Harper's Bazaar/Bazaar 1940S
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THE As America went to war, Harper’s Bazaar discovered talent—from Lauren Bacall and Toni Frissell to Saul Bellow—closer to home. By Stephen Mooallem S The model Lisa Fonssagrives, wearing a Molyneux dress on the Eiel Tower, reportedly untethered, photographed by Erwin Blumenfeld for the September 15, 1939, issue 228 IN 1939, HARPER’S BAZAAR marked its 72nd year as America’s rst fashion magazine. But over the span of that near three-quarters of a century, Bazaar had devoted compar- atively little attention to exploring American fashion—or, at the very least, what made fashion American. From Bazaar’s nascent days syndicating illustrations from Der Bazar in Berlin, the magazine remained rmly xed on Europe and what was occurring in places like Paris, London, and Vienna, where “real” fashion—the kind borne in ateliers by great arti- sans and grand artistic minds—was thought to be happening. The arrival of Carmel Snow as Bazaar’s editor in the 1930s “It was all so different only served the magazine’s European obsession. For Snow, Paris, in particular, held a special allure. Snow’s years there during World War I had been formative for her. She volunteered for the Red Cross and during the last war,” developed what would become a lifelong connection to the city—one that, in many ways, fueled her Carmel Snow wrote vision for Bazaar. In America at the time, the pall of the Great Depression was slow to lift; in Paris, though, designers, artists, and writers seemed to be reacting to the widespread cultural change and of Paris in 1939. rapidly shifting geopolitics of the day with a creativity and an energy that Snow found electric. “I used to go to my Snow, who had joined Bazaar from Vogue in 1933, was radical in her reimagining of the magazine. office in the Hotel With her Russian-born art director, Alexey Brodovitch, she embraced the revolutionary impulses of European modernism, recasting the magazine as a canvas for the work of artists like Brassaï, Man Regina, along streets Ray, and Salvador Dalí. Alongside her deputy, Diana Vreeland, she also helped wrestle fashion pho- filled with children tography free from the staid strictures of the studio, publishing images that conveyed space, time, and narrative. The imprimatur that Bazaar developed in the rst years of her tenure was such that she trooping to school.” handily recruited a pair of Vogue hands, George Hoyningen-Huene and Erwin Blumenfeld, to shoot for the magazine. Bazaar, in the 1930s, was a bastion of the new. By the close of the decade, however, the magazine suddenly became unmoored. In the summer of 1939, as German forces marched toward Poland and the French military mobilized to defend against a possible incursion, the prospects of a second world war seemed more palpable. For his rst feature in Bazaar, Blumenfeld, German-born but based in Paris, shot the model Lisa Fonssagrives dangling o the Eiel Tower—reportedly untethered—in looks by Mainbocher and Molyneux. Blumenfeld’s pictures, soaring and majestic, ran in the September 15, 1939, issue; they were some of the last new photographs of the city to appear in the magazine until the end of the war. Visiting Paris herself in August 1939, Snow observed the profound fear and unease that had overtaken the city. “It was all so dierent during the last war,” she wrote in her “Letter From Paris” in the October issue. “When I was here in 1917 and 1918 there were no blackouts at night. I used This page, from left: to go to my oce in the Hotel Regina, along streets lled with children trooping to school. Soldiers The February 1942 cover, photographed were home on leave, the big restaurants were jammed with good-looking ocers. I can remember by Erwin Blumenfeld; ordering at Premet a black evening dress with fringe, suitable for dining in the Bois, and I had my the March 15, 1942, cover, photographed uniform made at Creed,” she recalled. France would soon fall under German domination and remain by Louise Dahl-Wolfe; so for the next four years. the September 1943 cover, photographed After the United States entered World War II, in December 1941, Bazaar began to take on a sober air. by Dahl-Wolfe; the Covers featured red, white, and blue motifs; American ags; Red Cross insignias; and images of women September 1945 cover. Opposite page: in uniform. Some were inscribed with language like “The Women Who Serve” and “Girl With a Job.” A young Lauren Bacall Others addressed the pervasive sense of loss and anxiety that arose as the brutal realities of the war came photographed by Dahl-Wolfe for into sharp relief; the September 1943 cover depicted a woman gazing into a mirror above a dressing table ‰ the March 1943 cover. with a photograph of a serviceman tucked in the frame. When the war nally concluded, in 1945, PHOTOGRAPHS, DAHL-WOLFE LOUISE PAGE: AND OPPOSITE