Throughout Gordon Parks’s work, fashion played an extraordinary role, shaping both his career and the broader landscape of American fashion imagery. From his early years in Minneapolis and Chicago, photographing department store fashions and studio portraits of stylish African American women, to his work in fashion capitals such as New York and Paris, where he captured the latest international designs for the pages of Life, Glamour, Sports Illustrated, and Vogue, fashion photography provides an essential lens through which to understand Parks’s legacy. It was at Vogue’s Condé Nast offices where Parks gained entry to the international world of fashion photography, and where he later returned to at the height of his career.

In the late 1930s, Parks was living in Minneapolis and frequently riding train cars between cities to keep warm. It was on those trips that he first encountered magazines such as Vogue, Life, and Look. He later wrote, “Vogue was one of the magazines well-to-do passengers left on the train. I studied the fashion photographs in it with fierce concentration. I went to every large department store in the Twin Cities asking for a chance to photograph their merchandise, without success. But I kept trying.” By 1939, he was creating studio portraits for the society columns of local newspapers such as the St. Paul Recorder and by October of that year, he was hired to photograph new fashions for Frank Murphy’s Town and Country Department store in St. Paul. His lighting, he later recalled, was “inspired by the pictures I had so often studied in the pages of Vogue.”

Parks made his return to Vogue with “The Dramatic Shoe,” a story published in the August 15, 1960 issue. Under editor-in-chief Jessica Daves and the art direction of Alexander Liberman, this eight-page feature focused on innovative shoe designs, and marked the beginning of his more consistent work for the magazine. The article declared, “Not one of the new shoes is plain as an old shoe; all have excitement in one way or another, some in several ways at once.”  The same would be true of the images Parks created for Vogue in the five years that followed. Under Dave’s and Liberman’s direction, Parks shot several stories that featured celebrated designers such Capezio and Evins, and models such as Anne St. Marie.

In 1963, Diana Vreeland’s tenure as Vogue’s editor-in-chief in 1963 signaled a major transformation in the magazine’s visual and editorial style. Vreeland’s embrace of the bold and eccentric, international ideas and aesthetics, as well as youth as a style force, aligned well with Parks’s approach to fashion photography. Parks’s first major assignment under Vreeland and art director Priscilla Peck was “Seven Women with the Grace to Blush,” published in the February 1, 1963 issue. This was followed by more ambitious shoots, including the July 1, 1964 feature “The Day of the Reptile,” for which he and his then-wife, model Liz Campbell, traveled to Northern Kenya along with a “small but dauntless group” from Vogue. Parks also wrote an accompanying article detailing his experiences photographing in Africa, titled “Flight Over Africa: The upper skies, the great rivers, churning desert, and the famous animals.”