Sixty years ago this month, Harper’s Bazaar unveiled the magazine’s April 1965 issue, a special edition guest-edited by the photographer Richard Avedon. Featuring British supermodel Jean Shrimpton on the cover, the issue—dubbed “a partial passport to the off-beat side of Now”—offered a kaleidoscopic exploration of people and ideas who were shaping the era: pop stars like Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan; literary lions like James Baldwin, Renata Adler, and Tom Wolfe; artists such as Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein; the “Youthquake” Londoners who were spurring a revolution in fashion; musings on the space race, miniskirts, and the burgeoning counterculture; Donyale Luna, the first Black model to appear on the cover of Bazaar; even a 17-year-old Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
For decades, the April 1965 issue has been an obsession in fashion circles; copies are rare and coveted, especially the very limited number with a lenticular patch on the cover that makes it appear as if Shrimpton’s eye is winking. The story of how Shrimpton came to be wearing what is often described as a hot-pink space helmet is also one filled with intrigue. At various times, numerous people involved with the shoot—Bazaar co–art directors Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler, fashion editor China Machado, and even Avedon—have recounted its genesis, in bits and pieces. In the magazine, “the nouveau space helmet in heavenly pink” is credited to New York milliner Mr. John, a.k.a. John P. John, who did Vivien Leigh’s hats for Gone With the Wind (1939). Except it’s not actually a helmet at all, but rather a piece of Day-Glo poster board cut into the shape of one, by some accounts, to cover up a hat that Shrimpton was wearing (and that Avedon reportedly hated).
Avedon oversaw the April 1965 issue to mark his 20th year at Bazaar, where he got his start in the mid-1940s under the watchful eye of vaunted art director Alexey Brodovitch. His first assignment for the magazine was for Junior Bazaar, an in-book supplement geared toward teens. He was just 21 at the time, fresh off a stint in the Merchant Marine. “I want to be a fireman when I grow up,” he proclaimed in the Editor’s Guest Book section of the issue in which he made his debut. But his singular eye (and sense of humor) was already very much in evidence.
Avedon envisioned the April 1965 issue as a paean to the rising tides of youth culture and social revolution that were upending old barriers and boundaries and ways of seeing and thinking in the mid-1960s. In the design of the issue, Ansel and Feitler disposed of the regular rhythms of the magazine in favor of a more free-flowing approach that reflected the content, which tapped into the raging torrent of mass-mediated images and ideas sweeping through the world at a moment not unlike our current one, when the future seemed to have arrived but what it all portended was still very much an open question. For the cover story, Avedon photographed Shrimpton—a “young English bundle of fire who personifies what’s happening all over (or ought to be),” as Bazaar described her—in an actual NASA space suit, a key image in the articulation of that concept.
Set against the backdrop of the civil-rights and women’s movements, the specter of nuclear threat, the worsening conflict in Vietnam, the attendant pushes for protest and peace, the fallout from President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the end of Camelot, the growing distrust in governments and institutions, and the profound wave of technological advances and scientific discoveries that were transforming people’s lives, the April 1965 issue became a flashpoint for it all. It arrived at a time of extraordinary progress, crushing setbacks, and profound uncertainty—and a period of reckonings about who we are and what we want that would ultimately light the way forward.
