Category: fashion

Francisco Martins

The Photography of Francisco Martins

Born in Cascais, a municipality of Lisbon in 1980, Francisco Martins is a Portuguese photographer, illustrator and graphic designer. He developed his drawing skills from a very young age; the focus of his artwork became the human body depicted in a realistic style. Spending long hours drawing faces and bodies, Martins was captivated by the idea of capturing on paper a subject at a particular moment in time, in effect rendering the subject timeless and beyond mortality. 

Throughout his art history studies, Martins felt especially inspired by the works produced during the Renaissance and Late Baroque periods, the Classical art of Europe’s seventeenth-century and the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which included such artists as William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and, later, William Morris and John William Waterhouse. Martins was also inspired by the portraits of past monarchs who, considered to have been anointed by God, were depicted in divine postures surrounded by auras of light and magical atmospheres. 

Francisco Martins, drawn to these painting styles and techniques, began to apply these same principles to his own artwork. Along with his love for nature, he has a deep fascination for Greek and Celtic mythology, as well as the folklore of his native Portugal. Martins’s book collection of fairy tales and local lore told by elders around fires on cold nights played an important role in shaping his graphic style. 

Between 2000 and 2004, Martins attended Lisbon’s Institute of Art, Design, Technology and Communication where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design. After graduation, Martins began to experiment in photography. He combined photography with his illustrative techniques to create hyper-realistic illustrations that depicted scenes from ancient myths. As his photographic skills matured, Martins began to focus more on fashion and his favorite form of expression, portrait photography.

Begun in 2016, Francisco Martins’s “LongIsBeautiful” project is a photographic series that celebrates that which is different and aims to break down labels and stereotypes. Primarily it is an attempt to break rigid trends in the fashion industry, elevate the industry’s  fundamental values, and confront society’s rigid expectations of what a man’s image should be. The project also glorifies the image of men in communion with Nature, a communion exemplified by Native Americans and Brazilian and Polynesian native cultures. 

The “LongIsBeautiful” project associates long hair with the sixth sense and sees it as a celebration of the natural world of which we are a part. Societies, especially ancient ones, believed that hair was more than an aesthetic attribute; a person threatened or in danger would feel one’s hair rise up on the back of his neck, an unconscious perception of a warning. The project depicts modern man as a being who recognizes and respects the importance of the natural environment. 

Concurrently with his “LongIsBeautiful” project, Martins began a project entitled “RedIsBeautiful”, a photographic series that was started with the goal of ending the negative stigma that is usually associated with red hair. The rarest of all hair colors on the planet, less than two percent of the world’s population, red hair is often an excuse for bullying, derogatory comments, harassment and even hate crimes. There are high incidents of both depression and suicides among those with red hair due to such occurrences. In Martins’s vision, red hair plays a major role in fairy tales and should be recognized as an exceptional trait. His project hopes to increase self-esteem and shape the fashion world into a more accepting and appreciative industry. 

As an independent artist, Francisco Martins’s work has appeared  in many periodicals including Umbigo Magazine, Egoísta Magazine, DIF Magazine, PARQ Magazine, Computer Arts Portugal Magazine and MC1R Magazine, among others. He has also done photographic work with guitarist Steve Vai for Ibanez Guitars. 

Martins’s work was featured in two compendiums of illustrations from worldwide artists by the German art publishing house TASCHEN. His images appeared in “Illustration Now: Volume 3” and “Illustration Now: Portraits”, as well as in the promotional calendars and diaries. Martins’s work was also featured in the official catalogues for the 2009 Lisbon Offf festival and the 2010 Offf in Paris.