THIS PAGE BLUMENFELD. OF ERWIN © THE ESTATE BLUMENFELD ERWIN PREVIOUS PAGE: COLLECTION CENTER FOR CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY © 1989 CENTER FOR CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY, ARIZONA BOARD OF REGENTS 230 the September cover of Bazaar showed no people or clothes at all, just the lone word “Victory” in blue painterly script set against a stark white background. The U.S. emerged from World War II not just a political superpower but a cultural one. Even before the war ended, a new—and distinctly American— vision of fashion had started to take hold in Bazaar. British-born Charles James had become America’s rst great couturier, and with the rise of sports- wear designers like Bonnie Cashin, Vera Maxwell, Carolyn Schnurer, and Claire McCardell, a looser, more liberated approach to fashion took form. McCardell’s use of denim in a 1943 collection made history when Bazaar highlighted a playsuit from the line on the May 1943 cover—the rst time a denim look had appeared on the cover of a major fashion magazine. One of the sportswear boom’s biggest boosters was Diana Vreeland. While Vreeland is probably best known for her whimsical extravagance, her work with sportswear—often captured in colorful images shot on location by Louise Dahl- Wolfe—revealed the enormous range of her talents as a fashion editor. In a world of fabric rationing and workaday separates, she found magic and fantasy. To Vreeland, true style wasn’t purely about material wealth but rather indepen- dence, optimism, eortlessness, and freedom. It was an ethos inspired by the self-possession of women like Katharine Hepburn and society doyenne Nancy “Slim” Hawks, who favored cool, casual clothes that reected their unappable individualism. Another icon of the new American style, Lauren Bacall, was In a world of discovered by Vreeland as an 18-year-old model from the Bronx who then went by Betty Bacal. Bacall scored her rst lm role, in To Have and Have Not, after Nancy Hawks spotted her on the cover of the fabric rationing March 1943 issue of Bazaar and suggested to her then husband, the director Howard Hawks, that he cast and workaday her in it. (In acknowledgment, Howard Hawks nicknamed Bacall’s character in the movie “Slim.”) separates, Diana oon other new talent ltered onto the pages of Bazaar. Toni Frissell, a colleague of Vreeland found Snow’s from Vogue, and Lillian Bassman, who’d started out as one of Alexey Brodovitch’s assistants in the Bazaar art department, both began contributing photographs to the magic and fantasy. magazine. Snow had red her irascible ction editor, George Davis, in 1940, after a particularly rough argument during which he’d threatened to quit, thinking she’d con- Svince him to stay. (She did not.) Nevertheless, Snow kept publishing writers Davis championed, including W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, and Paul and Jane Bowles. All were inhabitants of what came to be called the February House, a Brooklyn Heights brownstone that Davis helped transform into an art commune and that took its name from the birth month of many of its occupants. Davis’s successor Mary Louise Aswell continued to burnish Bazaar’s reputation for promoting new writers by publishing early stories by the future Strangers on a Train author Patricia Highsmith and the eventual Nobel and Pulitzer prize winner Saul Bellow. The initial postwar years brought further developments in fashion. On a trip to St.-Tropez in 1946, Vreeland eyed a woman in a two-piece swimsuit. “The bikini is the most important thing since the atom bomb,” she boldly (if awkwardly) proclaimed. (The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had occurred the previous year.) The bikini made its debut in Bazaar in the May 1947 This page: Betty issue, in a lush Toni Frissell image of the model Dovima reclining in a polka-dot version by Caro- REGENTS. OF BOARD ARIZONA PHOTOGRAPHY, CREATIVE FOR CENTER 1989 © PHOTOGRAPHY CREATIVE FOR CENTER COLLECTION 1946, Bridges in a Claire McCardell lyn Schnurer, shot in Montego Bay, Jamaica. denim one-piece, Earlier in 1947, Snow had remarked upon a revelation of her own. On the morning of February UNTITLED, photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe 12, she attended the presentation in Paris of Christian Dior’s rst collection under his own name, for the May 1946 which was punctuated by a silhouette with a nipped-in waist and a full skirt that ended mid-calf. “It’s issue. Opposite page: Dovima in a quite a revolution, dear Christian. Your dresses have such a new look,” Snow said after the show, within Carolyn Schnurer earshot of a reporter from Reuters. The next day, papers around the world carried the headlines of bikini, photographed by Toni Frissell for Dior’s “New Look”—everywhere with the exception of Paris, where newspapers weren’t publishing n the May 1947 issue.