Holden Luntz: Inventive Fashion
Inventive fashion
EXHIBITION
Holden Luntz presents Melvin Sokolsky
Exhibition
Feb 8 - March 4, 2020
Throughout history, photography has served as a medium that documented and preserved a wide variety of disciplines. Photography recorded our lives, political events, cultural events, and society’s endeavors to discover our planet and beyond. Often, a photographer’s goals were factual and straightforward picture taking, intended to create images that inform our personal and collective memory. However, with the dynamic evolution of 20th and 21st-century fashion and the birth of magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, Glamour, and Elle (among others), photographers were encouraged to be creative, inventive, and push the artistic components of their work. The striking photographs in Inventive Fashion were chosen because of their bold spirit and imaginative nature, displaying the photographers’ desire to challenge traditional ideas of beauty. Due to their numerous experimental, creative methods these photographers and their work helped advance both the medium of photography and the presentation of fashion.
Innovative photographer Melvin Sokolsky used daring and unique approaches in his fashion shoots that ultimately expanded the creative limitations of the genre. In the 1960s, Sokolsky used his original vision to create two astounding series of photographs that have become iconic images in the history of fashion photography. Sokolsky’s Bubble and Fly series depicted a model floating within a bubble through the streets of Paris and New York as well as appearing to “fly” inside of restaurants and above the rooftops of Paris. In his series, Sokolsky defies gravity by displaying the model, Simone D’Aillencourt, airborne within the bubble, becoming an embodiment of grace and beauty, untouchable in her world, mesmerizing her observers as well as the viewer. Sokolsky’s photographs created poetic illusions in an era predating photoshop, which remains remarkable more than half a century later.
In Inventive Fashion, fashion photography connects on a variety of levels with their intended audience. Compelling fashion photographs have visual surprises, enhances the adventurous and creative collective spirit of the viewer, and transports them – if only for an instant – from their everyday moments to a world imagined. The Inventive Fashion exhibition invites viewers to take a visual journey to travel through time and space and gaze voyeuristically at the lives of others – all inspired by the fashion and culture of the day.
