‘He immortalised the beginning of the supermodel’: inside Dior’s career-spanning retrospective of photographer Peter Lindbergh

If the Nineteen Eighties was a decade of heady womanhood – immortalised by the colorful confections of couturier Christian Lacroix, the broad shoulders and bouffants of Working Woman, or the high-voltage glamour of the ladies of Dynasty and Dallas – the soulful, stripped-back images of German photographer Peter Lindbergh offered a riposte to the period’s more-is-more aesthetic. ‘He really formed a brand new manner of representing ladies in magazines,’ says Olivier Flaviano, head of Paris’ La Galerie Dior, the place a brand new exhibition ‘Dior / Lindbergh’ celebrates the late photographer’s work, significantly that made in collaboration with the maison.

Lindbergh, who was born in Lissa (Leszno) in German-occupied Poland in 1944, grew up in Duisburg, a city near the German-Dutch border, earlier than happening to review on the Berlin Academy of Nice Arts and the Kunsthochschule (Faculty of Artwork) in Krefeld. After helping photographer Hans Lux and dealing at Stern journal (an influential title which then counted Helmut Newton and Hans Feurer as contributors), his breakout second would are available in 1989 capturing for British Vogue.

‘Dior / Lindbergh’ at La Galerie Dior, Paris

Photographing the duvet of the January 1990 situation – one of many defining style pictures of our time – Lindbergh captured then-burgeoning fashions Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista on the streets of New York’s Meatpacking District. The accompanying editorial would herald the stripped-back aesthetic of the Nineteen Nineties – an period of cool minimalism and undone glamour – and introduce the world to the supermodel.

‘He immortalised in 1990 the beginning of the supermodel,’ says Flaviano, who additionally curated the brand new Paris exhibition. ‘Peter Lindbergh was a proponent of a naturalist method to {photograph}, which was usually at odds with the stereotype revealed in magazines. His fixed quest for the “fact” of his topic, free from artifice, is a testomony to his want to affirm ladies’s identities.’ Describing his personal method, Lindbergh would say that his ‘nice topic was ladies… To comply with them as carefully as doable in order that they may specific themselves and assert their fact. I observe down a thriller, I search an emotion.’

The brand new exhibition started with the 2018 launch of Peter Lindbergh. Dior, a Taschen-published two-volume e book that noticed the photographer shoot quite a few clothes from the home’s 70-year historical past on the streets of New York (largely, the pictures had been set in opposition to the bustle of Occasions Sq.). ‘He performed with contrasts: 70 years of Dior high fashion shot within the current day; Paris high fashion shot within the streets of New York. These pictures convey again “the motion of life”, so expensive to Christian Dior, to the archives,’ says Flaviano. The exhibition has the same goal: tracing 70 years of the home ‘by means of the lens of Peter Lindbergh, and a retrospective of Peter Lindbergh’s work primarily based on the pictures he created for Dior,’ Flaviano continues.

Spanning 1988 to 2018 (Lindbergh died in September of 2019 aged 74), the pictures are divided over ten areas on the gallery, which is situated on the identical deal with as the home’s flagship, 30 Avenue Montaigne (additionally it is the situation of the home’s couture atelier, the place Christian Dior himself was primarily based throughout his lifetime). Dotted among the many images are a collection of tableaus, usually that includes the real-life clothes from the Dior archive that seem within the pictures. ‘I actually just like the room devoted to [his work] for magazines,’ says Flaviano. ‘The Peter Lindbergh Basis loaned to the Galerie Dior archives which can be exhibited for the primary time: contact sheets, work prints, remaining proofs, present the general public with an understanding of the method of creation.’

La Galerie Dior first opened in March 2022 and hosts exhibitions that change twice yearly. ‘These exhibitions all the time takes a “new look” at its [Dior’s] historical past and archives,’ says Flaviano. ‘What makes the gallery distinctive is that it tells the historical past of the home of Dior within the areas the place it was born in 1946 – the high fashion ateliers are nonetheless creating Dior’s collections within the flooring above the exhibition areas.’