Francisco Martins’s work can be found at his Instagram site located at: https://www.instagram.com/franciscomartinsphotography

Francisco Martins’s Behance site, which combines his three fields of graphic work, illustration and photography, is located at: http://www.behance.net/FrancMartins

Second Insert Image: Francisco Martins, “João David, Cascais”, 2019, “LongIsBeautiful” Project, Black and White Print

Third Insert Image: Francisco Martins, “Chris Pritchard, Cascais”, 2015, “RedIsBeautiful” Project, “NC1R?-The Magazine for Redheads, Issue 5, 2016

Bottom Insert Image: Francisco Martins, “António Godinho, Cascais”, 2018, “RedIsBeautiful” and “LongIsBeautiful” Projects, Color Print

Manuel Scrima and Paolo Rutigliano, “Ariel Ben-Attar”

Manuel Scrima and Paolo Rutigliano, “Ariel Ben-Attar”, 2020 Exclusive Photo Shoot for Homotography Magazine

Manuel Scrima is an Italian-Belgium photographer, artist and director who is based in Milan. His works, inspired by both classical and neoclassical art, draw upon the techniques of light and shadow used by the Dutch master painters to create the warm intimacies typical of their work. 

As a youth, Scrima’s earliest exposure to art was the mysterious paintings of Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff, whose works would form a major influence on the collective work of Gustav Klimt. Later influences on Scrima’s photography included the work of Keith Haring, the pop art works of Andy Warhol, and the marble figurative sculptures of the Italian Renaissance.

Manuel Scrima spent years living among the tribal peoples of Africa’s Rift Valley in the countries of Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. His interaction with these cultures resulted in photographic series that deeply examined their cultural identity, the basic foundations of their lives, and their exposure and interaction with the expanding modern globalization. 

A pivotal point in Scrima’s career was his 2006 photographic exhibition “Africa Awakens”, a well-received and successful show by critics and the public. The exhibition was in support of two international non-government organizations in Kenya, The International Community for the Relief of Starvation and The New World International, which combats child poverty, provides clean water, malaria prevention, and intervention in HIV and AIDS. The show toured museums and galleries in England, Ireland, France, Finland, Italy and Kenya. Due to his work in Africa, Scrima was appointed by UNESCO as the artist to exhibit and celebrate the culture of Kenya.

Paolo Rutigliano is an art director and photographer known for his work in the fashion world. He has done multiple shoots for Homotography, Kaltblut Magazine, and Desnudo Magazine, among others. Rutigliano’s fashion shoot with model Anilton Cabral was featured in the October 2020 issue of Desnudo Magazine.

Born in September of 1995, Ariel Ben-Attar is an Israeli international model who lives and works from Tel Aviv. As a competitive fitness model, he received the name Mr. Israel.

Manuel Scrima’s website can be found at: https://www.manuelscrima.com, Images and contact information for Paolo Rutigliano can be found at his Instagram site: https://www.instagram.com/paolorutigliano/?hl=en

Tim Tadder

The Photography of Tim Tadder

Born in Baltimore in 1972, Tim Tadder is an internationally acclaimed photographic artist known for his highly inventive, conceptual advertising photography. The son of a commercial photographer, his interest in photography developed at an early age through watching his father develop images in his Baltimore studio.

Tadder earned his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He was a high school educator in Costa Rica for five years and, on summer breaks, would take photographs during his mountaineering adventures. Deciding to concentrate on a career in photography, Tadder returned to Baltimore where he had connections in the photography world and worked from his father’s studio as a photojournalist for the local newspaper.

After working for two years in Baltimore, Tim Tadder studied  at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication and graduated with his Masters of Fine Art in Photojournalism. He did freelance work as a photojournalist in Baltimore, Colorado and San Diego. In 2005, Tadder began his career in commercial and editorial photography. The prestigious Luezer Archive Magazine has for eight consecutive years ranked Tadder in the top two-hundred photographers worldwide. Epson, the world leader in photographic printing technology, recognized him in 2015 as one of the top influential photographers.

Skilled in both video and still photography, Tadder’s preference is to make communicative images through still photography. He consumes images from multiple medias, including movies and art, in an effort to seek those concepts which have not yet been visualized. Tadder enters his photo shoots with an already conceived mental image of the finished product; he then works with his team through multiple techniques and experiments to bring the concept to fruition.  

