If one name is synonymous with fashion imagery it's Vogue, the magazine bought by publisher Conde Montrose Nast in 1909 and still owned by the company bearing his name.

Vogue began using photographs around 1912 and hired its first photographer – Baron Adolph de Meyer, gay son of a Scottish mother and German-Jewish father – in 1914. If you had the time and inclination to trawl its century-spanning archive, you'd find few of the photographic greats who followed de Meyer unrepresented.

Vast this archive of fashion photography may be, but art historian and curator Nathalie Herschdorfer has made just such a trawl and selected some of the finest examples of the form for touring exhibition Coming Into Fashion: A Century Of Photography At Conde Nast. There are around 165 images in the show, though sadly space issues at the City Art Centre means only 117 are on display in Edinburgh, its only UK showing.

They're arranged chronologically and start with de Meyer. Among those whose work don't make the cut are Nick Knight, Juergen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans, who did more than anyone to give fashion photography the art world kudos it has today, thanks to his 2000 Turner Prize win. Still, the presence of Man Ray, Diane Arbus and Lee Miller more than make up for their absence. Likewise Herb Ritts, Bruce Weber, Cecil Beaton, Albert Watson and William Klein, to name another handful whose work features here.

Predictably, there isn't a single image which isn't glorious. Fashion photography is commercially driven, after all. The clothes, where you can see them, are the finest examples of their age too, and the models are all beautiful, though possessed of a beauty which is sculptural, ethereal, coltish or athletic depending on whether you are looking at work by Norman Parkinson, Edward Steichen, David Bailey or Helmut Newton.

More engrossing than the surface sheen are the thematic undercurrents and background stories. For instance, gallery-goers will have fun charting the changing ideas of feminine beauty between, say, Steichen's 1923 portrait of a demure model with perfect cupid's bow lips and Corinne Day's sexually provocative 1993 study of a 19-year-old Kate Moss in knickers and vest. They will learn about the explosions of creativity which occur when editors and art directors click (the coming together of Diana Vreeland and Richard Avedon at Vogue in the 1960s is the best example, shown here in a section called The New Wave). They may notice what happens to their understanding of an image when the supermodel in it is more famous than the photographer or the designer whose clothes the supermodel is (almost) wearing. And they will enjoy the cover lines on the handful of vintage magazines presented in display cabinets. The autumn fashion special from 1943 carries the exhortation "Take a job! Release a man to fight!". Fashion doesn't stop in wartime.

What also becomes evident as you proceed through the ages is the way fashion photography reacts against its own past. In the work from the 1990s and Noughties occupying the second floor of the exhibition, models are often shot from behind or with their hair entirely obscuring their faces and their clothes. You can imagine Norman Parkinson, the old dandy, tutting into his cravat. It's a long way from the formula he was familiar with, where a couture-wearing "gal" was plonked into a situation incongruous enough to add a little contradiction to the shot, but not too much.

Mind you, at the same time Parkin-son was working that formula was already being subverted. Clifford Coffin's shot from a June 1947 edition of British Vogue shows a model in flowing evening dress standing against the curved staircase of what looks like a Mayfair townhouse. Look more closely and you see it's actually a bombed-out townhouse with the roof hanging in and walls pockmarked with shrapnel marks. In another eye-catching image from two years later, Coffin shoots four models, from behind, sitting cross-legged on a sand dune wearing swimsuits and bathing caps. It would be unsettling if it wasn't so beautiful.

Coffin is one of three lesser-known photographers whose work deserves more intense scrutiny. The other two are Frances McLaughlin-Gill, one of the few women whose work is shown here, and Erwin Blumenfeld, Dadaist artist-turned-Vogue regular and the subject of a recent BBC Four documentary.

Aside from a typically over-showy and over-sized Testino portrait from 1984, a Vogue shot of Blumenfeld's from March 1945 is the exhibition's most striking image. The model herself is a blur, shot behind some sort of gauze on which a thick red cross has been applied. Her gloved hands, the only things remotely in focus, are raised as if in supplication but the rest of her is a ghostly grey-black silhouette. The only other colour is the turquoise saucer of her hat. It's an almost entirely abstract image.

McLaughlin-Gill, meanwhile, was notable for being in the vanguard of a movement towards spontaneity and naturalism. She came to prominence in the late 1940s, the era of Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio, and liked to use actresses rather than models in her shots. She and her twin sister – Kathryn Abbe, also a photographer and now in her 90s – often dressed identically and she brought that sense of playful eccentricity to her work as well as her woman's eye and sensibility.

A striking image of hers from December 1946 shows two thoroughbred models in statuesque black ball gowns holding still, casual poses in a stable. The third thoroughbred in the picture is a horse. It's a wonderful shot, but its provenance, shot by a sparky young woman making headway in a male business that objectifies women, gives it a steely satirical edge.

A more complete show would have put more meat on the bones of the subject, but this is a fascinating snapshot of an art form which fully deserves the title.

Coming Into Fashion: A Century Of Photography At Conde Nast is at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh until September 8