Jean Cocteau and Jean
Marais on the set of
Jean-Pierre Melville’s film,
Les Enfants Terrible, 1950
Vintage silver print
Estimate €200 > 400
Photographs Mode Cinema
Drouot-Richelieu
Paris | France
Exhibition 28 February /
1 + 2 March 2018.
Sale 2 March 2018
Fashion’s influence on film – and vice versa – is as enduring as the simple black sheath Gabrielle Chanel created in 1926, which Hubert de Givenchy paid homage to with the little black dress he designed for Audrey Hepburn to wear in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) that became thereafter an essential item in every modern woman’s wardrobe.
It shouldn’t be ignored, however, that fashion-conscious men such as the distinguished French writer, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker, Chanel’s friend Jean Cocteau whom she first met and for whose ballet she designed costumes in 1917, exerted a significant, if somewhat more subtle impact on the development of 20th-century, and even 21st-century male style.
Jean Marais in Jean
Cocteau’s film Orphée, 1950
Vintage silver print
Estimate €200 > 450
Jean Cocteau on the
set of his film, Le
Testament d’Orphée, 1956
Vintage silver print
Estimate €300 > 500
The self-portraits Cocteau produced throughout his life tend to concentrate on his head. Lacking conventionally handsome looks, clothes hung well on his slim, angular frame and, from the start, the painters and afterwards the photographers, who chose to immortalise him pulled back to show what he was wearing. As concerned about his own look as about that of his lover Jean Marais, in 1937, Cocteau asked Chanel to dress Marais for his film Oedipus Rex.
Jean Cocteau and
Charlie Chaplin,
Saint-Jean-Cap-
Ferrat, c 1950
Vintage silver print
Estimate €300 > 500
The dozen, or so, photographs of Jean Cocteau to be found among the diverse collection of 386 lots in the forthcoming auction Photographs Mode Cinema at Drouot in Paris, curated by photography expert Viviane Esders, reveal that by always dressing well and looking as good in front of the camera as he did while directing the actors who appeared in his films, he set an impeccably stylish example for others to follow.
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