Women Before 10 a.m. was not a sleeper hit.
Published by powerHouse Books in 1998 — the same Brooklyn art house that would become synonymous with countercultural image-making — this slim volume was their breakout hit, their first bestseller.
The photographer was Véronique Vial, a French transplant in Los Angeles who had been cutting her teeth backstage with Cirque du Soleil. Naturally with this pedigree, she understood spectacle, which is why her decision to photograph the absence of it feels so subversive. In Women Before 10 a.m., she turned her lens not on the stage but on the hours before the stage even exists. Hair unbrushed. Sheets twisted. Coffee cups half-empty. Children clinging. Bodies unclothed, but not for the camera.
Her sitters were actresses, models, musicians — faces you’d recognise in magazines, but here they resist the performance. They’re not stars. They’re selves. And that’s the revelation.
The book runs to 144 pages, duotone stillness from cover to cover. No gloss, no filter, no stylist hiding in the corner. Each frame is ritual at its rawest: waking, washing, stretching, mothering, staring into nothing. It’s radical in its simplicity. Identity before curation. Power before performance.
When I found Women Before 10 a.m., it felt like a key text for 39BC. A spiritual cousin. Because bathing — like Vial’s mornings — isn’t about display. It’s about that private theatre of becoming. What struck me most was the regalnes in those images: intimacy not as softness, but as authority.
For me, the bathroom is the same stage. Before the perfume, before the dress, before the door opens to the world — there’s that moment of oil, water, and reflection. It’s where you exist most clearly. Women Before 10 a.m. reminded me that ritual is not always loud. Sometimes it’s duotone. Powerful people in sheets, unarmoured, vulnerable.
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