It takes a delicate blend of technical skill and artistic sensibility to pull off a great lingerie photoshoot. Clichés are hard to avoid, critics will accuse you of shilling for fashion brands, and you’re always straddling the line between erotica and pornography.
Such challenges make the work of the world’s leading fashion photographers all the more impressive. And 2012 brought us some remarkably creative and courageous work from magazines, fotogs and models who collaborated to find new ways to celebrate the female form in various stages of undress.
We looked at hundreds of magazine editorials from 2012 that focused on lingerie fashions and chose the images below as a representative sample of this evolving artform. You’ll see some familiar names: the incomparable Ellen von Unwerth, Mert & Marcus, Greg Kadel; leading models like Karlie, Miranda, Constance (no surnames necessary!) and more; and some very exciting work from the pages of V Magazine, I-D, Schon, W, Numero as well as all the big books.
As for the lingerie, there’s a whole world of it in here; we’ll leave it to you to spot your favorite brands.
We’ve included a few items of commercial work not used in consumer magazines, but our list does not cover marketing campaigns by the brands themselves. Where possible, we’ve included both the model’s and photographer’s names.
Finally, if they gave out prizes for such things, the year’s crowning achievement for lingerie fashion editorials would have to go to the image above: Victoria Beckham in Elle mag, shot by Karl Lagerfeld on the mirrored staircase of Coco Chanel‘s Paris mansion. A once-in-a-lifetime moment and an instantly iconic image in a year filled with them.
(the campaign banned from New York billboards for being too racy)
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