In 1911 the French publisher Lucien Vogel challenged Edward Steichen to create the first artistic, reasonably than merely documentary, fashion photographs, a moment that may be now regarded as to be a turning point in the history of fashion photography. As fashion changed over the next century, so did the photography of fashion. Steichen’s modernist approach was once forthright and visually arresting. In the 1930s the photographer Martin Munkácsi pioneered a gritty, photojournalistic style. In the 1960s Richard Avedon encouraged his models to express their personalities by smiling and laughing, which had continuously been discouraged prior to now. Helmut Newton brought an explosion of sexuality into fashion images and turned the tables on traditional gender stereotypes in the 1970s, and in the 1980s Bruce Weber and Herb Ritts made male sexuality a very powerful a part of fashion photography. Today, following the integration of digital technology, teams like Inez & Vinoodh and Mert & Marcus are reshaping our notion of what’s acceptable—not just aesthetically but also technically and conceptually—in a fashion photograph.
 
This lavishly illustrated survey of one hundred years of fashion photography updates and reevaluates this history in five chronological chapters by experts in photography and fashion history. It includes more than three hundred photographs by the genre’s most famous practitioners in addition to important but lesser-known figures, alongside a selection of costumes, fashion illustrations, magazine covers, and advertisements.