A Rare Photography Show in Beijing Tracks a Century of Fashion Under Western Taste

Here are 8 points that don't quite count as spoilers.

On January 19, "Coming into Fashion: A Century of Photography at Condé Nast" opened at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. If you have ever lost yourself staring at a beautiful photograph in a fashion magazine, this show may interest you.

It gathers more than 100 years of photographs from Condé Nast magazines including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour and Love — over 170 works by more than 80 photographers, among them Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, David Bailey, Guy Bourdin, Tim Walker and Mario Testino. Alongside the stills, the show screens six short films made by fashion magazines.

The curator is Nathalie Herschdorfer, an art historian who specializes in the history of photography. She now directs a Swiss fine arts museum, and spent 12 years as a curator at the Musée de l'Elysée, the public photography museum in Lausanne. She also works in publishing: she wrote Afterwards: Contemporary Photography Confronting the Past in 2011, and co-edited Le Corbusier and the Power of Photography in 2012.

Herschdorfer picked the photographs from Condé Nast's archives in New York, Paris, Milan and London. This is not the show's debut either — it has already traveled to 12 cities, including Berlin, Milan, Edinburgh, Paris, Moscow, Mexico City and Tokyo.

We have rounded up some of its highlights that don't quite count as spoilers. Here they are:

1. Condé Nast isn't the organizer, and the show uses the magazine as a medium to talk about meaning beyond fashion magazines

Condé Nast supplied most of the material for "Coming into Fashion: A Century of Photography at Condé Nast," but the organizer is the Foundation of the Exhibition of Photography (FEP); Condé Nast is a partner. For the Beijing edition, the main partner is Vogue China.

A quick word about FEP.

This independent nonprofit foundation was founded in 2003 and is led by Todd Brandow, a former art advisor. It is "devoted to producing and creating meaningful photography exhibitions and publications beyond conventional systems, so as to use the immediacy of images to promote the exchange and development of global culture."

Since it started, it has staged exhibitions in 35 countries. The better-known ones include The Polaroid Project, on the history of Polaroid; Retrospective, a show by Lorna Simpson — the African American photographer and multimedia artist who made her name in the 1980s — on identity and memory, gender and history, fact and fiction; and Moving Still, drawn from Lois Greenfield's 40 years of photographing modern dance.

FEP works with many curators, historians and critics. Herschdorfer is one of its members.

So "Coming into Fashion" is not just a collection of pretty pictures from fashion magazines. The photography half of the show runs in four chronological sections, starting in 1914 with Baron Adolphe de Meyer, the first photographer Condé Nast hired. You can watch fashion photography change technically from its beginnings to now, watch fashion itself change, and see that the "model" was not handed her enviable social role until the 1980s.

Stepping outside the magazine, the show adds a fashion film section at the end — those six shorts. Its visual record, in other words, does not run along a single timeline; the history of the medium runs through it as well. That way of seeing is plural, as the introduction to the first section puts it: "With the birth of cinema, photography gradually became a popular medium — its outstanding strength being its broad appeal. Condé Nast clearly recognized photography's potential, and began cultivating public taste by defining the identity and style of the modern woman."

2. What was added for Chinese audiences is the Vogue Me films

The material added for Chinese audiences is not fashion photography shot by Vogue China, but fashion films made by Vogue Me, starring supermodels alongside Zhou Xun, Fan Bingbing, Li Yuchun, Lu Han and Kris Wu.

Vogue Me launched in February 2016, a new magazine Vogue China aimed at young readers, especially the post-90s generation (average age 24). So these films hang right "next door" to the Teen Vogue fashion photographs.

3. Every photograph is an unedited original print

Worth noting: all 170-plus works by more than 80 photographers here are original prints. No magazine editor has reworked them.

You will not find the post-production marks that fashion magazines usually leave behind — no headlines, no model credits, and certainly no product listings.

If the question of "how commerce remakes art" interests you, 36 fashion magazines sit in the middle of the second gallery. Set the published pages against the prints and you can see exactly what the editors did to them.

4. A century of photography also shows how fashion changed

These works record both the move from black-and-white to color and the turns fashion took. You can see the bobbed hair of the 1920s, and swimsuit pictures from before the bikini existed.

Another thing stands out: early fashion photography rarely went in close on a face or a garment. It leaned on medium and wide shots instead.

5. It is a photography show, but photographers are not the only leads

The Condé Nast photography section is split into four parts, each with a short introduction. Besides Edward Steichen, Irving Penn and Helmut Newton, other names come up: Condé Nast himself; Alexander Liberman, who started as the photographers' key contact and later became editorial director (the text covers how he worked with photographers and editors alike); and the late Franca Sozzani, editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue.

