Eleven Fine Art and the Norman Parkinson Archive are pleased to announce an exhibition celebrating Norman Parkinson’s influential contributions to fashion photography specifically through his work for Vogue. The exhibition has been organised to coincide with the National Portrait Gallery’s Vogue 100: A Century in Style (11th February to 22nd May 2016) where a number of Norman Parkinson’s works will be shown.

In a career that spanned over five decades, Norman Parkinson photographed for Vogue for most of this time. He worked consistently for British Vogue from 1941 to 1960, and after a stint at Queen, returned again in 1965 working with British Vogue through 1975. His long association with Vogue brought him worldwide recognition and he is now considered one of the twentieth century’s foremost fashion photographers.

Parkinson was instrumental in taking fashion photography beyond the stiff formality of his predecessors and injecting an easy and casual elegance into his images. His impulsive and unstructured style changed forever the static, posed approach to fashion photography.

Norman Parkinson dazzled the world with his sparkling inventiveness as a fashion photographer and his work provides a comprehensive and unique record of the development of fashion design, photography and modelling from the 1940’s to 1990.

Elegance in Vogue will present a carefully curated selection of previously unseen vintage work along with posthumous prints all of which document the transformation of fashion during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. From the luxurious silk and satin couture dresses of the 1950 Paris Collections to the sleek and sophisticated styles of the late 1960s, followed by the 1970s hippie look which radically transformed into a more geometric stylized fashion by the end of the decade, Elegance in Vogue will reveal glimpses into these moments in time.

This is the second time the Norman Parkinson Archive and Eleven have joined forces, the first was the exhibition Norman Parkinson and Philip Treacy at Eleven in 2007. For over the past ten years Eleven has fostered the careers of our gallery artists including Harry Cory Wright, Jonathan Yeo, and Natasha Law. Since its conception, Eleven has been committed to exhibiting the best of international contemporary art by both established and emerging artists.