The thread between: Early Fashion Work

Seen through the lens of Needleworks, Delaporte’s early fashion photographs reveal how deeply these questions have been embedded in her practice from the beginning.

After studying photography and film at the École Louis-Lumière in Paris, Delaporte moved to London, where her first photographs appeared in i-D magazine in the 1990s. During these formative years, she developed a singular photographic language in which color, staging, gesture, and play challenged the conventions of fashion photography.

Delaporte does not simply photograph clothes; she imagines situations. Her images unfold like fragments of stories, suspended between fantasy and reality, innocence and sensuality, spontaneity and mise-en-scène. Women are not passive subjects of the fashion gaze, but protagonists within enigmatic narratives of their own.

“I like images that are not obvious and leave room for interpretation, those that offer several levels of reading,” Delaporte has said. Her visual language draws upon poetry and surreal displacement, as well as Magritte, Man Ray and 1930s photography.

Revisited today alongside Needleworks, these early photographs acquire another resonance. The freedom of the female figure, the ambiguity between innocence and sensuality, and Delaporte’s resistance to conventional representations of women were already present.

Across the two bodies of work, the techniques change, but the underlying inquiry remains remarkably consistent. In her fashion photographs, Delaporte constructs her own representations of women from within the language of fashion; in Needleworks, she begins with existing representations and transforms them through the physical gesture of her own hand.

The thread between them is both material and conceptual: a continuous exploration of how women are seen, how desire is represented, and how the image itself can become a space for freedom.