“I was not the first person to photograph Kate Moss, but maybe the second,” says Arthur Elgort, the legendary, 76-year-old New York photographer who’s known for bringing fashion out of the studio and into the real world. “I never took a bad picture of her — I couldn’t. Christy Turlington and Kate Moss, I would say they’re the best models that I’ve worked with.” Both women appear in a new exhibition of his work, which opens at Photo London this week.
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See Vintage Photos of the Teens Who Ran Washington Square Park in the 1950s
“Let me put it this way: those were the late days of beatniks and the early days of hootenanny,” says the gallerist Howard Greenberg. “It was a time when the seeds of change were being sown, and things were fermenting in the coffee shops and the folk-music clubs downtown.” He’s speaking of New York in the late 1950s, when photographer Dave Heath wandered down to Washington Square Park — the city’s incubator of youthful defiance — and captured raw, moody images of what would become a historic scene.
Read MoreThe Ultimate Celebrity Hairstylist Has a New Book
“Hair by Sam McKnight” is a retrospective centered on the respected British stylist, who has been a fixture on fashion shoots and the show circuit for 40 years. He was the man who gave Agyness Deyn her crop; slicked back Princess Diana’s hair; styled Madonna’s platinum curls for the cover of Bedtime Stories; and created a flame-red mop that transformed Tilda Swinton into David Bowie. He’s worked with most of fashion’s big names, decade after decade — including, most consistently, Kate Moss, Patrick Demarchelier, and Karl Lagerfeld.
Read MoreParty Photos of Teens Being Teens in 1960s Mali
In 1960, the country of Mali became independent after over 60 years of French rule, and for young Malians, everything changed. “For the first time, Malians could listen to Western music, and they wanted to be dressed just like the stars they saw in the magazines,” says Philippe Boutté, co-curator of the new exhibit Malick Sidibé: The Eye of Modern Mali, on view at London’s Somerset House. From 1962 and on, the late photographer Malick Sidibé captured the aftermath (and the changing fashions) in the capital city of Bamako.
Read MoreEngland’s Rough-and-Tumble First Teen Fashion Movement
“The Teds were really the first manifestation of teenage culture in the U.K.,” says photographer Chris Steele-Perkins. His new exhibit exploring the British “Teddy Boy” scene of the mid-20th century recently opened at Magnum Print Room in London. It’s a peek into the macho world of a distinctive fashion tribe, complete with debauchery and street fights.
Read MoreSee Vintage Fashion Illustrations in a New London Exhibit
“A lot of people think that fashion illustration is something that died circa 1930, when photography came in — but that’s absolutely not true,” says Connie Gray, curator of “Drawing on Style,” an exhibition running during this London Fashion Week. “They ran very much hand-in-hand up until the 1960s and 1970s, and they really complemented each other on the page. Very often there would be a mixture of photography and illustration within the same fashion story.”
Read MoreA Swinging ’60s Look at London Style
Donovan, who died in 1996, was one of the significant image-makers who produced the famous London look of the 1960s. “It’s a very British thing: the Union Jack, Twiggy,” says Muir. But, as the new show demonstrates, there was more to Donovan than his renowned women’s-fashion shoots.
Read MoreA Beatles Photographer Captures Street Style in 1970s London
“Al just struck up a rapport with people,” says Martin Barnes, senior curator at the V&A Museum, of the photographer Al Vandenberg, whose new book, On a Good Day, depicts London street life in the 1970s and 1980s.
Read MoreThe History of Modern Underwear in 10 Objects
“I think we underestimate our underwear, and the impact it has on wider patterns of fashion, society and design,” says Susanna Cordner, assistant curator of Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear at London’s V&A Museum.
Read MoreIs British Fashion Photography More Fun?
“I want people to go away from this exhibition thinking, There’s an awful lot more to Vogue than just pictures of clothes.” So says Robin Muir, a contributing editor of British Vogue and the curator of “Vogue 100,” a major exhibition that opened Thursday at London’s National Portrait Gallery.
Read MoreMeet Fashion’s New Favorite Erotic Model
On a Monday morning in Stoke Newington, London, the model Tessa Kuragi arrives for our brunch wearing a leather harness. In fact, it’s the “Tessa Harness” by Tamzin Lillywhite, named after her, and it snakes across her stomach, up her breastbone, and around her throat. She’s wearing it over a black turtleneck sweater; she has dozens of freckles, velvety red-wine lipstick, and an immaculate blunt bob. At first glance, I think of both Louise Brooks and Wednesday Addams.
Read MoreAn Ode to Drinking With Your Friends in Your 30s
"Hollywood is really guilty of making 'badly behaved' women go through some kind of redemption process, and a moral realization about how bad they are. I think it’s absolutely connected to what we do with our bodies. The pressure to be biologically productive is slammed on women in their 20s and 30s so hard that you end up feeling that if you’re not having a baby, then you’re some kind of mess, to be looked down upon. I knew that I didn’t want Animals to be a cautionary tale."
Read MoreA New Exhibit Shows Every Side of Audrey Hepburn
London’s new Audrey Hepburn exhibition has a satisfying symmetry. It opens with snapshots from her childhood in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, when she gave ballet recitals to raise money for the Resistance — and it closes with a poignant image of her 50 years later, striking a dance pose in Steven Meisel’s studio, in what was to be the last major photo shoot of her life.
Read MorePeople Have Been Obsessed With Shoes for Centuries
Shoe fetishists rejoice: London’s V&A Museum has finally turned its attention to one of the world’s most enduring obsessions. "Shoes: Pleasure and Pain" is the exhibition opening Saturday, which makes use of the V&A’s enormous fashion archive and showcases 250 pairs of shoes, spanning 2,000 years and 20 countries.
Read MorePhilip Treacy Says Blame the Australians for Fascinators
"A fascinator sounds like a sex toy — it doesn’t really sound like a hat."
Read More4 People Remember Alexander McQueen’s 1996 Dante Show
On March 1, 1996, almost two decades ago, Alexander McQueen presented the Dante collection at the dilapidated Christ Church in East London. The show was dedicated to his close friend Isabella Blow; models walked a crucifix-shaped runway to a soundtrack of organ music and gunfire.
Read MoreWhat It Was Like to Be Backstage at Alexander McQueen’s First Shows
Back in the early 1990s, before there was a Savage Beauty show or friendship with Kate Moss, Alexander “Lee” McQueen was a young fashion graduate, living in a squat and producing fashion collections on a shoestring. Back in those early days, his world was full of friends and collaborators from Central Saint Martins — including Gary Wallis, who was just starting out as a photographer.
Read MoreLondon’s Alexander McQueen Show Is Bigger and Better Than Ever
In May 2011, only a year after the suicide of Alexander McQueen, "Savage Beauty" opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a sweeping retrospective of the designer’s work that explored everything from his 1992 postgraduate collection to his final runway show.
Read MoreBehind the Scenes at an Iconic McQueen Show
In 2007, the photographer Nick Waplington was approached by Lee Alexander McQueen to collaborate on a photography book. McQueen’s idea was to document his working process, following one collection from its conception to the final show. He went to Waplington, he said, because he liked his “dirty, messy style.”
Read MoreSee Moving Portraits of Couples Who’ve Been Married for Decades
Today most people are so blasé about what our grandparents called “courting” that we flick through potential mates on our iPhones like we’re playing cards. But for all that, I don’t believe that anyone, of any generation, could look at Lauren Fleishman’s new book, The Lovers, and not find it moving.
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