Sophie Delaporte: The Thread Between, on view at Sous Les Etoiles Gallery from September 17 to October 31, 2026, brings together the artist's 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 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.
Born in 1971 in Paris, Delaporte works between Paris and New York. Her work is frequently featured in publications including Vogue Germany, Italy, Turkey, Japan, and India; Interview; Harper's Bazaar; and Another Magazine. Her series Needlework was featured in the book The Art of Fashion Photography by Patrick Remy, published by Prestel in 2013. In 2019, she won the Grand Prize Eye on Talents Photography and Sustainability, aiming to raise awareness of the ecological impact of the fashion industry. The gallery is located at 315 West 36th Street in New York. The opening reception is held on Thursday, September 17, from 6 to 8 pm, with the artist in attendance. The exhibition remains on view through October 31, offering visitors a chance to encounter work that reclaims the female image as a space of agency, imagination, and freedom.
Image: Sophie Delaporte, Needlework #19, 2008 © Sophie Delaporte
Instagram 
Facebook 
Pinterest 
X / Twitter 