Smoke + Veil, Paris, 1958

William Klein was a self-taught photographer who studied painting briefly at the Sorbonne with Ferdinand Leger. In the early 1950s, he was discovered by Vogue art director, Alexander Liberman. Liberman said about Klein’s photographs, ‘In the fashion pictures of the Fifties, nothing like Klein had happened before. He went to extremes, which took a combination of great ego and courage. He pioneered the telephoto and wide-angle lenses, giving us a new perspective. He took fashion out of the studio into the streets, trying anything, stopping traffic, photographing models in waxworks, repainting shop fronts, hiring actors and dwarfs. He functioned like a Fellini, sensing the glamorous and the grotesque. ... He was the first to bring into photography what [Fernand] Léger achieved in art - the glorification of the life and rhythms of the street.’

Smoke + Veil Paris, 1958 is a prime example of Klein’s classic fashion photographs of the 1950s commissioned for French Vogue. Influenced by the films of Federico Fellini and the high fashion of Dior’s New Look, with percher hats, smoky veils , cat-eye make-up and half smoked cigarettes, Klein captured the zeitgeist of his time.