Melvin Sokolsky
As a teenager growing up on New York’s Lower East Side, Melvin Sokolsky came across a reproduction of the 15th- and 16th-century Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastical, richly detailed triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (circa 1490) in a book and became fixated on a detail of a nude couple lounging in a transparent bubble. The image stayed with him for decades and ended up being the inspiration for what remains his best-known work: a 12-page editorial that ran in the March 1963 issue of Harper’s Bazaar and features his muse at the time, the French model Simone D’Aillencourt, floating over Paris in a human-size Plexiglas bubble. In the most iconic frame, D’Aillencourt wears a double-breasted suit and silk coat by the French designer Philippe Venet as the bubble, suspended from a crane by an aircraft cable, kisses the surface of the Seine. Sokolsky, who died in 2022, later recalled in an interview that at one point the bubble was lowered too far, submerging D’Aillencourt up to her ankles — and ruining an expensive pair of shoes. It was a small price to pay for an image that continues to inspire: The idea has been revisited several times, including for a 2001 Vogue shoot with the actor Ben Stiller by Annie Leibovitz and a 2014 Bazaar story featuring the actress Jennifer Aniston and shot by Sokolsky himself. — Jameson Montgomery
Ian Bradley: It’s very sci-fi.
Vinoodh Matadin: To think that it was made without a computer.
Patrick Li: Linda, it’s like your Peter Lindbergh Meatpacking photo [for a 1992 issue of Harper’s Bazaar], where you’re flying away.
Linda Evangelista: Oh, the one where I was chafed and cut. I was so excited to go up on the crane and didn’t know that all my body weight would go into the harness. [The American stylist] Paul Cavaco tried to help me stuff things in there for support. We found a shoehorn and some sanitary napkins.
Cate Holstein: Girl …
Evangelista: I couldn’t understand how Mary Martin did it on Broadway in “Peter Pan” (1954), because it wasn’t comfortable. Anyway, Sokolsky’s model has probably been told, “Don’t breathe, you don’t want to steam up the ball.” But look how airy her feet are.
Choosing the 25 most influential fashion photographs of the past century is an impossible task. Partly, that’s because influence is hard to trace. Without knowing firsthand, one can’t really say whether Marc Jacobs’s 1993 grunge collection (the one that got him fired from Perry Ellis) was inspired by the work of Joseph Szabo, whose photographs in the 1970s captured the angst and glory of suburban adolescence; or whether today’s street-style photographers admire or even know about the midcentury American photographer Saul Leiter. There’s also the fact that some fine-art photographers have had a great deal of influence on fashion, even though they aren’t considered fashion photographers and wouldn’t refer to themselves as such. In general, fashion photography was defined broadly enough here to include the work of fine artists, street-style photographers, backstage and nightlife photographers and paparazzi. And it didn’t matter if an image was meant as a fashion photograph, so long as the picture later inspired a designer, collection, or trend, or it changed how we might think about style.
One morning this past July, a group of experts convened at the Times building in Midtown Manhattan to debate and make the list below. Huddled in a conference room for nearly three hours, six image makers — the New York-based stylist and T contributor Ian Bradley; the Canadian model Linda Evangelista, one of the original “supers” in the late 1980s and ’90s; the American fashion designer and Khaite founder, Cate Holstein; the Dutch American photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin; and T’s creative director, Patrick Li — considered the merits of about 60 pictures they’d nominated, spanning roughly 100 years.