3. George Hoyningen-Heune - Photography

GEORGE HOYNINGEN-HUENE (St. Petersburg 1900 – Los Angeles 1968)

Condé Nast launched Vogue France (“Frogue”) in 1920, after Vogue UK (“Brogue”) in 1916. Fashion photography in the 1920s perfectly reflected the new global balance: New York as the capital of global commerce, Paris as the undisputed center of haute couture. This situation was reinforced by Condé Nast’s strong Francophile orientation and his enthusiasm for presenting European style and art de vivre to wealthy American readers. For this reason, he began hiring many photographers from the Old Continent—among them George Hoyningen-Huene.

George Hoyningen-Huene was born in St. Petersburg, “the most aristocratic city in the world.” His father, Baron Barthold Theodor Hermann von Hoyningen-Huene (1859–1942), was a Baltic German nobleman, chief equerry to Tsar Nicholas II and owner of the Navesti estate in central Estonia. His mother was American: Anne “Nan” Lothrop (1860–1927), daughter of George Van Ness Lothrop, a Michigan politician appointed in 1885 as U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to the Russian court of Alexander III.

The family home in St. Petersburg was located within the imperial stables, a series of neo-Gothic buildings resembling a medieval stone castle, designed so the Tsar’s prized horses could live like royalty. Huene’s early years at the Tsar’s court were marked by opulence, privilege, political intrigue, and high drama. This was a time of lavish banquets and society balls, where men in fashionable military uniforms and women in flowing gowns—among them his mother and sisters—glided from one ballroom to another.

Hoyningen-Huene absorbed and was deeply inspired by the beauty and refinement of the pre-revolutionary period, influences that would later shape both his personal style and his photographic work. His education was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I and Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution. Europe had entered a period of profound political upheaval.

George fled with his mother, traveling through Finland to Sweden, then Norway, crossing by sea to England, where he enlisted in the British Army as an interpreter and served in southern Russia against the central communist forces. Everything the family owned in Russia was lost.

Eventually, he moved to Paris in 1925. Like many Russian refugees from the former elite classes, the Huene siblings had not been prepared for a specific profession; working had now become a necessity. For his elegant sisters, Helen and Betty, employment in Parisian fashion seemed the most obvious choice. Helen found work as a seamstress, while Betty founded the fashion house Yteb.

In the early 1920s, many other fashion houses run by Russian women emerged in Paris, including TAO, founded by Princess Maria Sergeevna; IRFÉ, co-founded by Princess Irina Romanova; and Paul Caret, founded by Lady Olga Nikolayevna Egerton.

After a modest beginning in a small Left Bank apartment, Yteb (the reversed and abbreviated form of “Betty”) moved in 1922 to larger premises at 14 rue Royale. Betty’s second husband, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Norman Buzzard of the British Army, became its commercial director. For a period, Huene lived in the fashion house’s attic, earning room and board by designing garments.

The house became known for creations and embroidery inspired by traditional Russian style, later shifting in 1925 to cleaner Art Deco lines, embellished with simple geometric motifs or curled ostrich feathers.

Huene designed a striking cubist-inspired logo for the maison and helped create several garments. The quality of his drawings brought him further work as a fashion illustrator and commissions from magazines including Vogue, Le Jardin des Modes, and Harper’s Bazaar. He also began designing photographic backdrops for fashion shoots in Vogue’s Paris studio and, in 1926, was personally commissioned to take the photographs.

In Paris, he became part of the close circle of Man Ray, the famous Surrealist photographer, who taught him the basics of photography. In 1924 they collaborated on a portfolio of the most beautiful women in Paris. At the time, Paris was a hive of artistic expression—a crucible where writers, innovators, and artists cross-pollinated new ideas.

Huene’s circle included Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, Coco Chanel, as well as Picasso, the Surrealists, Paul Éluard, and Jean Cocteau.

Huene began gaining recognition as a respected fashion illustrator. His art teacher was the French Cubist painter André Lhote. Unexpectedly, the editors of Vogue Paris asked Huene to replace an indisposed photographer to avoid losing an entire set already prepared—pure chance. His rise to the position of chief photographer for Vogue Paris was rapid. Although his early work often imitated Steichen or de Meyer, he soon developed his own style.

His refined eye for elegance, his aristocratic background, and his ease within high society allowed him to connect with some of the most beautiful women of the era, many of whom became his models. He photographed Lisa Fonssagrives, the world’s first supermodel, who later married Irving Penn.

Vogue France’s editor was the American Main Bocher, who later became the fashion designer Mainbocher, famous for the corset photographed by Horst. The fashion editor was Edna Chase, who directed the magazine from Manhattan while traveling regularly to Europe. In 1928, she became editor-in-chief of the American, British, and French editions of Vogue.

Huene met the German Horst Paul Bohrmann, later known as Horst P. Horst, in Paris while Horst was working in Le Corbusier’s studio in the late 1920s. Horst became Huene’s lover and model. They bonded over a shared passion for ancient Greece, visiting classical masterpieces at the Louvre. This fascination with antiquity is evident in Huene’s photographs of Horst: muscular, fair-haired, described by Alexander Liberman of Vogue as “extraordinarily handsome—a classical Teutonic beauty.”

Huene arranged for Horst to move into an apartment adjacent to his own. Seeking refuge from city life, the two later built a vacation house in Hammamet, on the Tunisian coast. During this same period, the dominant figures in fashion were Coco Chanel, with her geometric minimalism in black and white, and Elsa Schiaparelli, extravagant and close to Surrealism.

Huene was an architect of the photographic image. The model was no longer placed at the center of the composition. He cultivated abstract places of pure beauty, which he also sought in classical Greek architecture, photographing the Parthenon.

Hoyningen-Huene was both enchanted and inspired by the light, poetic beauty of Greece and its classical architecture—an enduring theme throughout his career.