SOPHIE DELAPORTE
Black Skirt on a Girl
Mixed Media
10 1/4 x 7 3/4 in
Unique
NededleWork #016
Archival Pigment Print
35 1/8 x 25 1/2 in
Ed. 3/8
Red Pins on Blue Dress
Mixed Media
10 1/4 x 7 3/4 in
Unique
Male Study #2
Mixed Media
7 3/4 x 10 1/4 in
Unique
Pop Nude
Mixed Media
10 1/4 x 7 3/4 in
Unique
Two Girls and a Thread
Mixed Media
10 1/4 x 7 3/4 in
Unique
The Reflection
Mixed Media
7 3/4 x 10 1/4 in
Unique
L'Homme a la pie, 2000
From the series Early Fashion Work by Sophie Delaporte
Archival Pigment Print
18 x 23 in.
Ed. of 10
Le Nu, 2000
From the series Early Fashion Work by Sophie Delaporte
Digital C-Print
18 x 23 in.
Ed. of 10
La fille sous l'eau, 2001
From the series Early Fashion Work by Sophie Delaporte
Digital C-Print
23 x 31 in.
Ed. of 10
Les Poissons, 1998
From the series Early Fashion Work by Sophie Delaporte
Digital C-Print
18 x 23 in.
Ed. of 10
Pompon, 1999
From the series Early Fashion Work by Sophie Delaporte
Digital C-Print
18 x 23 in.
Ed. of 10
Le Vent, 2000
From the series Early Fashion Work by Sophie Delaporte
Digital C-Print
18 x 23 in.
Ed. of 10
La Buée, 2001
From the series Early Fashion Work by Sophie Delaporte
Digital C-Print
18 x 23 in.
Ed. of 10
Sous Les Etoiles Gallery is pleased to present The Thread Between an exhibition by Sophie Delaporte bringing together her Needleworks series and a selection of her early fashion photographs. Spanning nearly three decades of artistic practice, the exhibition reveals a continuous exploration of femininity, desire, intimacy, and the representation of the female body.
The Thread Between will open Thursday, September 17, from 6 to 8 PM, with Sophie Delaporte in attendance. The exhibition will be on view through October 31st.
The Thread Between evokes Delaporte’s way of challenging established visual codes from inside the image itself. Rather than rejecting the languages of fashion and erotic representation, she inhabits them, disrupts them, and ultimately makes them her own. Moving between photography, fashion, and physical intervention upon the image, Delaporte challenges conventional ways of looking. From the provocative intimacy of Needleworks to the imaginative freedom of her early fashion work, women emerge not as passive subjects of the gaze, but as protagonists—confident, enigmatic, and fully inhabiting their own narratives.
Drawing from snapshots and photographs found in erotic and pornographic magazines of the 1980s and 1990s, Delaporte takes images originally produced within established codes of sexual representation and makes them her own. Eroticism and intimacy remain present, but their meaning is shifted through her physical intervention upon the photographic surface.
Thread, lace, mesh, ribbon, and pins cover and uncover, conceal and reveal. The photograph becomes tactile—part image, part textile, part handmade construction. Needlework, traditionally associated with femininity, domesticity, and craft, is transformed into a language of intervention and freedom. What initially appears decorative becomes a means of questioning both the image and the gaze through which the female body is perceived.
Across the two bodies of work, the techniques change, but the underlying inquiry remains remarkably consistent. In her fashion photographs, Delaporte constructs her own representations of women from within the language of fashion; in Needleworks, she begins with existing representations and transforms them through the physical gesture of her own hand. The thread between them is both material and conceptual: a continuous exploration of how women are seen, how desire is represented, and how the image itself can become a space for freedom.
After studying photography and film at the École Louis-Lumière in Paris, Delaporte moved to London, where her first photographs appeared in i-D magazine in the 1990s. During these formative years, she developed a singular photographic language in which color, staging, gesture, and play challenged the conventions of fashion photography. Delaporte does not simply photograph clothes; she imagines situations. Women are not passive subjects of the fashion gaze, but protagonists within enigmatic narratives of their own.
