Fashion

The Fashionable Side of Weegee

Now, more than 125 Weegee prints are now on exhibit at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York, arranged under such rubrics as “Song and Dance,” “Parties,” and “Crime and Disaster.”
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Ann Sheridan, c. 1947 This Hollywood star, like so many glamorous women of a certain time and place, is sporting a lush mink coat—an item of a once immutable symbol that a woman had arrived. Though still popular, this garment no longer exudes a special power.Photo: Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
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Photo: Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
Ann Sheridan, c. 1947 This Hollywood star, like so many glamorous women of a certain time and place, is sporting a lush mink coat—an item of a once immutable symbol that a woman had arrived. Though still popular, this garment no longer exudes a special power.

Weegee, the renowned photojournalist and chronicler of gritty street- and nightlife, acquired his pseudonym (he was born Usher Fellig) as a result of the supernatural prescience he seemed to employ ferreting out newsworthy events, Ouija-board-like, before they even happened.

From the late 1920s until his death in 1968, he photographed everyone from flophouse denizens to opera lovers, crime victims and their perpetrators. Now, more than 125 of his prints are on exhibit at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York, arranged under such rubrics as “Song and Dance,” “Spectacle,” and “Crime and Disaster.”

There is no section specifically for fashion, but that doesn’t mean that these wonderful pictures don’t offer, if often unwittingly, an accidental record of the styles sported by the impecunious artists and glamour girls, renegades and bohemians, that were his frequent subjects. Sometimes this information, always rich, is inadvertent and incidental; other times the subjects have quite consciously adopted ensembles that capture and further their unique characters and personalities.

Here, Vogue.com’s brief tour of Weegee’s works, with an eye to their stylish implications, in the slideshow above.

“Weegee: Naked City” opens today at Steven Kasher Gallery and is on view through February 25; 521 West Twenty-third Street, NYC; stevenkasher.com