Tim Tadder’s finished work is mainly untouched images captured by his camera; a smaller section of his work is later enhanced by computer graphic imagery. Tadder’s larger shoots , such as the calendar project for the Tecate brand of Mexico’s Cuauhtémoc brewery , required weeks of production work, both before and after the shoot. Inspiration for a shoot comes from many sources. His Bella Umbrella project was a theatrical photogaphic production inspired by images seen on Instagram. The shoot involved models carrying umbrellas to which active smoke bombs had been attached. Multiple approaches to the concept were required before the final product was acceptable.

Intrigued by the Day of the Dead celebrations that occurred in southern California, Tadder created a set of images that paid homage to this cultural event celebrated in many countries. He shot the images both on location and in the studio. Tadder used four female models to represent each of the seasons and set them in the appropriate seasonal backgrounds. The images set in landscapes represent the dead’s return for the day; while the indoor studio shots allow the viewers to examine the skeletal face masks, costumes, and backgrounds.

Tim Tadder currently lives with his family in South California and is the CEO of Tim Tadder Stills + Motion, based in Solana Beach, California. His website is located at: https://www.timtadder.com

Imre Szobotka

Imre Szobotka, “Fiatalkori Onarckép (Self Portrait as a Young Man)”, 1912-14, Oil on Canvas, 45.5 x 38.2 cm, Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

Born in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary, in September of 1890, Imre Szobotka was a painter and engraver. Between 1905 and 1910, he studied at Budapest’s School of Design under painter Ignác Újváry. Szobotka traveled to Venice in 1908 for a study trip and traveled to Rome in 1909, this time accompanied by his friend Ervin Bossámyl. He relocated to Paris in 1911, where he lived at the residence of avant-garde sculptor and graphic artist József Csáky, one of the first Parisian sculptors to apply pictorial Cubism to his art.

Szobotka attended the 1911 Independent Salon in Paris, where he viewed the works of the Cubist painters. Inspired by their work and with the encouragement of his friend, the Cubist painter József Csáky, he enrolled at the La Palette School of Art in 1912, where he studied under Cubist painters Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier. By the spring of 1913, Szobotka’s works, exhibited in the Independent Salon, were already noticed by the French critics, including writer and critic Guillaume Apollinaire. 

During World War I, Imre Szobotka was interned as a prisoner of war, starting in 1914 in Bretagne and later, at Saint Brieuc, France, until his release in 1919. The landscapes, still lifes, and portraits made in the internment period were experiments in cubism, symbolism, and orphism, a cubist offshoot that focused on abstraction and bright colors. These works, rare examples of Hungarian Cubism,  included his 1914 “Pipe Smoker”, the 1916 “Sailor”, and watercolor illustrations he produced for poet Paul Claude’s “Revelation”.

After his return to Paris in 1919, Szobotka’s paintings contained a more naturalistic expression. He exhibited this new work first in 1921 in Belvedere, a commune in the Vesubie Valley north of Nice, and, between 1929 and 1944, in shows at the Tamás Gallery, the Fränkel Salon, and the Mária Valéria Street gallery. The solid, defined construction of these landscape works by Szobotka insured him a place among the Nagybánya artists, whose work was focused on plain-air painting.

Imre Szobotka was a founding member of Képzőművészek Új Társasága, the New Society of Fine Artists, and presented his work in its exhibitions. For his 1929 “Mill in Nagybánya”, he won the landscape award presented by the Szinyei Society, an artistic association founded after painter and educator Pál Szinyei Merse’s death to promote new artists. Szobotka would later enter the “Mill in Nagybánya” at the 1938 Venice Biennial. In 1941, he won the Szinyei Society’s grand award for his exhibited work. 

