When the National Portrait Gallery, London, reopened in June 2023 following a three-year redevelopment closure, its first exhibition ‘Yevonde: Life and Colour’ centered on British photographer Yevonde Middleton [1893-1975]. The art event, which focused on the sixty-year career of a paradigm-breaking woman photographer, was sponsored by The CHANEL Culture Fund.

With the release of its new 2024 Leathergoods Campaign, Miu Miu [IG] is also inspired by the British photographer Yevonde Middleton.

An ode to color, to femininity, to fashion and to feminism, Miu Miu celebrates its signature matelassé in images by photographer legend Steven Meisel with art direction by Edward Quarmby. Starring Gigi Hadid as a modern reflection of the Miu Miu persona styled by Lotta Volkova, the images focus on the Wander and Arcadie bags. / Makeup by Pat McGrath; hair by Guido Palau

This campaign extols Yevonde’s hallmark fractured colortones, in instinctive and joyful contrasts – an idea reinforced with the new colorways of the Arcadie and Wander, where classic Caramel and Cognac hues are joined with bright orange and soleil.

The contemplative poise of each image - fallen petals, a carefully-gestured hand, bags hugged, cradled, held - evokes the bygone age captured in Yevonde’s quietly vivacious portraits. Yet Meisel’s images are injected with the bold but non-frivolous attitudes of today — traits held dear by the Miu Miu woman.

Gigi Hadid is a perfect half fashion model and half cultural figure to represent the history of this extraordinary artistic talent.

Miu Miu nodded to Yevonde’s hallmark aesthetic with Meisel imaging Hadid with “saturated hues set against porcelain-delicate dégradé pastels, yet with the spontaneous spirit of now.”

A feminist and suffragette, Yevonde’s career emblematizes freedom and independence - opening her own studio aged just 21 at a time when professions for women were limited, if permitted at all. She signed her work using only her first name, asserting both her personal authorship and identity as a woman.

“Yevonde’s work of the 1930s is ground-breaking for its use of delicately nuanced and considered color, creating surreally perfect arrangements of models and high society elites within utopian scopes of unreal props, drapery and foliage.”

Women were frightfully bored and tired of the pale, soft prints used in their portraits. They rejected more artificial roses and Empire furniture. Men had no desire to solve women’s disdain for these mothballs-worthy portraits.

With the introduction of Vivex — a technically demanding process for colouring photographs – around 1930, that Yevonde’s ship arrived in British harbor. Despite strong resistance to colour photography from within the profession and potential clients — or their husbands — “I started experimenting madly”, she remembered in her autobiography, “oblivious of the fact that people did not want such things.”

AOC wishes to be very specific about Yevonde’s artistry and accomplishments:

In 1921, she became the first woman to lecture at the Professional Photographer’s Association.
She was the first person in Britain to exhibit colour portraits.
Over her 60-year career, around 10,000 sitters were photographed by Yevonde.
She also ran a successful commercial photography business until the year before her death, shortly before her 83rd birthday.
Yevonde loved stories of ancient goddesses and her most famous project – the Goddesses Series of 1935 – was inspired by a charity ball.