Frères Séeberger

After high-quality half-tone reproduction of photographs became possible, most credit as pioneers of the genre goes to the French Baron Adolph de Meyer and the Luxembourgian Edward Steichen who, borrowing his friend’s hand-camera in 1907, candidly photographed dazzlingly-dressed ladies at the Longchamp Racecourse[1] and who by 1911 had been assigned by the French magazine Art et Décoration to produce pictures of dresses by the Parisian designer Paul Poiret, competing with the drawings and pochoir prints earlier, and contemporaneously, used for fashion plates.

Supported by their mother, their older sister and Louis’ wife Anna, the three brothers established a family business in 1909 under the name 'Frères Séeberger' in a studio at 33 rue de Chabrol, also in the 10th and five minutes walk from their home.

While magazines like Les Modes published careful portraits, most hand-coloured, of high society women in outfits designed by the renowned couturiers, the daily newspapers like Le Figaro and Le Gaulois had been running pictures in their late editions taken, like Steichen’s, of women at the racetracks,[3][4] and their approach was taken up by the magazine Femina, in an effort to satisfy the curiosity among their readership about what was fashionable in ‘real clothing’, a trend soon picked up by Paris Illustré or La Nouvelle Mode that from 1901-1902 featured snapshots taken by obscure amateurs Carle de Mazibourg or Edmond Cordonnier, though these were soon displaced by more professional images.

[5][1] Incidentally, though their focus was on dresses, shoes, bags, hats, furs, and feathers, they also captured imagery of a truly haute couture, a ‘high society’ normally inaccessible to those of their class, who, though conscious at all times of the camera and allowing themselves to be photographed, would only acknowledge those belonging to the great studios and certainly not the Séebergers.

From their imagery, since it was published immediately in a long list of over 50 publications, fashion historians are able to track the influence on style of the great designers Chanel,[6] Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Patou, Robert Piguet, Madeleine Vionnet, Lucien Lelong, Paquin et al., of whom the Séebergers also made portraits.

Lesser, or newer, couturiers hired casuals by the hour and often dressed them in their most eccentric costumes to attract attention, while some wore the insignia of the designers on their backs like sandwich-board bearers while they circulated alone.

The ‘fashionables’ were another class of model; well-known personalities known as ‘amphibians’, ‘jockeys’ or ‘society consultants’ who, while their celebrity lasted, wore the great designers latest creations sold to them at huge discounts or loaned free.

A lesser known part of their practice, as noted by Gilbert Salachas,[8] from 1923 International Kinema Research employed the Séeberger brothers to document locations which filmmakers adapted to create the formulaic Parisian ‘atmosphere’ in sets for movies such as the 1938 American romantic comedy Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and A comedy of murders (Charles Chaplin, 1947) or even as late as An American in Paris (Vincente Minelli, 1951), thus creating a mythic Paris that survives in cinema even today.