When Vogue 100: A Century of Style, a large-scale and far-ranging historical exhibition celebrating Vogue’s first 100 years, opened at London’s National Portrait Gallery in the spring of 2016, it was the culmination of five years of research. As chief curator, I pored over every issue of the magazine, over 1,500 and counting. As far as we could for the early decades, we wanted to go right back to the very prints that Vogue had published all those years ago. If they were torn, abraded or otherwise displayed the patina of age, then so much the better, we thought, for this was the very stuff of Vogue, its history.

Some of Staley-Wise Gallery’s represented artists on Artsy as some of the fashion photographers that defined the genre.