Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women by Michael Gross Page B
Authors: Michael Gross
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his house model when he opened Worth, the first “designer” couture salon, in 1858. When she approached the Austrian ambassador’s wife, Pauline de Metternich, and sold her two crinolines, her husband’s fortunes were assured. He went on to dress Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III. Inspired by his wife, Worth pioneered the use of live models in selling his haute couture designs.
The first photographic model of any accomplishment was the Countess of Castiglione, a Tuscan noblewoman at the court of Napoleon III. In 1856 a book of 288 photographs of her by Adolphe Braun displayed her renowned style and wardrobe. She even demurely raised her skirts to show off her shoes.
Technology made photographic modeling something more than a dilettante’s avocation. The halftone process that allows photographs to be printed on the same page as type was patented in 1881 and refined throughout the proceeding decade. In 1892 La Mode Practique was the first to use halftones to show fashion. A few years later John Robert Powers was born in the farm town of Easton, Pennsylvania, the son of an engineer. As he grew up, worked as a newspaperboy, attended local schools, and caught the acting bug, other key figures were coming onstage as well—all over the map. Adolphe de Meyer was born in Paris in 1868 (as Adolphe Meyer Watson). Edward Steichen was born eleven years later in Luxembourg. Louise Dahl-Wolfe was born in SanFrancisco in 1895. Baron George Hoyningen-Huene was born in Leningrad in 1900. The four were pioneers of fashion photography.
At first their subjects were actresses and aristocrats whose names were known to at least some of the public and who were sometimes given the clothes they wore as compensation for posing. Steichen, for example, shot a portrait of the wife of a swell named Condé Nast in 1907. Two years later Nast, an ambitious young man from Peoria, bought Vogue magazine. Two years after that Steichen took what he later modestly claimed were “the first serious fashion photographs ever taken.”
Paul Poiret, a Parisian haute couturier, had used his wife, Denise, as his muse and model and had hired others to stage fashion shows on a barge on the Seine. In 1911 Arts et Décoration commissioned thirteen Steichen photographs of Poiret dresses for an article on “The Art of the Dress.” His models were not great beauties. But Poiret became a patron of fashion photographers and models, and the visual quality of his cabine —his private group of models—improved with time.
Ten years later, when Man Ray, the American surrealist, arrived in Paris during the summer fashion shows there, he met Poiret and photographed some of his Orientalist designs. In Man Ray’s autobiography, Self Portrait , he remembers his first meeting with Poiret’s models: “They were beautiful girls … moving about nonchalantly in their scanty chemises, stockings and high-heeled shoes…. I tried to look as if I did not see anything. The girls were cool, almost forbidding. All except one black-haired, wide-eyed girl…. She, too, was from New York, studying singing and making her way by modeling.” She agreed to pose for him and said she hoped the photos would be published in a fashion magazine. In fact, they became monuments in the history of photography: Man Ray’s first “Rayographs.” He stumbled upon the process when his darkroom door was accidentally opened while he was making contact prints of the American model.
Baron de Meyer, an admirer of Whistler, Sargent, and Europe’s great court painters, had started working for Vogue in New York in 1913, earning $100 a week as the world’s first full-time fashion photographer. He’d dropped his original last name when, despite his homosexuality, he married a woman reputed to be the illegitimate daughter of Britain’s Edward VII. “There was always a slight air of mystery about him,” said Vogue ’s then editor, Edna Woolman Chase, who remembered him as “Von” Meyer. His
The first photographic model of any accomplishment was the Countess of Castiglione, a Tuscan noblewoman at the court of Napoleon III. In 1856 a book of 288 photographs of her by Adolphe Braun displayed her renowned style and wardrobe. She even demurely raised her skirts to show off her shoes.
Technology made photographic modeling something more than a dilettante’s avocation. The halftone process that allows photographs to be printed on the same page as type was patented in 1881 and refined throughout the proceeding decade. In 1892 La Mode Practique was the first to use halftones to show fashion. A few years later John Robert Powers was born in the farm town of Easton, Pennsylvania, the son of an engineer. As he grew up, worked as a newspaperboy, attended local schools, and caught the acting bug, other key figures were coming onstage as well—all over the map. Adolphe de Meyer was born in Paris in 1868 (as Adolphe Meyer Watson). Edward Steichen was born eleven years later in Luxembourg. Louise Dahl-Wolfe was born in SanFrancisco in 1895. Baron George Hoyningen-Huene was born in Leningrad in 1900. The four were pioneers of fashion photography.
At first their subjects were actresses and aristocrats whose names were known to at least some of the public and who were sometimes given the clothes they wore as compensation for posing. Steichen, for example, shot a portrait of the wife of a swell named Condé Nast in 1907. Two years later Nast, an ambitious young man from Peoria, bought Vogue magazine. Two years after that Steichen took what he later modestly claimed were “the first serious fashion photographs ever taken.”
Paul Poiret, a Parisian haute couturier, had used his wife, Denise, as his muse and model and had hired others to stage fashion shows on a barge on the Seine. In 1911 Arts et Décoration commissioned thirteen Steichen photographs of Poiret dresses for an article on “The Art of the Dress.” His models were not great beauties. But Poiret became a patron of fashion photographers and models, and the visual quality of his cabine —his private group of models—improved with time.
Ten years later, when Man Ray, the American surrealist, arrived in Paris during the summer fashion shows there, he met Poiret and photographed some of his Orientalist designs. In Man Ray’s autobiography, Self Portrait , he remembers his first meeting with Poiret’s models: “They were beautiful girls … moving about nonchalantly in their scanty chemises, stockings and high-heeled shoes…. I tried to look as if I did not see anything. The girls were cool, almost forbidding. All except one black-haired, wide-eyed girl…. She, too, was from New York, studying singing and making her way by modeling.” She agreed to pose for him and said she hoped the photos would be published in a fashion magazine. In fact, they became monuments in the history of photography: Man Ray’s first “Rayographs.” He stumbled upon the process when his darkroom door was accidentally opened while he was making contact prints of the American model.
Baron de Meyer, an admirer of Whistler, Sargent, and Europe’s great court painters, had started working for Vogue in New York in 1913, earning $100 a week as the world’s first full-time fashion photographer. He’d dropped his original last name when, despite his homosexuality, he married a woman reputed to be the illegitimate daughter of Britain’s Edward VII. “There was always a slight air of mystery about him,” said Vogue ’s then editor, Edna Woolman Chase, who remembered him as “Von” Meyer. His
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