In the summer of 1904, while on holiday on the Côte d’Azur,
the 23-year-old Dora Kallmus, like many of Europe’s
well-to-do ladies at the turn of the century, purchased a camera.
Smarting from an unhappy love affair with a married man, she had
concluded that she did not want to be a “woman in the background,”
as she put it, and had been actively seeking an occupation.
Two years later, back home in Vienna, she was listed in the city’s
commercial registry as a photographer. And so began an illustrious
career, celebrated in the Neue Galerie New York’s “Madame d’Ora,”
Kallmus’s first major U.S. museum retrospective, which opened in
February. The show positions the Jewish-born Kallmus—who took
the alias Madame d’Ora in homage to her
Francophile sensibilities—as one of the
most prominent documenters of the early
20thcentury’s culturati: Gustav Klimt,
Anna Pavlova, Colette, and Josephine
Baker all took turns before her lens. Her
society portraits were anything but stuffy, though; like
cinema stills, they captured protagonists with a story
to tell. In 1922, she snapped the operetta star Elsie
Altmann-Loos (wife of modernist architect Adolf) in
dishabille, the look of ecstasy in her partially closed
eyes as evocative as her onstage performances.
A year later, she photographed Gabrielle Chanel in a
decidedly unglamorous stance, arms crossed and
hair in defiant disarray. Though she was avant-garde
in both her subject matter and her biography
(professional female photographers were highly
unusual at the time), Kallmus’s services were
nonetheless requested by even establishment elites,
from the Habsburgs to the Rothschilds. Good taste
transcends convention and borders.—LILAH RAMZI
A new photography show at the Neue Galerie
New York honors Austria’s Belle Époque.
Armani Beauty
launches a concealer
for our nothing-to-hide
makeup moment.
Vienna in Focus
Touch and Go
MIRROR, MIRROR
ACTRESS GRETE JACOBSON IN A DRESS
FROM THE WIENER WERKSTÄTTE,
PHOTOGRAPHED BY MADAME D’ORA IN 1917.
Once upon a time, long
before Armani Beauty’s
Luminous Silk Foundation changed the
way women thought about full-coverage
cosmetics, you had to cocktail different
formulas together to get shine and
dimension. “We had to cheat to get the
glow,” Armani Beauty’s international
makeup artist Linda Cantello recalls of
life without the best-selling product,
which launched in 2000, inspired by the
texture, weightlessness, and translucency
of charmeuse silk. The formula
heralded a lightweight, natural-looking,
lit-from-within skin finish for the
new millennium, appealing to everyone
from Serena Williams to the Duchess
of Sussex. “It was ahead of its time,”
Cantello suggests, nodding to the skin
care–first, makeup-second mandate
from brands such as Glossier that has
made full-coverage dirty words in 2020.
Those light-reflecting, pearlescent
pigments that melt into the skin have
already been leveraged into a pressed
powder and a hydrating primer, but
their latest incarnation—a new Multi-
Purpose Concealer, out this month—
is poised to be similarly era-defining.
“It’s basically a concentrated Luminous
Silk Foundation in a wand,” says
Cantello of the versatile creamy elixir,
which comes in an expansive range
of 20 shades and neutralizes dark circles
and discolorations with a hint of sheer
highlighter. It has a way of brightening
everything, she continues—so much so
that you might just find yourself cutting
back on foundation or skipping
it altogether. Adds Cantello, “Why
gild the lily?”—lau r en valenti
SMOOTH MOVE
AVAILABLE IN 20 SKIN-
PERFECTING SHADES, THE NEW
CONCEALER TAKES ITS CUES
FROM CHARMEUSE SILK.
MAKEUP
DESIGN
MAKE IT MODERN
TWO DESIGN FIRMS CARRY ON THE
WIENER WERKSTÄTTE AESTHETIC. LEFT:
A BACKHAUSEN MILL TEXTILE, BELOW:
A TUMBLER FROM LOBMEYR.
VLIFE
224 MARCH 2020 VOGUE.COM
MAKEUP: BLAUBLUT/AUGUST IM
AGE; DESIGN, FROM
LEFT: M
ADAM
E D’ORA.
ACTRESS GRETE JACOBSON IN A DRESS FROM
THE W
IENER W
ERKSTÄTTE
, 1 9 1 7.
ULLSTEIN BILD COLLECTION – M
ADAM
E D‘ORA; COURTESY OF OESTERREICHISCHE W
ERKSTAETTEN; COURTESY OF M
ARTINO GAM
PER.
