Horst P. Horst and the Story of the Mainbocher Corset
- julia_mji@me.com
- Jul 15
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 13
How did the German-born fashion photographer Horst P. Horst capture the anxiety and sorrow he felt as he fled France for the United States just before the outbreak of World War II?
In this starkly lit black-and-white photograph, we see a model from behind. She wears a corset laced up the back, with the tightening ribbons pooling and dripping off the edge of the balustrade against which she is perched. We see only the model’s torso, her bowed head, and her outstretched upper arms, folded inward at the elbows. The model’s face is mostly hidden; we see her ear and the shiny waves of her coiffed hair. Her corseted torso forms a C-shaped curve, contrasting sharply with the right side of her nipped-in waist and the curve of her right hip.
The Mainbocher Corset, featured in this photograph, was made by corset maker Detolle for the American couturier. It marked the end of the loose-fitting, straight silhouettes of the Jazz Age, favoring a slim waist, fuller bust, and controlled hourglass figure.
The Velasquez Silhouette
This shift in fashion to a familiar ideal shape for women from a bygone era was called the “Velasquez silhouette” in the Vogue article that accompanied Horst’s image. This term references Diego Velázquez’s well-known 17th-century painting Rokeby Venus. In 1914, Mary Richardson, a British subject advocating for women’s right to vote, slashed this painting of what many considered an extraordinarily beautiful woman. She did this to protest the arrest of suffragette Emily Pankhurst. The painting was carefully restored, but Richardson’s attack underscores the strong emotions this image could still trigger almost 300 years later.
While Horst omitted the mirror in his photograph, we see the echoes of the Rokeby Venus in the Mainbocher Corset—in the position of the right arm, the narrow waist above a curved hip, and the near concealment of the model’s face that no mirror reveals.
The Allure of Imperfection
While the published versions of the photo were retouched to make the model’s waist even more slender and to remove the gap made at the top left edge of the corset, the photographer explained that he preferred the photo with the visible gap between the corset and the model’s body, finding it more alluring.
In Horst’s sketches to work out the composition, he included a vase with a rose. This alludes to historical images of Venus and links the model’s torso to a still-life object. The final version of the studio image omits this element to keep the viewer’s focus on the curving torso, positioned to the right of the center of the frame. This is balanced by the dangling ribbons on the model’s left, another reference to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, recalling the ribbons spilling out of Cupid’s hand and over the mirror he holds. Perhaps leaving these unfurled ribbons also signals the unraveling Horst felt in leaving Paris.
Lasting Influence of the Photograph
The photograph has an elegance, along with a feeling of stillness and melancholy that continued to influence fashion photography for decades after it was taken. It even inspired pop-star Madonna to appropriate its composition at the end of her music video for the song Vogue, released in 1990.
Influences and the Making of Mainbocher Corset
Horst P. Horst was born in Germany in 1906 as Horst Bohrman. As a teenager, he studied carpentry and set design at the Hamburg School of Arts and Crafts. He befriended Eva Weidemann, a dancer ten years his senior, who worked with Lothar Schreyer at the Weimar Bauhaus. Schreyer was an early Weimar Bauhaus instructor and the first Master of the Theater department, heavily steeped in the mysticism common at the time. Weidemann introduced Horst to the Bauhaus teachings, although she was not a student there herself.
Horst claimed the Bauhaus influenced his aesthetic. We can see this in the asymmetrical framing, dramatic lighting, and the spare setting that focuses on a singular object. However, Erich Consemüller’s 1926 photograph of a seated woman contrasts with Horst’s 1939 image. In Consemüller’s photograph, the masked model is comfortably supported by the tense fabric bands of her chair. In contrast, Horst’s model is constricted by fabric in tension and is not comfortably seated.
Perhaps even more striking is the influence of German Neoclassicism from the 1920s and 1930s. This movement admired beautifully sculptural human bodies, as seen in the work of Leni Riefenstahl from the 1936 Munich Olympics, which reflected Nazi aesthetics.
