Fri 20th October
“Louise Dahl-Wolfe changed the landscape of fashion photography forever,” says Oliva María Rubio, curator of the photographer’s latest retrospective at London’s Fashion & Textile museum, Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Style of Her Own. It’s a European retrospective long overdue – for someone of her acclaim, Dahl-Wolfe’s fame has has never expanded much beyond her native United States.
And the breadth of her work speaks for itself – during her prolific twenty-two years at Harpers Bazaar, the main focus for this show, Dahl-Wolfe amassed eight-six covers, six-hundred colour plates and over two thousand black and white images. And whilst the numbers are impressive, her enduring legacy remains her transformation of the way that America fashion was viewed – her photographs a declaration that it existed in its own right and no longer relied on imports from Paris. As Smithsonian curator John Jacob said: “she did not so much discover the new American style as she embodied it.”
The style is unmistakeable. It has that air of familiarity that great works often do, but it’s only once you discover the litany of legendary photographers influenced by Dahl-Wolfe – Avedon, Penn and Bourdin to name but a few – that you realise that modern fashion photography pretty much started with her. The simplicity in her lighting and composition, the pared down, casual poses and her pioneering use of colour (all a result of her training to be a painter at the Institute of Fine Art in California) – Dahl-Wolfe wrote a rule book for fashion photography that is still followed today.
This latest exhibition shifts from from Dahl-Wolfe’s early still lifes and portraits of post-crash Tennesseans to the her big Hollywood break in 1938 where she re-modelled the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Vivien Leigh and Orson Welles from unattainable stars into everyday people. Her iconic works are scattered throughout; ‘Twins at the Beach’, Suzy Parker by the Seine in Balenciaga and that iconic 1953 Jean Patchett cover for Harper’s – all classics, all Dahl-Wolfe. It’s an exhibition that shouldn’t be missed
Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Style of Her Own is on at The Fashion & Textile Museum from the 20th October to the 21st January 2018
