Edward Steichen: In High Fashion

Steichen was already a famous painter and photographer on both sides of the Atlantic when, in early 1923, he was offered possibly one of the most prestigious and certainly the most lucrative position in photography's commercial domain - that of chief photographer for Conde Nast's influential and highly regarded magazines, Vogue and Vanity Fair. Over the next fifteen years, Steichen produced an oeuvre of unequalled brilliance, putting his exceptional talents and prodigious energies to work dramatizing and glamorizing contemporary culture and its achievers - in politics, literature journalism, dance, theatre, opera and, above all, the world of high fashion.
The fashion plates Steichen produced make for a full archive of modernist fashion in the inter-war years. In the 1920s and 1930s, Steichen created a new style of fashion photography, which had previously been a fussy, fuzzy pictorialist affair, out of step with the modernist ethos championed by the couturiers themselves, busily absorbing avant-garde currents of the time. Steichen's crisp, detailed, high-key style is a strong wind felt in the field to this day - George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber are only his most illustrious descendants.