From 1945 onward, Szobotka produced some graphic work; however, his main concentration was on his landscapes. He spent his last summers in the countryside near the village of Zsemmye where he painted pastoral landscapes. Szobotka became president of the painting division of the Fine and Applied Arts Alliance in 1952. For the body of his work, he received the Munkácsy Award in 1954 and the Socialis Work Order of Merit in 1960. Imre Szobotka died in March of 1961, at the age of seventy, in the city of Budapest.

Imre Szobotka’s “Self Portrait as a Young Man” is one of the key creations of his Parisian years. It shows his embrace of the elements of cubism, particularly the coloring and abstraction of its orphism branch. The main emphasis of the work is not the formal structure with its conventionally postured figure, but rather the way the light breaks its components into prisms of color. Szobotka emphasized his sense of light value and his translucent colorization to form a refined play of reflections, which cut the painting’s solid forms into colored shards.

Insert Images:

Imre Szobotka, “Sailor”, 1916, Oil on Canvas, 35 x 29 cm, Janus Pannonius Museum, Péca

Imre Szobotka, “Gathering Apples”, 1930, Oil on Canvas, 55 x 76 cm, Henman ottó Museum, Miskolc

Imre Sobotka, “Self Portrait”, 1912, Oil on Cardboard, 53 x 45 cm, Private Collection

Franz Szony

Photographic Work by Franz Szony

Raised in Reno, Nevada, Franz Szony is a writer and photographic artist whose main body of work, both in its fine art and commercial forms, embraces conceptual portraiture. 

After finishing his primary education in 2014, which included art classes at an early age, Szony relocated to San Francisco where he attended the Academy of Art. At the academy, he initially studied fashion and illustration, and, later. focused on photography. After learning the technical aspects of photography, Szony returned to his hometown of Reno where, as a freelance artist, he photographed different advertisement campaigns for newspapers, theaters, and several casinos. He exhibited his own work in a small gallery he created and hosted monthly nude drawing workshops in that space. 

Szony moved to Los Angeles in 2012 and settled in the Brewery Artist Loft complex, an industrially zoned area where artists rent living and working space. Inspired by the area’s creative energy, he photographed campaigns for perfume and fashion brands, created album covers, and did creative photographic work for companies, including Disney and Warner Brothers. 

Influenced by illustrators such as Marc Davis and Erte, and, at an early age, by the extravagant stage shows of Reno’s casinos, Franz Szony’s conceptual portraiture work is lush both in its color and settings. His images are presented ambiguously in time and place, and androgynously in character. Szony’s photographs often contain symbolic or mythological elements and convey psychological, political, and sexual identity messages to the viewers.  

Franz Szony is also a songwriter who has produced several music videos in which he has incorporated his poetry and visual art. Shot over a period of three days, his music video, “Petunia”, based on several of his photographic pieces, was released in 2018. Other music videos by Szony include “La Petite Mort”, “Antibeige”, and “Pansy”, also released in 2018; and “What You Seek” and “Surrender Dorothy”, both released in 2020. 

Szony had solo exhibitions at Reno’s Sierra Arts Foundation in 2015 and at Hollywood’s World of Wonder Gallery in 2019. His work is included in many private collections. Franz Szony’s website is located at http://www.franzszony.com

Leonardo Corredor

The Black and White Photography of Leonardo Corredor

Born in Mérida, Venezuela, and based in New York City, Leonardo Corredor is a photographer and art film director. Before his photography career, he was professional model, named Best Venezuelan Model in 2007. Since his first appearance as an actor in 2010, Corredor has appearred in several acting roles on television series, including “Control Remoto”, “Dum Dum”, and “La Merienda”. He has also hosted Telemundo’s show “Invasion Casera”.

