist delighted to employ some of your pictures. Still, no number of pages was agreed." Coin, exclusivity, and status were constantly negotiated to facilitate shoots and proceeds commissions, as Snow remarked at the end of her letter of the alphabet, "… we must be very careful and clear in our business relations and commitments" ("Alphabetic character to Toni Frissell" 1947). As with fashion photography itself, commercial concerns and the magazine's calendar were a constant business organization for image-makers, whose ability to create was militated past the need to finance trips, cope with the sheer bulk of travelling with camera equipment, and by the demands of designers and editors.

Dahl-Wolfe and Frissell's photographs brought images of women's lives to the fashion pages; if not how they actually lived them, and so at least an attainable imagining of modern beingness.

Each had to negotiate the increasingly competitive and crowded world of way photography to create images that met individual assignment briefs, equally well as the magazines' overall aims. Jessica Daves noted the skill required to create powerful photographs within the environment of a manner magazine: "To find a personal way of photographing these repetitious subjects is an achievement limited to a photographer who can combine his [sic] technique with his [sic] own point of view and can plant rapport with the model" (Daves 194). While for Dahl-Wolfe this was more about control of the image'south elements, for Frissell improvisation brought fresh perspective to each shoot.

Behind the Scenes

Edna Woolman Hunt recognized the pressures placed on her magazine staff, only said that "Because of homo rivalries or jealousies of incompatible temperaments, we were not e'er ahappyfamily onVogue, but we were e'er a family curiously united" (Chase and Chase 311-2). Her emphasis on the close ties between her magazines' staff reinforces the thought of an organization built by individuals, who were focused on a common idea, and yet could translate and reinvent this while maintainingVogue's identity. The same was true atHarper's Bazaar,as Carmel Snowfall said upon seeing Louise Dahl-Wolfe's piece of work: "'From the moment I saw her first colour photograph, I knew thatBazaar was at last going to expect the manner I had instinctively wanted my magazine to look'" (Schwiegershausen). Snowfall'due south ability to project towards the magazine equally a whole through the work of each individual was crucial toHarper's Bazaar's success. Snow reconciled Bruno Latour's clarification of organizations, where "What passes is not a stable fixture just a whole moving assemblages of asunder parts" (Latour eleven). Nancy McDonnell recognized this talent when she praised Snow's ability to maintainHarper'sBazaar's sense of "continuity" and identity across issues and years, crediting her understanding that "y'all tin can't strength collaboration. These women worked together really well because they had talents that dovetailed and they respected each other'south talent" (Rowlands).

       Talent was supported by efficient organisation, a facet of machine production and mass communication, both of which grew enormously during this period. The camera'southward technology, the photographer's skill, and, later, that of the dark room and printers were combined with the editor and assistants' crafts of styling, sewing, and adjusting to make the image itself "piece of work." Technology is present simply usually removed, and the image's surface disguises the labour, fourth dimension, coin, and thought that went into every shot.

Latour'south theory of a fluid set of practices, instigated past varied groups of people, underscores the institutional rhythms at the heart of fashion magazines' beingness. A "tactical reading" of Dahl-Wolfe and Frissell'south imagery across dissimilar contexts exposes the hidden organization that facilitates fashion representation. Each person, each brief, each element had to cohere yet suggest new possibilities, to represent the photographers discussed here, their editors, and models, and, past extension, the magazines and fashion itself in constant motion: the same, but always unlike.

Works Cited

Bacall, Lauren.By Myself. Coronet, 1980.

Ballard, Bettina.In My Fashion. Secker & Warburg, 1960.

Chase, Edna Woolman, and Ilka Chase.Always In Vogue. Victor Gollanz, 1954.

Dahl-Wolfe, Louise.A Photographer's Scrapbook. Quintet Books, 1984.

Daves, Jessica.Prepare-Made Miracle: The Story of American Fashion for the Millions. G. P. Putnam'south Sons, 1967.

