Marie Claire Celebrates the Female Gaze
WOMEN BEHIND THE LENS: French monthly magazine Marie Claire is putting the spotlight on six female photographers with an exhibition during Paris Fashion Week.
“Aux Yeux des Femmes” (“Through Women’s Eyes”) will feature the fashion images of Sarah Moon, Betina du Toit, Françoise Huguier, Sacha van Dorssen, Marianne Chemetov and Elina Kechicheva, who have all worked with the magazine.
The exhibition at Paris City Hall is part of the “La Mode Aime Paris” program organized by the city. It will feature photographs from 1960 to present day, and will run from Sept. 17 to Oct. 6.
The retrospective will track the evolution of how women are represented within the pages of Marie Claire and celebrate its female talents.
“Each of the models I worked with were a side of the woman I wanted to portray — a woman who manages to break free from convention,” Moon said.
Huguier, known for her photojournalism, remembers one of her fashion shoots for Marie Claire for which she traveled to Kolkata, India. “I chose to frame the narrative like a ‘roman photo,'” she said, in reference to the European tradition of photo-novels.
Her photo “Le retour de l’enterrement” (“Coming Back From the Funeral”) is one of the striking images featured in the exhibition. “The woman is presented as equal to man. She cultivates a taste for provocation, wearing a yellow sweater,” she said.
Olivier Gabet, museums director at Les Arts Décoratifs and curator of “Aux Yeux des Femmes,” said the exhibition casts a new light on the fashion publication’s history, underlining the fact that its fashion stories celebrate a “serene, sensual and benevolent” representation of women.
Marie-Claire, founded in 1937, was a major platform for women’s voices in France in the Seventies. In 1976, the magazine introduced a dedicated women’s section, run by a team of female journalists, which covered the emergence of the feminist movement in France in the wake of May 1968.
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