Horst moved to Paris in 1930 to apprentice under modernist architect Le Corbusier. Soon, he met Vogue photographer and Baltic Baron George Hoyningen-Heune. Hoyningen-Heune introduced him to Paris’s fashionable world and his own photographic work, becoming both Horst’s mentor and partner. Through this connection, Horst began as a studio fashion photographer for Paris Vogue in 1931.
Horst made Mainbocher Corset, which would become his most well-known photograph, just before leaving Paris for New York on August 15, 1939. He recalled 45 years later:
It was the last photograph I took in Paris before the war. I left the studio at 4:00 AM, went back to the house, picked up my bags, and caught the 7:00 AM train to La Havre to board the Normandie. We all felt that war was coming. Too much armament, too much talk. And you knew that whatever happened, life would be completely different after…. This photograph is peculiar—for me, it is the essence of that moment. While I was taking it, I was thinking of all that I was leaving behind.
Two weeks later, the Second World War began when Hitler invaded Poland. Horst’s photograph was published in American Vogue on September 15, 1939. The Mainbocher Corset—and the American couturier’s return to a slim waist, fuller bust, controlled hourglass figure ideal—had been intended to appear in the October issue of French Vogue. However, the magazine did not publish issues in either October or November due to uncertainty at the outset of World War II. Therefore, the photo was not published until December. An anonymous editorial in the December 1939 French Vogue lamented the passing frivolities of fashions produced the previous August. It asserted that the fashion industry was too important to France and its working economy to simply shut down due to the war. The designed pages of the ready-to-print but now outmoded October issue were included in the December French Vogue, but at such reduced size that Horst’s Mainbocher Corset image was robbed of its considerable aesthetic power. By the time the photograph was published, both the photographer and the corset’s couturier had relocated from Paris to the United States, far from both the center of fashion and the European theater of war.
From Vogue to Vogueing
What is it about this photograph that continues to speak to us today? The stark lighting and dramatic contrast draw our attention to the model’s bowed head and hidden face, a posture that expresses fear or sorrow. The corset was being relaunched as a fashion accessory for the 1939 fall collections in Paris. This can be read as the tragic trapping of a woman in an uncomfortable and fetishized garment that she cannot even put on or remove by herself. The tangled, falling ribbons streaming from the back of the confining contraption add a chaotic element that belies the straitlaced attempt at maintaining control. The model’s posture, along with the lack of visible lower limbs, adds to the sense that this is an image of entrapment and bound stasis, on the brink of collapse.
While the photograph conveys the timeless qualities of elegance that were so prized in Horst’s fashion work, the emotional impact he achieved rises above any simple product advertisement.
It is precisely this emotional impact that Madonna seized upon and reinvested for her own purpose in her music video for Vogue. In the Material Girl’s multiple layered appropriation, she not only appropriates Horst’s image but also the dance and aesthetics of New York Drag Ball culture, created by gay men of color in the 1980s. She dials down the melancholy, strikes the pose, and turns the entrapment into agency. This serves as a signifier for the only power women are afforded under patriarchy: sexual allure.
David Fincher, the video’s director, takes advantage of the moving image. He shows Madonna’s back, filmed in elegantly lit black and white, seated on a similar marble balustrade. Writhing in her corset near the culmination of the video, as she sings “let your body move to the music,” she lifts her arms while she wriggles. Unlike Horst’s model in the Mainbocher Corset, Fincher finally gives us a full profile view of Madonna’s face as she powerfully speaks the word “Vogue.”
Horst, in 1939, as Europe was on the brink of war, made a final image in Paris. This photograph journeys across oceans and time to fifty years later, transforming a magazine title into a concept and a verb.
Horst P. Horst and the story of the Mainbocher Corset
Written by Dr. Gretchen Gasterland-Gustafsson
Article source: https://smarthistory.org/horst-corset/
Horst P. Horst's work is owned and managed by the Horst Estate and various galleries representing his work.
Horst Estate: https://horstphorst.com
The Horst Foundation: https://thehorstfoundation.com
JM Art Management