To make clear what part Condé Nast played in finding fashion photographers, the show also sets it against the history of poaching talent back and forth with Harper's Bazaar.

So although it sums up Condé Nast's 100 years of photography through the photographers, the show wants to say something else too: fashion magazines are a business. It was that business that brought these photographers and these pictures into being.

We once wrote a piece on this, The Fashion Magazine Business: They Really Aren't Just Photographing Dresses and Suits (《时尚杂志这个生意：它们真的不只是拍拍裙子和西装而已》), if you're interested.

6. It talks about fashion films without flinching, but it steers clear of Instagram

Besides the 170-plus photographs from Condé Nast, the show screens six short films, shot by magazines including Italian Vogue, W and British Vogue. The usual idea is to put models in haute couture and have them act out a small story, though now and then the editing borrows the language of cinema.

All of them were made after 2010, which suggests the curator still wanted to say: fashion photography has kept up with the times.

What's interesting, though, is that while the show displays fashion films without hesitation, it leaves the fashion photographs posted on social platforms like Instagram out of the conversation entirely. Remember that once Instagram caught on, the authority of both models and fashion photography lost its mystique. The photos that pull in millions of followers and endless likes on social media were not shot in manual mode on a high-end camera, yet technically they do not look much worse than what the masters put into a single frame.

Put another way: you cannot discuss fashion photography today and go around Instagram.

The show sums up Condé Nast's century behind the camera, but it will not spare a corner to ask what fashion photography becomes in the age of new media. That is a telling detail, because with the magazine market sliding the way it is, they probably haven't decided yet what posture to take when discussing their own competitors.

7. Another question you may want to ask: if Paris has always been the place fashion ideas come from, why were the first modern fashion magazines all born in America?

The first fashion magazines appeared in 17th-century France, made for wealthy readers. They were tied to culture and high society, and aimed at women. In the 19th century, women's magazines kept growing alongside the invention of lithography, the rise of haute couture and the first department stores.

In America, Harper's Bazaar began in 1867, and Vogue followed in 1892. In France, L'Art et la Mode began in 1881 and La Gazette du bon ton in 1912.

It wasn't only the first modern fashion magazines that were born in America. Condé Nast's own stronghold of fashion photography started there too; the French, Italian and British editions of Vogue only made their names in photography later.

After Condé Nast bought Vogue in 1909, the American edition led the field in photographic invention for a long time. In the second half of the 20th century, British Vogue broke away from its parent company. From 1954 on, French Vogue built a name of its own and opened the way for a whole new generation of fashion photographers. In the 1980s, the Italian and British editions became platforms for young photographers' talent — a generation that built stages charged with a sense of the sublime, and raised models into stars.

Condé Nast's American editors came to see the creative advantage of their European operations.

7. Anna Wintour, fashion's famous devil, is never named — but the show closes with words from the late Franca Sozzani, editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue

The other interesting thing about this exhibition is that from start to finish it never mentions Anna Wintour.

No one doubts Wintour's hold on the industry. On the first cover she oversaw at American Vogue, the Israeli model Michaela Bercu wore Guess jeans with a Christian Lacroix couture top. That mix of haute couture and high street became her signature break with the past. But what she added to fashion photography probably doesn't match what Franca Sozzani added.

"To set Italian Vogue apart from the other editions, Franca Sozzani resolved to apply the artistic standards she had established in the 1980s at Lei and Per Lui," the exhibition text reads.

Sozzani became editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue in 1988 and turned it into the most contentious Vogue of them all: models smeared in oil after the BP spill; the "Horror Movie" series about domestic violence; the "Black Issue," shot entirely with Black models to tell the story of Black culture; the 2011 series championing plus-size fashion; and features on cosmetic surgery, among others.

Look at Italian Vogue and you'll notice its look differs from the other editions, and that it is made up of almost nothing but photographs. Sozzani decided that more than 20 years ago. "Images used to exist as captions to the text, and we reversed that — we cut the text to a minimum. Years before our website went live, I had already started using this form in print," she said. She later started a fashion archive project on the website, putting an enormous number of fashion photographs online for people to search and enjoy. In 2011, Italian Vogue also opened a column called "Photovogue," inviting aspiring fashion photographers to submit work, and running one image each from three selected photographers per issue.

"Coming into Fashion: A Century of Photography at Condé Nast" ends with a line from Franca Sozzani.

It reads: "There are so many things published in the life of a magazine that most of them get forgotten. Very few images are powerful. It's not novelty that makes for creativity; it's creativity, or 'genius,' that creates novelty."

The attribution: Franca Sozzani, editor-in-chief of Italian Vogue. It does not mention that she has died.

8. The Beijing run lasts through March 5. The exhibition has also been made into a book.

Cover image and images in this article courtesy of Vogue China and palaisgalliera.paris.fr.