As Americans Fixated on Modern Art and the Space Race, Harper's

POP GOES BAZAAR As Americans fixated on modern art and the space race, Harper’s Bazaar editor Nancy White pushed fashion to its outer limits By Stephen Mooallem ON APRIL 9, 1959, NASA announced the start of Project Mercury, a program whose goal was to send the rst astronauts into orbit. It was the latest volley in the Cold War–era space race, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed to conquer outer space. Harper’s Bazaar soon got in on the action too. For a fashion story in the February 1960 issue, Richard Avedon traveled to the NASA space center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where he photographed the model Dovima in a series of con- spicuously modish looks with geometric shapes. At one point during the shoot, Dovima posed in front of a launch pad rigged with an SM-65 Atlas, which was not actually a spacecraft but the rst intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. There was still a month to go in the 1950s, but the 1960s had already arrived. Nancy White, a longtime fashion editor at Hearst’s Good Housekeeping, had succeeded Carmel Snow as the editor of Bazaar two years earlier. White was the daughter of Hearst executive Tom White—and Snow’s niece—and her appointment was intended to help ease the transition as Snow, whose physical health had begun to decline as her drinking increased, moved to an emeritus role at the magazine. ‰ FOUNDATION © THE RICHARD AVEDON PHOTOGRAPH: COVER Jean Shrimpton, helmet by Mr. John, on the cover of the April 1965 issue, photographed by Richard Avedon 132 hite wasn’t a grande verging, and Bazaar raced to keep up. The assassination dame like her aunt of President John F. Kennedy, the expanding Cold War, or an unbridled and the escalating conict in Vietnam left many Amer- romantic like Diana icans with a profound sense of uncertainty. The Civil Vreeland. But she was Rights Movement and second-wave feminism were a shrewd editor—and beginning to gain traction. It was also a time of great Win her own under- cultural upheaval, as the anarchic vibrations of the stated way, a ercely rising New Wave cinema and rock ’n’ roll rumbled progressive one at that. Though Vreeland, Snow’s top underfoot and the high-art world embarked on a deputy, had been passed over for the job, she elected romance with pop—tectonic shifts that writers such as to stay on; Alexey Brodovitch, who rarely came into James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe chronicled in Bazaar. the oce anymore, resigned as art director in 1958, In a 1964 piece for Bazaar titled “The New Art and Snow herself retired the same year. For Bazaar, Gallery Society,” Wolfe remarked about the amalgam Avedon’s Cape Canaveral story represented the dawn of avant-gardists, blue bloods, beatniks, politicos, and of a new day—and a period of radical change for both moneymen at a party to toast the reopening of the women and fashion. Museum of Modern Art after a six-month renovation. One of White’s rst hires was the former Esquire art It was as if, Wolfe wrote, “the world of celebrities, the director Henry Wolf, who infused the magazine with world of society, press agents, gossip columnists, fashion a deadpan surrealism through irreverent play with text designers, interior decorators and other hierophants and typography. The covers Wolf created during his have all converged on Art, now in a special, exalted three years at Bazaar remain some of the most recog- place. Art—and the Museum of Modern Art in par- nizable in its history—among them, his iconic Decem- ticular—has become the center of social rectitude, ber 1959 cover depicting a model in a pink cape comparable to the Episcopal Church in Short Hills.” balancing on a ladder as she actually carries an “A” in the marquee-style Bazaar logo. he April 1965 issue, which was Wolf was followed in 1961 by the artist and photog- guest-edited by Avedon, served rapher Marvin Israel, who tempered Bazaar’s glamour as a ash point for this new brand by commissioning the work of documentary photog- of insurgent popular culture, raphers such as Walker Evans, Bill Brandt, Lee Fried- endeavoring to be “a partial pass- lander, and Diane Arbus. However, Israel’s run at Bazaar port to the o-beat side of Now.” was also short-lived. White abruptly red him after an T The cover featured a close-up of argument over the January 1963 cover he’d prepared British model of the moment Jean of model Danielle Weil brandishing a cigarette holder, Shrimpton, with her face circumscribed by a Matisse- which unsubtly evoked Vreeland, who had recently like pink cutout that vaguely suggested the curves of left Bazaar to become the top editor at Vogue. an astronaut’s helmet. Inside were paeans to Bob Dylan, Following Israel’s departure, his deputies, Ruth Ansel the Beatles, go-go boots, and space exploration, along and Bea Feitler, took over as co–art directors. Both in with declarations of both the death of the diet and their 20s, they quickly developed a new visual identity the arrival of Donyale Luna, who just three months for Bazaar revolved around bold conceptual imagery earlier had become the rst black model to appear on created by an emerging group of photographers that the cover of Bazaar. included Melvin Sokolsky, Bill Silano, and a pair of To celebrate the magazine’s centennial in 1967, Bazaar former Avedon assistants, Hiro and James Moore. tapped Random House to publish the anthology Sokolsky, a Wolf discovery, had a proclivity for the Harper’s Bazaar: 100 Years of the American Female. The fantastical; in his images, models tumbled o giant anniversary heralded a momentous time for American chairs and glided through the air like seraphs. One women: As the 1970s approached, what women wanted of Sokolsky’s most famous sessions was his “bubble” from fashion was changing—fast. “Modern medicine story in the March 1963 issue. Inspired by 15th- and science have done for today’s woman what an apple century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych and a snake did for Eve,” wrote Truman Capote swan The Garden of Earthly Delights, it captured Simone Gloria Guinness in an article on the rise of the Pill, in d’Aillencourt as she seemed to oat in a translucent the September 1967 issue. “They have discovered or orb that begins its journey in New York and settles uncovered her for a new world. Like Eve’s, it includes above the river Seine in Paris. love and a man, but unlike the rst lady’s, it is a very Fashion was becoming the exploding plastic inevi- near perfect world where women at last are going to table: Art, artice, reality, and revolution were all con- have their cake and eat it, too.” n Simone d’Aillencourt floating above the Seine in Paris, photographed by Melvin Sokolsky for the March 1963 issue 134 “Fashion was becoming the exploding plastic inevitable: Art, artifice, reality, and revolution were converging, and Bazaar was racing to keep up.” .

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