Fashion fans rejoice: just a few days separate us from the Year of Fashion. The International Center of Photography officially gave this title to 2009 soon after the New York Fashion Week shows were over and the center is now ready to kick off the celebrations with four amazing fashion photography exhibitions starting on 16th January.
The first one celebrates the art of photographer and painter Edward Steichen through 175 fashion and celebrity portraits he took for Vogue and Vanity Fair. 
Though some of the images are well-known to fashion and photography experts, a selection of these prints has never been exhibited or published before. The exhibition will feature portraits of celebrities such as Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, while it will also explore the changes in the representation of the fashionable woman. Among the photographs exhibited there are particularly beautiful portraits such as the one taken in 1926 that features model Marion Morehouse posing next to actress Helen Lyons in a long sleeve dress by Kargère and slightly disturbing masks by the illustrator W.T. Benda.
Who loves contemporary photography should instead opt for “Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now”. This event focuses on the most innovative fashion photography and explores the influence of art, sexuality, youth cultures, digital media and graphic design on fashion through work published on various magazines, from 10 to Pop, from Vogue to Numéro, just to mention a few, taken by famous photographers, such as Cindy Sherman and Nick Knight. 
While Steven Klein and Miles Aldridge’s work prompt the visitor to ponder about issues such as plastic surgery and fake beauty, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott’s “I’m a Marionette” photo shoot with its set of women-puppets mesmerises and disturbs.
The third exhibition in programme, “This is Not a Fashion Photograph”, questions the meaning of fashion photography by presenting around 70 images spanning from 1888 to the present taken from IPC’s permanent collection. All the images exhibited are not taken by traditional fashion photographers but by photojournalists, documentarians or art photographers and though they weren’t taken to explore themes such as style and fashion, they wouldn’t look out of their place in a fashion magazine. I particularly like Malick Sidibé’s “Nuit de Noel” as I love the way this photographer seems to have grasped the style and teachings of Seydou Keita, one of the great portrait photographers of the twentieth century.
The last exhibition kicking off in January is probably the most important as it rediscovers the lost archive of Hungarian Martin Munkacsi (1896–1963) through a selection of images drawn from over 4,000 glass negatives. Munkacsi was a writer who started in the mid-‘20s to take pictures of sport events and later on opened a portrait studio. Soon he began taking travel and lifestyle pictures too and, after he emigrated to the United States, he created groundbreaking fashion images for Harper’s Bazaar. Munkacsi had a truly unique style and the rediscovery of his long-lost negative archive helps to clarify his working methods and uncover the secrets behind his most famous images.
Further events on fashion and photography will be launched in May and will explore the world of Richard Avedon and David Seidner. Avedon’s exhibition will focus on 200 photographs taken between 1944 and 2000, during his long career at Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and The New Yorker. The event dedicated to Seidner will instead be unmissable for experts of French fashion as it will feature 15 photographs of the 1944 Parisian exhibition entitled Théâtre de la Mode (I focused on it in a previous post) that presented the work of major fashion designers of the time such as Jeanne Lanvin, Elsa Schiaparelli and Pierre Balmain on small wire-frame dolls. The images were taken by Seidner in the early '90s when the dolls were rediscovered at the Maryhill Museum of Art and were returned to Paris.
The year-long celebrations will culminate in the Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, running from September 18, 2009 till January 3, 2010. It looks like fashion addicts will get a long fix of their favourite drug next year.
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