Tuesday, June 4 • 7pm
Soho Beach House
For more than a decade, photographer Sharon Socol accompanied her husband, retail visionary Howard Socol, then CEO of Barneys New York, to many of the fashion world’s most high-profile runway shows and VIP parties. An accomplished photographer of more than 30 years, she was never without her trusted Leica, capturing images everywhere she went, from backstage to front row.
Socol’s debut photographic compilation, Plus One: An Outsider’s Photographic Journey into the World of Fashion (Books & Books Press, $60) features 100 candid images from seminal moments at famed fashion shows and parties in New York and Paris between 2001 and 2010. The book’s title and theme reflect Socol’s status as a self-proclaimed ‘plus one’ for husband Howard Socol.
Using her unique Everyman perspective, Socol was able to capture stunningly intimate moments not only of industry icons including supermodels and designers including Diane von Furstenberg, Alber Elbaz, Narciso Rodriguez, Zac Posen, Tommy Hilfiger and Giorgio Armani, but also of those who toiled behind the curtain – the dressmakers, dressers, choreographers, makeup and hair artists, bouncers and waiters who provided the backbone for those glamorous, fleeting moments.
“My camera captured lives within lives,” Socol writes in the book’s forward. “To think that people can choose to control how they look, how they feel, and who they are on any given day is extremely powerful. That is something I would never have understood had I not exposed my film.”
The book’s design and production were directed by book designer and author Petra Mason (Bunny Yeager’s Darkroom, Rizzoli, 2012) and Ausbert de Arce, whose credentials include Assouline, Taschen and Rizzoli.