Lee Miller in Fashion by Becky E. Conekin

The book’s striking archival prints and contact sheets, as well as Conekin’s thoughtful insights, make Lee Miller in Fashion a delightful experience for the photographer-turned-fashionista in each of us. Each print invited thoughtful examination and attracted an elite crowd, including former Executive Director of the CFDA Fern Mallis, which tightly packed the space for hours.

The book thankfully features more than just the handful of photographs at Staley Wise which left the viewer yearning for more. They’re serious posed photography, and I think they would have admired each other’s work.” “I think they have that in common, you know, they’re not snapshots. “The period is so different, but they both are very formalized, they’re posed, they’re not context,” Staley told Musée in an exclusive interview. Gallery director Etheleen Staley compared Miller’s work to that of Patrick Demarchelier, also featured in an exhibit at Staley Wise. The photographs on display, shot between 19, demonstrate Miller’s careful construction and whimsical nature in a new context that complement Staley Wise’s already substantial collection of Miller's work. The celebration of Miller’s work continued at the Staley Wise gallery, which, in addition to a modest showing of 13 prints, featured a book signing with Conekin. Conekin has compiled a posthumous homage to Miller’s fashion portfolio in her new book Lee Miller in Fashion. Some of her greatest work was unseen, though, being unpublished until recently. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Lee Miller, esteemed model turned surrealist artist and war-time photojournalism, was a phenomenally accomplished fashion photographer. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. 3 Other British scholars such as Janice Winship, Lucy Noakes and Jo Spence have examined Woman’s Own and Woman magazines and have found, like Rose, that the ideal female citizen during WWII was expected to make a “vital contribution to the war effort while maintaining her femininity”. There he told British women that their combination of “age old vanity” and “new courage” meant that they were “ready for anything - even the continuance of your coiffure in an air-raid shelter whilst a battle royal is raging overhead”. 2 She provides, among many, the example of Antoine, one “famous man”, writing in the spring of 1940 in the popular Woman’s Own magazine of his “ideal woman”. Which People’s War?, that “glamour” and what she dubs “sexualized femininity” were “marshalled” at various levels of popular and official discourse “to make acceptable the ‘gender-bending’ obligations of citizenship for women” during the Second World War in Britain. Rose convincingly argues in her acclaimed book. There is now an established literature on the role British women’s magazines played in extolling the double-edged tenets of female “beauty and duty” in WWII Britain.

Lee Miller in Fashion by Becky E. Conekin