The Women of Harper’s Bazaar 1936-58 at The Museum at FIT in New York profiles the relationship of the three women behind the American fashion and lifestyle publication—the editor-in-chief Carmel Snow, the editor Diana Vreedland and the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Through photographs, vintage publications, personal letters, apparel and a video installation, the exhibition (until 2 April) candidly depicts how the trio “brewed the perfect storm that resulted in Harper’s Bazaar”, says Taylor Elyse Anderson, a graduate student at FIT who co-organised the exhibition. It aims to show how the magazine reinvented not just the aesthetic but also the content of fashion publications, as seen in a documentary essay from 1939 in which Dahl-Wolfe photographed the living conditions at housing projects in the Williamsburg and Harlem neighbourhoods of New York. The show was organised by the students at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s (FIT) MA Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory and Museum Practice programme, with additional support from the FIT adjunct instructor Sarah Byrd and the assistant curator Ariele Elia.
