“His pictures in The Elegant Woman suggest that Sander was extremely adept in capturing not only women’s changing fashions but their shifting modes of being. […] [Helene Abelen] wears a crisp man’s shirt tailored just to her size and finished with a skinny tie. Her ballooning white pants are of the latest fashion—certainly nothing a man of the day would have worn, but something that most women wouldn’t dare to wear either. Light on her feet in silk slippers, her hips and knee sway toward the camera in a kind of coiled contrapposto. She has a cigarette clenched in her teeth, which explains why she is about to strike a match, but the gesture sums up how explosive she is.”
From People of the Twentieth Century: Group III, Portfolio 16, Photograph 12