Guy Bourdin got liftoff like so many photographers before him—he was given a chance at Vogue. In 1955, an editor hired him to shoot hats by the renowned French milliner Claude Saint-Cyr. Bourdin did so shockingly: the backdrop he chose was a butcher shop, carcasses hanging, in Les Halles. The gamble paid off. When the photographs were published, the calves’ heads were cropped out of the frames, but the 26-year-old had Vogue’s approval.
By the mid-1960s, Bourdin’s cheeky, racy style was a fixture at the magazine. In March 1966, when he shot a pair of Charles Jourdan kitten heels for Pierre Cardin—a close-up of long, spindly legs in red tights—the image landed on the cover. A year later, Bourdin photographed eight Charles Jourdan heels by Karl Lagerfeld stacked on the arms of a naked model. “He never takes the same photo twice, he surpasses himself,” Vogue stated that year. “He doesn’t imitate himself: we imitate him.”