In 2012 Corredor became a creative director and fashion photographer for webzines, print magazines and fashion advertisers, including Essential Homme, Man About Town, Rollercoaster Magazine, Portrait, Fashionably Male, and Solar Magazine, among others. He is represented by The Industry MGMT, a artist and model management agency, focused on still and motion photography,  with offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Examples of Leonardo Corredor’s photographic and video work can be found at his site located at: https://www.leonardocorredor.com

Elys Berroteràn, “Nicolas Quevedo”

Elys Berroteràn, “Nicolas Quevedo”, Photo Shoot for “Kaltblut.” Magazine, September, 2020

Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1991, Elys Berroteràn is a photographer, fashion designer, model and actor. He started his career in fashion modeling and television commercial appearances. Deciding to make the fashion industry his career, Berroteràn formed Caracas Fashion in 2009, which, under his direction, is now one of the largest fashion showcases in Venezuela. One of his latest photography projects is “Moda Caracas Moda”, running the current fashion campaign “Born to be Wild”. 

Nicolas Quevedo is a model signed with the fashion and talent company Grupo 4 Colombia. 

Images reblogged with many thanks to the fashion magazine“Kaltblut.”, located online at https://www.kaltblut-magazine.com

Many thanks for inspiring this post to https://doctordee.tumblr.com

Edward Jean Steichen

Photography by Edward Jean Steichen

Born on March 27, 1879, Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourg-born American painter, photographer and curator, who was a key figure in the development of twentieth-century photography. His parents, Jean-Pierre and Marie Kamp Steichen, emigrated with their son Edward to the United States in 1880, originally settling in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and later moving to Milwaukee in 1899.

Steichen, at the age of fifteen in 1894, began attending Pio Nono College, a Catholic boys’ high school where his drawing skill was first noticed. Quitting high school, he began a four year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. Steichen acquired his first camera in 1895, joined with his friends in forming the Milwaukee Art Students League, and first exhibited his photographs at the Philadelphia Salon in 1899. Becoming a naturalized citizen in 1900, he traveled frequently between 1900 and 1922 to Paris to practice his painting.

After exhibiting in the Chicago Salon, Steichen received encouragement from photographer Clarence White, who would later establish the first educational institution in America to teach photography as a fine art. He was elected in 1901 as a member of London’s Linked Ring Brotherhood which promoted photography as one of the fine arts. In 1902 Steichen cofounded, along with White and  photographer and art patron Alfred Stieglitz, the Photo-Secession movement.

Edward Steichen began experimenting in 1904 with color photography, becoming one of the earliest to use the Autochrome process patented in France by Louis and Auguste Lumière. He also designed the first cover of Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly photographic journal “Camera Work” which would frequently publish Steichen’s work. In Manhattan, New York, he helped Stieglitz found the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, establishing the first American foothold for modern art of all media.

After high quality half-tone reproductions of photographs became possible, the genre of fashion photography became possible as a fine art. Most of the credit for this goes to French portrait photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer and to Edward Steichen, who began in 1907 photographing well-dressed ladies strolling the Longchamp Racecourse at the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Gven the task by publisher Lucien Vogel in 1911 to promote fashion as a fine art, Steichen took photos of couturier Paul Poiret’s designer gowns. Two of these in color were published in the April 1911 issue of the magazine “Art et Décoration”. The photos were done in a creative, soft-focus, aesthetically retouched style, idealizing the garment beyond the exact description of its fabric and buttons, and making a strong distinction from former hard, sharp commercial images.

In 1942, Edward Steichen curated New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Road to Victory”, photographs by enlisted members of the Armed forces, including some made by automatic cameras of Navy planes engaged in fighting. Five duplicates of this exhibition toured the world. In 1940, the first department of photography in a museum was inaugurated at MOMA and was headed by art historian and photographer Beaumont NewHall. In 1947 Steichen was appointed Director of Photography, a position he used to expand and organize the collection, recognizing new generations of photographers and showing early works of Henry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Rauschenberg. 

Among his accomplishments during his term as Director of Photography, Edward Steichen created the MOMA world-touring exhibition “The Family of Man”, a collection of five hundred photos depicting life, love, and death in sixty-eight countries. It was seen by nine million visitors and still holds the record for the most-visited photography exhibition. “The Family of Man” is now permanently housed, on continuous display, at Clervaux Castle in northern Luxembourg, the country of Steichen’s origin. 

