#LOFFICIEL100: La Parisienne According to Madame D'Ora
As L’OFFICIEL approaches its centennial anniversary this fall, we celebrate the most influential names from the history of the magazine, and the world of fashion itself. Delve into the legacy of this groundbreaking photographer, who brought an uncompromising female gaze to a male-dominated field.
Though considered a visual medium to contemporary eyes, the fashion magazine was not always inextricably linked with photography. The early days of L’OFFICIEL were marked mostly by words, as flowery prose described collections alongside technical fashion illustrations, and lengthy sentences full of legal jargon debated industry news and events. It would take several years into the first century of L’OFFICIEL for the publication to develop a visual language of its own: a development that is partially thanks to Dora Kallmus—better known as Madame d’Ora.
Much in the way that the fashion magazine began as something technical, so did the medium of fashion photography itself. The early photograph was stiff, sober; it was originally meant to capture the mere likeness of its subject, with little in the way of creative expression. However, as the artistic scene flourished in the early 1900s, cultured creators like d’Ora brought about new approaches to the practice that invited aesthetics to the magazine page. While fashion drawings served their purpose for an industry-focused publication, the iconic female photo director would help transform L’OFFICIEL into a visual magazine for a mass audience thirsty for the fantasy of couture.
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1881, Kallmus would adopt the professional moniker Madame d’Ora for the entirety of her 50-year career. Her interest in photography was first sparked when she worked as an assistant to the son of the Austrian painter Hans Makart. Over time, d’Ora’s talent behind the camera proved exceptional, and in 1905 she became the first woman to be accepted into the Association of Austrian Photographers. After a brief apprenticeship in Berlin, she returned to Vienna in 1907 and, with the financial support of her family, opened her first studio, Atelier d’Ora. As women were denied training in photography at the time, her assistant and collaborator Arthur Benda focused on the technical aspects. Meanwhile, d’Ora set out to accrue clients and define her personal visual style. Thanks to her affluent upbringing, d’Ora was at ease with members of the aristocracy and of the burgeoning art world of the 1920s and ’30s. Her informal style and charming attitude helped capture the individual personalities of her subjects.
Not long after opening her commercial studio in Paris in 1925, d’Ora began a long-term contract with L’OFFICIEL and soon became its predominant purveyor of fashion photographs, lensing garments and accessories from Chanel, Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, Jean Patou, Jeanne Lanvin, and more. She counted many of the designers and artists as personal friends. Early in her career, she befriended Madame Agnes, a French milliner and sculptor whose hats were popular from the late 1920s through the ’40s. This relationship was significant to the trajectory of d’Ora’s career, as hats were the most important fashion accessory for women at the time. Beyond fashion photographs created for the magazine, she would also capture many of the cultural and artistic icons of the era, including Colette, Gustav Klimt, Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, and many others, often photographing them in couture. In collaboration with d’Ora, L’OFFICIEL began to employ a powerful visual language, and created shapes that reflected the modern art of the day. This partnership laid the foundation that would transform L’OFFICIEL from a trade publication into a fashion, art, and lifestyle magazine that influenced women’s culture.
The editorial staff and contributors of L’OFFICIEL were mostly men when d’Ora signed on. While the publication targeted a majority-female audience thanks to its focus on women’s couture, during the interwar period, L’OFFICIEL lacked distinct female voices and perspectives. Through her lens, d’Ora introduced a female sensibility that captured la Parisienne in a way that was familiar to female readers. She presented her sitters as active subjects, engaging with the camera, and ensured their personalities emanated from their images. Through her work with L’OFFICIEL, d’Ora allowed women to see themselves on the magazine page as participants in a story, rather than passive objects with little more purpose than to be elegantly dressed for the pleasure of men.
In the late 1930s, d’Ora’s name began to disappear from L’OFFICIEL. With Europe on the brink of war, she sold her studio and fled Paris in 1940. She had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1919, but her Jewish heritage forced her to escape to a small town in Vichy, where she hid in a cloister for the remainder of the war. Post-war, d’Ora never returned to fashion photography. Upon her arrival back in Paris, she began a photo project commissioned by the United Nations, in which she photographed survivors of the concentration camps and German women displaced from their homes. Her final project was a series of photographs taken in various slaughterhouses across Paris. In these later years, her photographs took a dark turn, reflecting a life marred by the loss of most of her family, including her sister Anna, during the Holocaust. She died in 1963 at her family’s home in Frohnleiten, Austria.
Over the course of her remarkable five-decade career, d’Ora would produce approximately 200,000 photos. Today, all fashion magazines owe her a great debt for her fearless, brilliant chronicling of both the alluring, glamorous side of the culture, as well as its darkness.
