Fashion Lights

Vogue cover illustration by Georges Lepape, March 1927This morning I turned the page on my Vogue calendar to this picture and immediately thought, ‘Oooooh, this looks just like my photos of Flinders Lane on White Night!’ Except that, ahem, this is an illustration.

For the Spring Shopping Number of March 1927, Georges Lepape – one of my favourite fashion illustrators of the era – paints a woman walking down an electrified city street. But what are those bubbles of light floating around? Lanterns, balloons … urban fairy lights? The woman is wearing a classic cloche in one of my favourite shades of blue, periwinkle.

I took the photo below last Saturday night in the streets of Melbourne during the White Night Festival. My friend and I stumbled out of Hosier Lane into Flinders Lane, and into an intersection alive with myriad circles of light, created by lights concentrated on a set of mirror balls suspended high above the laneway. It was utterly entrancing.

Fashion Lights :: Doris // Sussex // No flash World-renowned lighting designer, Philip Lethlean, created the installation and this section was called Rags to Riches (so called because this precinct of Melbourne was the centre of the rag trade in the mid twentieth century). So similar is the electrified streetscape to Lepape’s drawing, I feel it behoves me to create a fashionable homage to his work using some of my photos as a backdrop. 

Oh, and happy first of autumn, by the way (or spring, as the case may be)!