Lee Miller The war photographer who saved the fashion world
Fresh from swimming on the Côte d’Azur with her friend Picasso, 32-year-old photographer Lee Miller would have been dazzlingly tanned – pale blonde hair gleaming – when she turned up at British Vogue’s New Bond Street headquarters in September, 1939, on the hunt for a job.
On hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland, Lee and her lover, the artist Roland Penrose, had hightailed the 1300km trip from Antibes to Brittany’s Emerald Coast in a car, to board a boat back to Britain.
Both were ardent surrealists (he organised Britain’s first surrealist exhibition in 1936; she had lived and worked with the artist Man Ray in Paris during the late 1920s). They’d even met at a surrealist ball. It was like being “struck by lightning”, Roland said. A note she wrote to him afterwards was filled with one word: “darling”, over and over again.
When they got back to Hampstead after that boat crossing, Lee found a fierce letter from the US embassy insisting she return to her native New York for her own safety. Not that she heeded it, preferring to tear it up, pour a stiff drink and plot her next move: . One wonders if she asked Roland his opinion about any of it, but