Di Bello, Patrizia, et al., editors. Introduction.The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, by Patrizia Di Bello and Shamoon Zamir, I.B. Tauris, 2011, pp. i-16.

Duka, John. "A Chronicler of Fashion, at 88, Reflects on Change."The New York Times,28 September 1984, pp. 6.

Foster, Inez Whiteley. "Pictures Keep Toni Frissell On the Motility."Christian Science Monitor, xx July 1943, pp. viii.

Jacob, John P. "Louise Dahl-Wolfe: Photographer of her Time."Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Style of Her Own, edited past Olivia Maria Rubio, La Fabrica, 2016, pp. 116-124.

Lambert, Eleanor. Personal interview. 22 April 2002.

Latour, Bruno. "'What's the Story?'" Organizing equally a Mode of Existence."Bureau without Actors? New Approaches to Collective Action, edited by Jan H. Passoth, Birgit Peuker and Michael Schillmeier,Routledge, 2011.

 "Reporting Paris Styles is a Business organisation:Vogue &Harper's BazaarCover Openings."Life, 6 September 1937, pp. 32-9.

Plimpton, George, and Sidney Frissell Stafford.Toni Frissell Photographs, 1933–67.Doubleday, 1994.

McClean, Lydia. "At present I'm Sixty-Vi and I Love Information technology."Vogue, 1 June 1973, pp.140-v.

McDonnell, Nancy. "A Conversation with Penelope Rowlands."The Museum at FIT,21 Feb 2016, exhibitions.fitnyc.edu/women-of-harpers-bazaar/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2016/02/Penelope-Rowlands-conversation-2016-Museum-at-FIT.pdf.

Schwiegershausen, Erica. "A Legendary Fashion Photographer, Revisited."Nytimes.com, 20 Apr 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/t-magazine/fashion/manner-photographer-louise-dahl-wolfe-book.html.

Snow, Carmel. Letter to Toni Frissell. 6 July 1945. Toni Frissell Collection. Prints and Drawings Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
---. Letter of the alphabet to Toni Frissell. 8 Apr 1947. Toni Frissell Collection. Prints and Drawings Sectionalization, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Snow, Carmel with Mary Louise Aswell.The Globe of Carmel Snow. McGraw-Hill, 1962.

Stuart, Amanda McKenzie.Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland. Harper Perennial, 2013.

Vreeland, DianaD.5. Da Capo Press, 1997.

Vreeland, Lisa Immordino.Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel. Abrams, 2011.

Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel. Directed past Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Aptitude Jorgen-Permutt, and Frederic Tcheng, 2011.

Author Biography

Rebecca Arnold

COURTAULD INSTITUTE OF Art

Rebecca Arnold is Senior Lecturer in History of Dress and Textiles at the Courtauld Found of Art in London.

She has lectured internationally and set up the beginning undergraduate course in the subject area BA (Hons) Mode History & Theory at Central Saint Martins in 2001. Her books include The American Look: Fashion, Sportswear and Images of Women in New York in the 1930s and 1940s (I.B. Tauris, 2008), Manner: A Curt Introduction (OUP, 2009), and the edited volume, 30 2d Mode (The Ivy Printing, 2016). She also contributes regularly to journals and compilations, including the article "Fashion in Ruins: Photography, Luxury and Dereliction in 1940s London" in Fashion Theory (2016). She is currently working on a new book, entitled Documenting Fashion: Image and Modernity in America, 1920–60. She also works as a consultant and in journalism and digital media (Blog: Documenting Style, Instagram: @documenting_fashion, Podcast: "Bande à part").

Commodity Commendation

Arnold, Rebecca. "Behind the Scenes with Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Toni Frissell: Alternative Views of Fashion Photography in Mid-Century America." Fashion Studies, vol. i, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-35, world wide web.fashionstudies.ca/behind-the-scenes/, https://doi.org/x.38055/FS010110.

Fashion/Photograph/Film
Past Paul Jobling

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