Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan

It is no controversy to say that Guy Bourdin is one of the most controversial photographers in the history of fashion, a pioneer and a true artist. Much of his fame stems from his 30-year collaboration with Vogue France began in 1955, when he was hired by editor-in-chief Edmonde Charles-Roux. In one of his first photos for the magazine, a model daintily holds the tips of her white chapeau, staring sweetly at the lens. Above her hang five severed calf’s heads, their lifeless tongues extended, curved hooks penetrating the tops of their heads. It is an arresting image, and it would not be Bourdin’s last. Before running the photo, Charles-Roux instructed the art director to crop out the decapitations, leaving only the model’s softly elegant gaze. Perhaps 1955 was too early for such explicit visualizations of sex and death.

Bourdin, proclaimed by highly respected Photo magazine as “the photographer of inventiveness, of the imagination,” is one of the most important and influential fashion photographers of the 20th century. His mastery of color (he began his career as a painter) is perhaps matched only by William Eggleston. His ability to craft a scenario, often surreal, sexy and subversive all at once, within a single frame, is peerless. Under the unyielding support of Francine Crescent, Charles-Roux’s successor, Bourdin flourished, making Vogue France the undisputed queen of fashion magazines in the 1970s, his technicolor editorial and advertisement fantasies hotly anticipated each month, by both supporters and detractors.

Bourdin’s work caught the eye of Roland Jourdan, the son of Charles Jourdan, who established a namesake French shoe brand in 1921. The brand’s success from the 1950s onward stemmed from its flexibility in sizing and colorways, and its positioning within the the haute couture establishment (both Christian Dior and Pierre Cardin were clients). Their understanding of good promotion in the press was also key, and they secured prominent positions within Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue France. Bourdin’s cover of Vogue France’s March 1966 issue featuring a red miniskirt, red tights and red Pierre Cardin shoes led Jourdan to hire Bourdin, sparking a twelve year collaboration (1967 – 1979), in which Bourdin served as de facto creative director for the brand.

The new book Guy Bourdin For Charles Jourdan, published by Rizzoli, captures this stellar collaboration with 150 color photographs that double as a good overview of Bourdin’s best work. All of Bourdin’s obsessions are there: the blood-soaked reds, glinting pops of sunlight, endless fields of verdant grass where models recline seemingly unaware of Bourdin’s voyeuristic lens, the luxurious but cold boudoirs where games of lesbian dominance and submission unfold, all with Charles Jourdan shoes, of course. The book is a shoe fetishist’s wet dream.

His campaigns from the late ’60s are exercises in perspective and proportion: a gigantic yellow shoe stands majestic in a hotel corridor among pairs of men’s black loafers, a model toys with a miniature red one, her red nails and lipstick in the exact hue. In the ’70s Bourdin dialed it up further. Hired to shoot the campaign for couture maison Patou, his double page advertisement of a red wedge on the left, and an unplugged outlet oozing with blood on the right, prompted the fashion label to immediately cancel his contract. Bourdin’s campaign from March 1975 in Jours de France of a pair of pink shoes haphazardly spilled on the sidewalk in front of a chalk outline of a woman’s body drew letters of outrage and disgust.

Not all of the photos are as macabre. His series of dislocated mannequin legs strutting through gardens and city-scapes in heels are surrealistically humorous. A pair of shoes seem to spontaneously ignite into sparks on a beach boardwalk. And, in a spectacular feat of color and composition, a model lies topless on sparkling green astroturf, her vermilion hair echoing the shape of an electric blue pond with three tiny goldfish, the lone black wedge beside her face barely present amid the riot of polychromy.

We have Roland Jourdan to thank for his willingness to trust Bourdin’s visual manifestations of renegade glamour. Even in moments of hesitation, Jourdan did not reject any of Bourdin’s proposals, understanding that risk taking must be employed in order to break new ground. And break new ground is precisely what Charles Jourdan’s campaigns achieved by bucking the formulaic template of the product as the center of the image. “We had to protect him because he was a true artist”, Jourdan said of Bourdin in 1995. “Today, I would not be able to work like I did with him.” Indeed. Guy Bourdin For Charles Jourdan stands as a document to a time when the restraints of commerce gave way for art to forge new territories, shattering boundaries and a few nerves in the process.

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Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan

216 pp, 8 ¼ x 11 ½ inches

150 color photographs

Hardcover $75.00 Rizzoli

All images courtesy of the publisher