Twins at the Beach, Nassau, Bahamas, 1949

Looking at Matisse, Museum of Modern Art, 1939. (Opposite page) Untitled, 1940.

At first blush, photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe cut an unlikely figure in the fashion world. Bespectacled and chubby-cheeked, she was 40 years old when editor Carmel Snow hired her in 1936 to take pictures for Harper’s Bazaar. Snow, a slender, diminutive Irish immigrant with a fondness for pearls and martini lunches, had blown into the Bazaar offices herself just a few years earlier. She and her eagle-eyed, Russian-born art director, Alexey Brodovitch, were both itching to banish the stodgy black-and-white society portraits that still dominated the burgeoning world of fashion photography. Instead they wanted the images to match their vision for the modern, liberated woman—one who worked, travelled, danced, drank champagne, and lived with such vitality that she’d leap off the page.

The fiercely independent Dahl-Wolfe had been freelancing for Saks Fifth Avenue when Snow came across her work and immediately zeroed in on the photographer’s sun-drenched outdoor settings, casually posed models, and vivid, painterly use of colour. Something clicked: “From the moment I saw [Dahl-Wolfe’s] first color photographs I knew that Bazaar was at last going to look the way I had instinctively wanted my magazine to look,” wrote Snow, whose memos were published in the 2005 biography, A Dash of Daring. She quickly introduced Dahl- Wolfe to Bazaar’s new fashion editor, the fabled

“THEY WERE MORE LIKE STORIES THAN PORTRAITS.”

—VALERIE STEELE

Diana Vreeland an immaculately dressed socialite with a quixotic imagination and a devilish sense of humour and together this improbable group went on to chart the next phase in the evolution of American style.