‘If you know yourself, you are doomed,’ Alexey Brodovitch once remarked. His modern fairy tale spurred a revolution and taught lessons which perhaps have yet to be fully understood.

The year was 1934 when Carmel Snow, the recently appointed fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, came across the works of a 36-year-old Russian émigré at an exhibition in New York’s Art Directors Club. Later defined by Snow herself as a ‘revelation,’ Brodovitch became the answer to a question that until that moment had yet to be raised: how should fashion publications develop and revolutionize their aesthetics to survive? The visual arts provided the field and Brodovitch the model for this new role of creative director within the world of fashion publications. Snow was utterly captivated by Brodovitch’s ‘bold and arresting’ designs which filled ‘pages that bled beautifully.’ She opened the doors of Harper’s Bazaar to him, and Brodovitch became the publication’s first art director.

The time for a new era in fashion magazines had come. Brodovitch employed and worked with some of the greatest names in photography, cinema and art, not only recreating the aesthetics of fashion publications but also revolutionizing their entire social perception. Moving away from their original 19th century roots as ‘catalogues’, fashion publications began to acquire an artistic status that was to last for decades to come. With protégés such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Robert Frank and Lisette Model, and project collaborators such as Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the perception of fashion as art-and not as apparel-began to flourish.

What is truly fascinating in Brodovitch’s use of imagery is that he considered clothes as symbols and not merely as functional garments, creating a particular creative context within which they were set. Brodovitch understood that fashion was in dire need of a reformation that could only occur by combining it with its ‘rivals’, namely design, cinema, and photography. With the help of an all-star cast of artists, he created a series of projects that continue to inspire and shape contemporary perceptions of fashion publications. And perhaps it is in this very idea that unifies differing creative elements that fashion will eventually escape to. What we have forgotten today is to look beyond fashion as apparel and to embrace the simple idea of fashion as art. Because when the greatness of the past is so present, it has the potential to shape the future.

Image © Harper’s Bazaar