Lee Miller in Fashion

Surrealist artist, muse of Man Ray, photographer, fashion model and Vogue war correspondent - Lee Miller defies categorization. Beginning her career as a Condé Nast model in 1920s New York, she made the unprecedented transition from one side of the lens to the other, creating stunning photos that imbued fashion with surrealist wit and whimsy.

Fashion model, surrealist artist, muse, photographer, war correspondent - Lee Miller defies categorization.

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. 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.

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.

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photographers" during her hey-day as a fashion photographer, but an astonishing number of these images have remained unpublished. 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.

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. 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.

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. "In all her different worlds, she moved with freedom. In all her roles, she was her own bold self." - Antony Penrose

Author: Becky E. Conekin
Publisher: Monacelli Press
Published: 10/08/2013
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.33lbs
Size: 9.80h x 7.60w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781580933766


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/23/2013
New York Times Book Review 12/08/2013 pg. 39

About the Author
BECKY E. CONEKIN is a senior lecturer in history at Yale University and a senior research fellow in European Studies at the Whitney & Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She has previously taught in Paris, Berlin, and London at the London College of Fashion. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the author of The Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain, Vernier: Fashion, Femininity & Form with Robin Muir, and the co-editor of The Englishness of English Dress and Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964.


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