Steichen’s career, especially his activities at the Museum of Modern Art, did much to popularize and promote the medium of photography. Both before and since his death in March of 1973, photography, including his own, continued to appreciate as a collectible art form. In 2006, Steichen’s early 1904 pictorialist photograph “The Pond-Moonlight”, showing a wooded area and pond in Mamaroneck, New York, sold for US 2.9 million dollars. Steichen achieved the impression of color by manually applying layers of light-sensitive gums to the paper (the autochrome process not being available until 1907). Only three prints of “The Pond-Moonlight”, two being in museums, are known to exist.

George Platt Lynes

Photography by George Platt Lynes

In the 1930’s and 40’s, George Platt Lynes was the best-known fashion and portrait photographer in the U.S. He was also producing an abundance of male nudes that he circulated among friends and occasionally published in the Swiss homosexual magazine “Der Kreis” under the pseudonyms Roberto Rolf and Robert Orville. Over time, the male nudes became his most valuable artistic endeavor.

The photographs we have come to associate with Lynes are often his highly staged studio images, which he crafted with exacting control over the smallest detail. These images display his inventive use of diffused lighting that seems to come from everywhere and yet from nowhere. Idealized and perfected, bodies and faces are wrapped in light and shadows, their contours defined with precision by the spaces around them.

Lynes began a friendship with Dr Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana and helped with his sex research. Between the years  1949 to 1955, Lynes sold and donated much of his erotic nudes to Kinsey. By May 1955, Lynes had been diagnosed terminally ill with lung cancer. He closed his studio and destroyed much of his print and negative archives, particularly his male nudes. It is now known that he had transferred many of these works to the Kinsey Institute. After a final trip to Europe, Lynes returned to New York City where he died on December 6, 1955.

Fabrizio Ferri

Fabrizio Ferri, “The Ballet Dancer Roberto Boile”, Photo Shoot for the Book “Roberto Bolle: Viaggio nella Bellezza (Voyage into Beauty)”, 2015, Rizzoli Publishing

Fabrizio Ferri began his career as a photojournalist in 1970 at the age of seventeen, taking photographs of Italy’s political life. He then shifted his attention to the fashion world, moving temporarily to London in 1974 and to New York a year later. Ferri soon became one of the most sought-after photographers, working for top fashion magazines as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Elle, Vanity Fair, Interview, GQ and Esquire.

Maskulo

Maskulo

Maskulo, founded in 2014,  is an openly gay-owned and gay-oreinted festish gear company for men. They design, manufacture and ship their creations worldwide. Their gear, made of neoprene, lycra, latex and spandex, are available in  a wide range of articles, including leggings, wrestling singlets, shorts, t-shirts, tank tops, jockstraps, boxer briefs, and other accessories.

Maskulo was founded by Artem Smyslov and Bulat Barantaev who both support democratic movements in Russia, with emphasis on support for gay movements. These incllude the Russian democratic “Solidarnost” movement, the civil movement “Za Prava Cheloveka” (Movement for Human Rights), and GORD ( Movement for Gays, Relatives, and Friends).

Reblogged with thanks to http://fotofanisback.tumblr.com

Cecil Beaton

Photography of Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton was a British photographer and designer best known for his elegant photographs of high society. Working within a cinematic approach, his black-and-white images are characterized by their staged poses and imaginative sets. Beaton’s costume and stage designs won him three Academy Awards, including one for the 1964 film “My Fair Lady”.

Born on January 14, 1904 in London, United Kingdom to a wealthy family, Beaton went on to study at St. John’s College in Cambridge, but he left before finishing his degree. He was mostly self-taught as a photographer, though he did study in the studio of photographer Paul Tanqueray. During World War II, Beaton’s focus shifted to documenting the realities of war throughout the United Kingdom and Europe, forging a prolific and varied career.

