VOLUME 16 - The Old World, Living New

In 1923, an American woman in Paris had an idea: photograph the new rooms appearing around her and send them back to America. Her name was Thérèse Bonney. She had recently become one of the first American women to receive a doctorate from the Sorbonne, counted Raoul Dufy and Madeleine Vionnet among her friends, and was apparently more interested in what was happening around her than in pursuing academic life. What was happening was modernism.

Bonney photographed the interiors of Jean-Michel Frank, Pierre Chareau, Georges Djo-Bourgeois, Sarah Lipska and others as they dismantled the conventions of domestic life. Out went the ornament and heavy furniture. In came empty space, strange materials, new objects. A new way of living appeared. A century later, these rooms still look remarkably radical.

Study Volume 16 returns to Bonney's archive to look at Europe in the 1920s through its interiors and at a largely forgotten woman who understood very early that a room could tell you almost everything about the person living in it. Running through the portfolio is Gertrude Stein's “Rooms.”

As a counterpoint to the highly composed interiors of Thérèse Bonney, photographer Bruno Staub and fashion editor Charlotte Collet went to a trailer park in the Paris suburbs with four teenagers. There is no grand narrative, they hang around, talk, wait, get bored. The clothes are similarly unforced and worn without much thought about being fashionable. 

For our brand special insert, Angela Hill meets Bottega Veneta. In London, Hill photographed Los Angeles skater Georgia Martin wearing pieces from Louise Trotter's Bottega Veneta collection mixed with school uniforms and everyday clothes. No hair. No makeup. No retouching. Soon, it becomes difficult to tell where Bottega ends and Georgia's own wardrobe begins. And that's the idea. A runway collection removed from the runway and absorbed into someone's life. What belongs to whom hardly matters anymore as fashion becomes clothing and clothing becomes style.

Contributors : Thérèse Bonney, Charlotte Collet, Angela Hill, Bruno Staub, Gertrude Stein, Hisato Tasaka

Design : Rupert Smyth Studio

Content : 178 pages of color and black and white photographs, protective packaging

Dimensions 21cm x 29.7cm

Price : 35 Euros