Lee Miller in Fashion by Becky E. Conekin

Conekin’s very engaging, nicely researched book is the first devoted to Miller’s fashion work. Miller has been the subject of a number of books, and the muse for at least one fashion show, but Ms. “As a woman, as one of the most perceptive photographers of the 20th century, Lee Miller enthralled because she made her own choices. The photographs in Lee Miller in Fashion might appear to be ordinary fashion photos of the interwar period-although they are sometimes bracing, such as the ones taken in London during the war itself-but the book is valuable for the way it expands our view of that protean spirit, an American model who became a European Surrealist, a fearless photojournalist, and other things besides.” - The New York Times Book Review “Lee Miller was herself remarkably glamorous, although her best pictures are anything but: her stark and brutally truthful record of Germany at the end of World War II. In all her roles, she was her own bold self.” “In all her different worlds, she moved with freedom. Lee Miller in Fashion presents these striking archival fashion photographs as well as contact sheets, memos, and Miller’s published illustrations, vividly setting the wit, irrepressible creativity, and daring of Miller within the larger story of women’s experience of fashion, art, and war in the twentieth century. Miller witnessed incredible acts of resistance born out through fashion-and her photographic record of women’s indomitable spirit even in times of war has remained an invaluable resource in fashion and global history. The world of fashion emerges as the backbone of Miller’s creative development, as well as an integral lens through which to understand the effects of war on the lives of women in the 1940s and 1950s. Lee Miller in Fashion is the first book to examine how her career as a model and fashion photographer illuminates her life story and connects to international fashion history from the late 1920s until the early 1950s.

Miller was recognized as “one of the most distinguished living photographers” during her hey-day as a fashion photographer, but an astonishing number of these images have remained unpublished. Miller became a celebrated Surrealist under the tutelage of her lover, Man Ray, and then joined the war effort during World War II, documenting everything from the liberation of concentration camps to the daily life of Nazi-occupied Paris. Midcareer, she made the unprecedented transition from one side of the lens to the other, from a Condé Nast model in Jazz Age New York to fashion photographer, creating stunning images that imbued fashion with her signature wit and whimsy.

She was a woman who refused to be penned in, a free spirit constantly on the move from New York to London to Paris, from husbands to lovers and back, from photojournalistic objectivism to surrealism. Fashion model, surrealist artist, muse, photographer, war correspondent-Lee Miller defies categorization.

Lee Miller in Fashion by Becky E. Conekin