“Be daring, be different, be impractical. Be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”- Cecil Beaton

Note: Cecil Beaton’s self-portraits shown: Overhead shot with Mick Jagger; self-portrait standing on stepladder

See April 2, 2022 article in the archive for a more complete biography.

Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Self Portrait”, 1930, Silver Gelatin Print

Calendar

A Year: Day to Day Men: 19th of August, Solar Year 2018

The Musician

August 19, 1883 was the birthdate of French fashion designer Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel.

Coco Chanel began designing hats initially as a diversion that evolved into a commercial enterprise. She became a  licensed milliner in 1910 and opened a boutique at 21 Rue Cambon, Paris, named Chanel Modes. Chanel’s millinery career bloomed once theater actress Gabrielle Dorsiat wore Chanel’s hats in the 1912 play “Bel Ami”.

In 1913, Coco Chanel opened a boutique in Deauville , financed by her long-time lover Arthur Capel, where she introduced deluxe casual clothes suitable for leisure and sport, constructed from humble fabrics such as jersey and tricot, at the time primarily used for men’s underwear. The location was a prime one, in the center of town on a fashionable street. Here Chanel sold hats, jackets, sweaters, and the mariniere, the sailor blouse. Her sister Adrienne and her aunt Antoinette were recruited to model Chanel’s designs; on a daily basis the two women paraded through the town and on its boardwalks, advertising the Chanel creations.

Chanel, determined to re-create the success she had enjoyed in Deauville, opened an establishment in Biarritz in 1915. Biarritz, situated on the Côte Basque, in proximity to wealthy Spanish clients, had neutral status during World War I, allowing it to become the playground for the moneyed and those exiled from their native countries by the hostilities. The Biarritz shop was installed not as a storefront, but in a villa opposite the casino. After one year of operation, the business proved to be so lucrative that in 1916 Chanel was able to reimburse Arthur Capel his original investment.

In 1918, Chanel purchased the entire building at 31 Rue Cambon, which was situated in one of the most fashionable districts of Paris. In 1921, she opened what may be considered an early incarnation of the fashion boutique, featuring clothing, hats, and accessories, later expanded to offer jewelry and fragrance. In addition to turning out her couture collections, Chanel threw her prodigious energies into designing dance costumes for the cutting-edge Ballets Russe. Between the years 1923–1937, she collaborated on productions choreographed by Diaghilev and dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, notably “Le Train Bleu” a dance-opera, “Orphee” and “Oedipe Roi”

Coco Chanel’s  design aesthetic redefined the fashionable woman for the post World War I era. Chanel’s initial triumph was the innovative use of the jersey fabric, a machine knit material manufactured for her by the firm Rodier. Prior to this, jersey tended to be used only in hosiery and for sportswear for tennis, golf and the beach. The Chanel trademark became the look of youthful ease, a liberated physicality, and unencumbered sportive confidence.

Gold Headdress

Gold Headdress, 2600 BC, Gold Leaves, Strings of Lapis and Camelian

This ornate headdress and pair of earrings were found with the body of Queen Puabi in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. The headdress is made up of 20 gold leaves, two strings of lapis and carnelian, and a large gold comb. In addition, she wore chokers, necklaces, and large lunate-shaped earrings.

Her upper body was covered by strands of beads made of precious metals and semiprecious stones that stretched from her shoulders to her belt. Ten rings decorated her fingers. A diadem or fillet made up of thousands of small lapis lazuli beads with gold pendants depicting plants and animals was apparently on a table near her head.

Two attendants were in the chamber with Puabi, one crouched near her head, the other at her feet. Various metal, stone, and pottery vessels lay around the walls of the chamber.

Her name and title are known from the short inscription on one of three cylinder seals found on her person. Although most women’s cylinder seals at the time would have read “wife of ___,” this seal made no mention of her husband. The fact that Puabi is identified without the mention of her husband may indicate that she was queen in her own right. If so, she probably reigned prior to the time of the First Dynasty of Ur, whose first ruler is known from the Sumerian King List as Mesannepada.