This story originally appeared in the November 1, 1964, issue of Vogue. It was photographed by John Cowan, assisted by Allan Ballard, in Canada on Resolute Bay, on Cornwallis Island in the Arctic Circle. Fashion Editor: Mary Kruming. Models: Jill Kennington and Antonia Bioeckesteyn.
What would you do for fashion—Suffer Spanx? Wear too-high shoes on a big night? Go bare-legged in winter? Been there, done that. None of these voluntary sacrifices comes close to the fortitude required of the team Vogue sent to shoot winter whites on Canada’s Cornwallis Island, above the Arctic Circle, in 1964. The results are magnificent, but “for the girls, just wearing these thin clothes,” as photographer John Cowan recounted in the magazine, “it was fantastically hard work.”
The group, accompanied by Mounties, had more than the cold to contend with; there was the unnerving silence, blinding brightness, and technical difficulties. “The day started,” Cowan said, “when Mary Kruming said, ‘John, the sun’s shining.’ The first problem we had was that both the Hasselblad cameras froze. We presume they froze as the shutters wouldn’t work. Then we found that the film was bending and cracking because of the cold. Roughly, apart from one time when we really had a blast of fabulous sunshine (we had waited five or six days for it), we worked normal working hours, governed by the canteen food.” So much for glamour, at least behind the scenes. On film, and on paper, the results captured “a glittering world”—and fashions—at “the very limit of cold.” A place (wrote a romantic copywriter from a desk in a heated office) “like the inside of a diamond.”
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