WEST PALM BEACH, FL.- The Norton Museum of Art announces the opening of the exhibition, Coming into Fashion: A Century of Photography at Condé Nast. Essentially a hip, visual history of the evolution of fashion photography, the exhibition runs through Sunday, Feb. 15, 2015. The Norton is the first (and at this time) only venue in the U.S. where the public can see what Norton curator of photography Tim B. Wride describes as, “this visually stunning and historically important show.”

Originating in Europe, culled from the Condé Nast archives, and organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis/ Paris/ Lausanne, Coming into Fashion includes 150 stellar images created by 80 of the world’s most renowned fashion photographers during a period of nearly 100 years. Most of these images appeared in the popular magazines, Vogue, Glamour, Vanity Fair, and W. 

The exhibition features a selection of the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer, widely considered the first fashion photographer. In 1913, Condé Nast hired him in New York as a full-time photographer for Vogue, then Vanity Fair. Illustrating how fashion photography has evolved since de Meyer’s days, both in terms of subject matter and technique, the exhibition presents the work of Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, William Klein, Helmut Newton, Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, and Miles Aldridge, among others. Also included in the exhibition is vintage behind-the-scenes footage of runway preparations and presentations as well as contemporary video pieces that hint at how and where the fashions of the future will be viewed.

“Coming into Fashion is an exhibition that simultaneously charts the history of photography over the period as well as the history of fashion,” notes Wride, the Norton’s William and Sarah Ross Soter Curator of Photography, who is installing the show for its Norton run. “It is a revealing look at how photographic trends and cultural evolution came to the service of one another.”

Curator Nathalie Herschdorfer, who organized the exhibition, observes that, “The discovery of most of the biggest names in fashion photography can rightly be credited to the legendary Condé Nast. From his earliest days as a publisher, Nast was a gifted talent scout, and surrounded himself with the most talented artists of his time. Many photographers’ careers were launched on the pages of his magazines.”

One of the fascinating aspects of the show is the dexterity and creativity that photographers have shown as they transformed the sculptural creations of fashion into a graphic vocabulary that was both appropriate and specific to the printed page. The way the Norton’s installation of the exhibition is designed makes this correlation readily apparent to visitors.