Provocateur extraordinaire Guy Bourdin (1928–1991) transformed the art of fashion photography with his landmark collaboration with shoe designer Charles Jourdan. From 1967–1979, he crafted a new vision of the newly liberated woman as a femme fatale with a disco twist that combined erotica, fetishism, and surrealism into hypnotic scenes of fantasy, danger, and desire.
Bourdin’s cinematic advertisements also elevated the shoe to starring role as enigmatic talisman of power, luxury, and allure, his photographs becoming an event unto themselves. Working exclusively in magazine format, Bourdin understood that the medium was the message. He staged scenes of drama, glamour, and pathos to rival an Alfred Hitchcock film or inspire neo-noir thrillers like 1978 cult classic, The Eyes of Laura Mars.
With the publication of Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan, author Patrick Remy revisits this chapter of photography history with the panache and aplomb of one whose lifelong love of these scintillating images tells a story all its own. During the summer of 1973, Remy, then 13 years old, spent the holidays in Veules‐les‐Roses in Normandy. There he spotted a photographer arriving by car, bringing models, makeup artist, hair stylist, and shoes… glorious shoes. The shoots went on for hours, to the young teen’s delight.
“I was fascinated by this ballet of bodies, these minimal stagings with the pebble beach, the blue sea and sky as a backdrop, and especially the boom, the wooden pier where we spent most of the summer hanging out and sometimes diving,” Remy writes in the book.
He returned to Paris, where he discovered Bourdin, the mastermind who commanded public space with the vision of a painter, and who once was an apprentice to Surrealist legend Man Ray. It is here the adventure begins.
Chic Mystique
It is also in Paris that Guy Bourdin met Charles Jourdan. And Bourdin kept it simple. He would not compromise. Instead, he maintained full control of not only the images for the campaigns, but their very placement on the pages of magazines.
Charles Jourdan proved the perfect collaborator for Bourdin, providing him with the space to transform the language of fashion advertising into fine art. The shoe is but a clue in a mystery untold, a call to something daring, taboo, or just plain naughty. It was an idea whose time had come amidst the feverish swirl of the sexual revolution born out of the 1967 Summer of Love.
For the campaigns, Bourdin hit the road, traveling to Great Britain, Normandy, New York, Los Angeles, and then across Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. The glittery shimmer of 1970s America and its seductive blend of sex and violence proved the perfect milieu for his radical photographs that had garnered a following of their own.
“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,” Gérard Tavenas, Director of Advertising, told The New Yorker in 1994.
Indeed, magazine readers could not help but come undone at Bourdin’s decadent transgressions that kept coming every month. Today, his images stand as an invitation into a new realm, where artists set the rules — and no one else.
Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan is published by Rizzoli and available for $75.
