The Replacement Girl 8/90. Baker, Fred. Havana, 1953. Clustered round the mothership that was m
The Replacement Girl 8/90. Baker, Fred. Havana, 1953. Clustered round the mothership that was midcentury Vogue were a battalion of satellite publications, providing everything from beauty tips to knitting patterns. The Pattern Books were, in their time, particularly popular; starting out as a coupon service offered to readers of the main magazine in 1905, they blossomed into standalone titles after World War I, offering patterns that ranged from simple sportswear separates and children swear to Parisian couture copies. They came complete with their own editorial and photographic teams — amongst them Fred Baker, a Nebraskan-born photographer who’d been under contract at Condé Nast since the Thirties. By the early Fifties, he’d branched out with three other staffers (Constantin Joffé, Herbert Matter and Serge Balkin) to found a commercial photography firm, Studio Associates, based in the old House & Garden studios on 37th Street. But he continued to shoot biannual sewing and knitting editorials for editor Ruth Seder Cooke. In the spring of 1953, Baker and Cooke booked Mullen and Mary Jane Russell for that season’s Pattern Book shoot. The team flew to Havana, where they photographed sleek summer knits and lightweight poolside separates in the grounds of the Hotel Nacional, an elaborate Twenties cocktail of Renaissance, Art Deco and Moorish styles perched on a hill overlooking the city’s harbour. In the most memorable image from the shoot, which appeared in Vogue itself that June, Baker posed the two models leaning against the swirling architecture of the hotel’s wraparound terrace. Wearing a simple, polka-dotted shift, Russell faces Baker’s camera with a steady gaze. But Mullen, with the wind ruffling her hair and her slim linen sheath adrift in clouds of DuPont nylon, seems lost in a dream.#BarbaraMullen #TheReplacementGirl #Unbound #DuPont #Vogue #FredBaker #1953 -- source link