Volker Hinz photographed the fashion world for decades without ever quite belonging to it. As a Stern photographer, his press pass opened backstage doors in Paris that remained shut to most photojournalists, and what he did with that access—between the 1970s and 1990s—is the substance of Carrousel, the second volume in a trilogy edited by his wife, Henriette Väth-Hinz. Hinz selected these pictures himself for a 2015 exhibition, and their vantage point is telling: not the runway’s polished finale but the corridor, the cigarette break, the fitting, the unguarded half-second before or after the show.
His subjects are the designers who shaped late-twentieth-century fashion, among them Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, and Giorgio Armani—seen occasionally in private, stripped of performance, but also acknowledged as the cultural figures they became. Paris provides the spine of the book; Milan, Florence, London, New York, Beijing, Shanghai, Moscow, and Hamburg extend its geography. Throughout, Hinz keeps his distance from the glitter. Models and couture do not intimidate his camera, which is why the images retain a personal, unposed quality that distinguishes them from standard show coverage.
The book’s design, by Claas Möller, borrows the logic of 1990s magazines and the slide carousel: pictures are collaged in sequence so that the reader moves through the material as through a projector tray, an approach that suits both the period and the photographer’s contact-sheet sensibility. Timo Feldhaus and Henriette Väth-Hinz contribute texts, and the volume appears in German and English through Hartmann Books, in a linen hardcover with foil-stamping and a tipped-in plate.
For collectors, the appeal lies in the combination of a defined historical subject, a photographer’s own edit of his archive, and a considered design program. Carrousel gathers a body of work whose access and intimacy are not easily repeated, and it presents that work as the second part of a larger project rather than an isolated anthology—a distinction that gives it both documentary weight and coherence.
