How Guy Bourdin Revolutionized Modern Fashion Photography

Hired by Edmonde Charles-Roux in 1955 at Vogue Paris, Guy Bourdin made his debut for the magazine with a series of hats photographed in front of a butcher’s stall in Les Halles. The calves’ heads hanging above the model were cropped to avoid shocking readers.
Bourdin was shortly entrusted with many pages per issue, the beginning of an exceptional collaboration of over 30 years with the magazine.

Photography provided by Rizzoli New York
When Francine Crescent [Vogue Paris fashion editor, then editor-in-chief] introduced Bourdin to Roland Jourdan in 1964, the creative director of Charles Jourdan was already sensitive to the visual provocations that [Bourdin] was deploying on the pages of the magazine. A few images had tickled [Roland’s] interest in how the photographer staged shoes: the March 1966 cover with a pair of Charles Jourdan heels for Pierre Cardin, long legs in red tights coming out of a miniskirt; in February 1967, [eight pairs of] a Karl Lagerfeld pump for Charles Jourdan stacked in the arms of a naked model. [Bourdin’s photos would expand from the fashion pages until they “took over the magazine.”] In 1966, Vogue Paris stated: “It is perhaps because of his love for detail that Guy Bourdin is among the great fashion photographers. Because he always goes one step further, he never takes the same photo twice, he surpasses himself. He doesn’t imitate himself: We imitate him.”
By hiring Bourdin, the famous shoe brand dared to move away from stereotypical images of accessories, [then] characterized by the banality of the staging and uniformity of the layout. The years after the Second World War were indeed marked by standardized communication. In brand catalogs, accessories were cropped on a neutral background; photography was simply descriptive, its function being only to show the product. A pioneer in communication, Charles Jourdan deliberately took the risk of engaging in a policy of visual expression by which the product was no longer at the center of the image. The Charles Jourdan campaigns, which were entrusted exclusively to Bourdin from 1967 to 1979, were also in line with the company’s commercial and marketing audacity and testified to its modernity.

Photography provided by © The Guy Bourdin Estate
For Charles Jourdan and Vogue Paris, Bourdin demanded control over the final selection as well as the layout of his images. While the very first campaigns were in square format, he quickly adopted the horizontal format, which corresponded to the magazine’s double-page spread and directly evoked the cinema screen. When not working horizontally, he created small sequences that developed a narrative.
With Bourdin, the frame of the photograph is almost always closed; there are few or no skies, and we’re at ground level. Whether indoors or outdoors, the spaces define a closed world, with no off‑screen. In very graphic images, he invented wacky scenes and unusual, sometimes absurd, situations. He juxtaposed bright colors with the almost systematic presence of the sophisticated red emblematic of his photographs.
The 1979 campaign, made with only a pair of half‑legs of window mannequins that he would take from place to place was the culmination of the cutting and fragmentation of the models’ bodies seen in the previous campaigns. This fragmentation of reality is a sign of his taste for surrealism. In his images, the isolation of objects from any human context gave them a reality of their own.

Photography provided by © The Guy Bourdin Estate
The reception of the Charles Jourdan campaigns exceeded the expectations of [his] patron but sometimes provoked extreme reactions. They intrigued and sparked debate; some readers did not hesitate to send inflammatory letters to the company to express their disgust, especially in front of the advertisement published in Jours de France dated 10‑16 March 1975: a pair of pink shoes spilled on the sidewalk in front of a black car, the body of a woman drawn in chalk on the asphalt and alleged traces of blood surrounding it. [Nevertheless, Bourdin’s photos were eagerly awaited in fashion magazines each month.] “It was as if we were publishing not advertisements but a paperback novel or a comic strip. People were hungry to see what was next,” according to Gerard Tavenas, director of marketing. The reception of his work in the magazine Photo was also unambiguous. Each year, portfolios were dedicated to his latest campaigns with titles such as “Bourdin or Unfettered Advertising” and “Advertising Photography as an Art Form.”
Pushing boundaries, Bourdin’s campaigns for Charles Jourdan had a decisive influence on several generations of designers. Even more than the history of advertising, they revolutionized the history of photography.
© Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan, Rizzoli New York, 2024. All images © The Guy Bourdin Estate. Condensed excerpt from the introduction.
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