Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan

A giant of modern fashion photography, Bourdin lent his surrealist eye to the shoes and fashions of Charles Jourdan. Creating compositions full of movement, color, and sensuality, this pioneering collaboration between designer and photographer still exerts a profound influence on modern fashion photography.

The late 1960s saw some of the most dynamic periods in French fashion. And the union between Bourdin and Jourdan captured the spirit of the moment unlike any other creative partnership of the era. Jourdan, a polymath who occupied the office of both couturier and shoe designer, tapped Bourdin, a true surrealist among the fashion photographers of the age, and engaged in a creative dialogue through to Jourdan’s passing in 1976.

Celebrated here are over 150 images, many never before published, full of the modernity and fetishism that made Jourdan’s designs so sought after, and Bourdin’s mise-en-scènes so provocative. To draw attention to the sweep of a woman’s feet and the gentle swell of her calves, the shod feet and lower leg of a mannequin are disembodied and transported to a variety of contexts, the central figures in compositions that are at once erotic, humorous, and often unsettling.

Provocative, fabulist, dramatic, and full of intense color and saturation theirs was as complete a collaboration as has ever been achieved in the history of postwar fashion. This book presents that work in its entirety for the very first time and provides insight into a true meeting of the minds between designer and photographer.

Patrick Remy is based in Paris and is the author and editor of numerous books on fashion and photography.