Modern fashion photography began with Edward Steichen. During the 1920s and ’30s, he produced thousands of photographs for Vogue, highlighting the creations of the era’s major couturiers including Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli.

Steichen’s early photographs of women in the soft Pictorialist style prepared him for this work, but his experience as a painter also helped. He was an expert at rendering the texture of cloth as well as the cut, style, fall and fold of a fabric in paint. Steichen had also learned to translate subtle gestures and fleeting expressions onto the canvas. The sum of these experiences proved invaluable to Steichen’s theatrical set-ups.

Whenever he felt constrained by the studio, the photographer took his models outside, to the racetrack, on board a yacht, to a chic hotel or to the Fifth Avenue apartment of Vogue publisher Condé Nast. Models, socialites and actors alike posed for him in images that successfully married art and commerce.