Pop Goes Bazaar

As Americans fixated on modern art and the space race, Harper’s Bazaar editor Nancy White pushed fashion to its outer limits.

- Stephen Mooallem

ON APRIL 9, 1959, NASA announced the start of Project Mercury, a program whose goal was to send the first astronauts into orbit. It was the latest volley in the Cold War–era space race, as the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed to conquer outer space. Harper’s Bazaar soon got in on the action too.

For a fashion story in the February 1960 issue, Richard Avedon traveled to the NASA space center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where he photographed the model Dovima in a series of conspicuously modish looks with geometric shapes. At one point during the shoot, Dovima posed in front of a launch pad rigged with an SM-65 Atlas, which was not actually a spacecraft but the first intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. There was still a month to go in the 1950s, but the 1960s had already arrived.

Nancy White, a longtime fashion editor at Hearst’s Good Housekeeping, had succeeded Carmel Snow as the editor of Bazaar two years earlier. White was the daughter of Hearst executive Tom White—and Snow’s niece—and her appointment was intended to help ease the transition as Snow, whose physical health had begun to decline as her drinking increased, moved to an emeritus role at the magazine. 

White wasn’t a grande dame like her aunt or an unbr idled romantic like Diana Vreeland. But she was a shrewd editor—and in her own understated way, a fiercely progressive one at that. Though Vreeland, Snow’s top deputy, had been passed over for the job, she elected to stay on; Alexey Brodovitch, who rarely came into the office anymore, resigned as art director in 1958, and Snow herself retired the same year. For Bazaar, Avedon’s Cape Canaveral story represented the dawn of a new day—and a period of radical change for both women and fashion.