Sous Les Etoiles Gallery New York
September 17th - October 31st 2026
Sous Les Étoiles Gallery is pleased to present The Tread Between, an exhibition by Sophie Delaporte bringing together her Needleworks series and a selection of her early fashion photographs. Spanning nearly three decades of artistic practice, the exhibition reveals a continuous exploration of femininity, desire, intimacy, and the representation of the female body.
The title Threaten Within evokes Delaporte’s way of challenging established visual codes from inside the image itself. Rather than rejecting the languages of fashion and erotic representation, she inhabits them, disrupts them, and ultimately makes them her own.
Moving between photography, fashion, and physical intervention upon the image, Delaporte challenges conventional ways of looking. From the provocative intimacy of Needleworks to the imaginative freedom of her early fashion work, women emerge not as passive subjects of the gaze, but as protagonists—confident, enigmatic, and fully inhabiting their own narratives.
The Tread Between, will open Thursday, September 17, from 6 to 8 PM, with Sophie Delaporte in attendance. The exhibition will be on view through October 31st.
First presented in a solo exhibition at Scream Gallery in London in 2008, Needleworks occupies a singular place in Sophie Delaporte’s practice. Revisited nearly two decades later, the series reveals an early and deeply personal exploration of femininity, desire, intimacy, and the representation of the female body.
Drawing from snapshots and photographs found in erotic and pornographic magazines of the 1980s and 1990s, Delaporte takes images originally produced within established codes of sexual representation and makes them her own. Eroticism and intimacy remain present, but their meaning is shifted through her physical intervention upon the photographic surface.
Thread, lace, mesh, ribbon, and pins cover and uncover, conceal and reveal. The photograph becomes tactile—part image, part textile, part handmade construction. Needlework, traditionally associated with femininity, domesticity, and craft, is transformed into a language of intervention and freedom. What initially appears decorative becomes a means of questioning both the image and the gaze through which the female body is perceived.
“As a fashion photographer, I approach my work with a real feminist point of view,” Delaporte explains. “The female represented as an object has always shocked me.”
Yet Needleworks is not a rejection of sexuality. Delaporte embraces eroticism, pleasure, humor, and intimacy while shifting the position from which they are expressed. The needle becomes an extension of the photographic gesture—a means of touching the image, altering it, and ultimately making it her own.
