Harper’s Bazaar Gets the Museum Treatment in Paris

If you own a copy of the April 1965 edition of Harper’s Bazaar, put it in the safe.
It’s among artifacts on display at the new “Harper’s Bazaar — First in Fashion” exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and it’s a succinct time capsule of a truly groovy era, picturing members of The Beatles besides Jean Shrimpton along with Space Age fashions by Courrèges. Among the cover lines that year were “Beauty Blast-Off: Lunar Glow” and “Frug That Fat Away.”
Far more than an ode to print publishing, the showcase reveals how closely female dress is intertwined with the fine and decorative arts, popular culture and even literature, and how the lens of editors and art directors helped not only chronicle fashion, but shape it.
Olivier Gabet, director of the museum, said a conversation with Glenda Bailey, who is stepping down as editor in chief of American Harper’s Bazaar this month, about the blockbuster Dior retrospective in 2018 made him realize that it omitted an important third-party: Harper’s Bazaar and its then editor Carmel Snow, who championed Christian Dior and immediately grasped the significance of his first collection of pinch-waisted jackets and flaring skirts in 1947, which she dubbed The

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