[The Guardian] The big picture: brimming with attitude in 1950s Paris

The big picture: brimming with attitude in 1950s Paris

The Vogue photographer Regina Relang captures haute couture at its most playful in this French cafe

“Cock your hat,” Frank Sinatra once observed, “angles are attitudes.” The two women in Regina Relang’s picture from the mid-50s have taken that advice to heart. Relang, a German photographer whose work was a fixture in Vogue and many other magazines for several decades, has constructed her picture like a scene from Desmond Morris’s The Human Zoo. The cafe, the coffee, the intimacy of the window seat speak of friendship and ease, but the beaky hat brims, the spiky eye makeup and the fall of light and shade suggest edgier, pecking-order forces of status and competition at play.

That edge is dramatised by a singular fact: one woman has a rope of pearls, and a swan neck on which to drape them, and the other doesn’t. She holds her beads across the dividing line of a window frame and Cinzano ashtray in the white-gloved hand of a curator showing off the priceless goods: look but don’t touch. The open mouth and downcast eyes of her friend seem to suggest a mix of disdain or envy or desire; in this, she shares common ground with the magazine’s imagined reader and the animating impulse of all fashion images: I want what she’s got.

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