The Editor’s Eye, celebrates the work of Vogue’s boundary-pushing fashion editors.What makes a great fashion image? A new book, Vogue: The Editor’s Eye, celebrates the work of Vogue’s boundary-pushing fashion editors.

Throughout its 120-year history, Vogue has been creating arresting images intended to make the reader’s eye stop. These are images that evoke desire—for something as real as a dress or a lipstick, or as intangible as a whole new body language, attitude, or paradigm. Some are images of stately, introspective calm; others make the heart leap with an adrenaline charge of energy, reflecting a century of change in fashion, society, and culture.

But who are the thoughtful provocateurs who have collaborated with Vogue’s image-makers to capture the moments you see frozen on these pages? The Editor’s Eye is a tribute to eight of these remarkable women (there have also been a handful of remarkable men) who have guided, educated, and enabled photographers and illustrators to create the visuals that have propelled fashion forward. They reveal not only the evolving history of women’s self-presentation but also the extraordinary arc of their journey from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first—the roiling ocean of emancipation, liberation, and empowerment, changes reflected in the lives of the women whose work is gathered here.

Vogue’s editors have long been instrumental in defining the faces of the era. During the tenure of the sweetly imperious Edna Woolman Chase, from 1914 until her retirement in 1952, it was the moneyed society women, generally of a certain age, who were the real leaders of fashion, and great models from Marion Morehouse to Lisa Fonssagrives were styled after their likenesses. Collaborating with Irving Penn in the late forties and fifties, Babs Simpson dressed her subject (reflecting her own impeccable personal style) and then sat down to her needlework as she quietly directed the sitting. Diana Vreeland, who came to Vogue in 1962, shook things up when she made young beauties like Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, and Marisa Berenson the faces of the moment, turned quirky performers like Barbra Streisand and Cher into style stars, and transformed the waifish Twiggy into an American celebrity as well as a British one.

Now the focus shifted to reflect the Youthquake era. Penelope Tree was “discovered” at Truman Capote’s 1966 Black and White Ball (written up in Vogue by Gloria Steinem) and was soon whisked to Richard Avedon’s studio, where Polly Allen Mellen emphasized her gangly limbs in a too-small pantsuit; together they created a defining image of idiosyncratic sixties beauty. A decade later, Jade Hobson turned Patti Hansen into the smiling embodiment of the golden goddess next door. Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele was front and center in creating the supreme moment of the supermodel in the late eighties and nineties, working with Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Meisel, and Peter Lindbergh on pictures that made Cindy, Naomi, Linda, Christy, et al., the most famous faces of their generation.
POST: 2024-11-24