Fashions Image the Complex World of the-2

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Fashion’s Image
The Complex World of the Fashion Photograph
Karen de Perthuis
Fashion needs the image. The image illustrates and documents fashion; throughout
its history, it has also been integral to understanding a form that only survives
through self‐destruction. Characterized by shifting styles, labeled fugitive, transitory,
ephemeral, and obsessed with novelty, fashion is defined as change. Hostage to the
question: “What next?,” it is as René König (1973) put it, a “restless image,” amnesiac in
its institutionalized forgetting of the recent past, ruthless in its dismissal of what is no
longer new. Once, it was the painted portrait that captured this restless impulse. “In the
Renaissance,” notes Roland Barthes (1983, p. 300), “as soon as one got a new costume,
one had a portrait done.” Later, in the mid‐nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire
(1995) launched into his famous essay on modernity with a meditation on fashion
plates. In the modern era, it is the fashion photograph. Fashion photography shows us
how fashions were once worn and dictates ideals of how we are supposed to look now.
It reflects and comments on the times and “congeals the essence of the now” (Wilson
2003, p. vii), but it does so through “incomplete visual statements” (Maynard 2008,
p. 66). The creative fashion photograph is a mystery, writes Margaret Maynard; always,
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there is “something beyond” its commercial rationale (2008, p. 60). Understood as the
“transitory image par excellence” (Brooks 2007, p. 520), paradoxically, it is through
the image that the transience of fashion is captured and lives on. This is crucial to
understanding the fashion photograph. It is the job of museums to preserve clothing—
white‐gloved curators can turn a garment inside out, inspect the technical virtues
of a cut or a seam, catalog methods of fastening, and appreciate the intricate weave of
cloth—but only the image can preserve “fashion.”
The editorial or advertising fashion photograph is a commercial image. It is also much
more. In the hands of talented individuals, fashion photography has always been an
alchemical blend of artistic creation, function, and commodity form – an image of fash-
ion as its ideal self. For decades, fashion photography depicted a world of high‐class
glamor, luxury, artifice, and desire shaped by idealized models in designer clothes. In
the 1970s, this “world without men,” as Helmut Newton (1984) characterized it, faced
scrutiny over its representation of women, beginning a debate that has continued ever
since. Soon after, the first pages of men’s fashion began to appear. Today, men’s fashion
photography is its own sub‐genre, substantially contributing to an image bank that,
A Companion to Photography, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Bull.

© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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254 Markets
nonetheless, remains defined by the representation of women’s fashion. From 1980,

independent magazine titles such as i‐D and The Face entered the market, challenging
the traditional content of glossy, mainstream titles, such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
Plugged into subcultural style and merging fashion with music, art, design, and “the
street,” publications like these also served as a platform for a new generation of photog-
raphers to experiment without commercial restraints.
In the last decade of the millennium, photographers at fashion’s cutting edge, along
with fashion’s other image‐makers—designers, art directors, stylists, and editors—
blurred the lines between fashion photo and portrait, between commercial image and
contemporary art. With the production of thoughtful, complex and sometimes disturb-
ing images came recognition of fashion photography as a powerful sign of culture and,
following a number of significant exhibitions, in the first decade of the twenty‐first
century fashion photography’s relationship with the museums became “firmly estab-
lished” (Williams 2008, p. 217). But this apparent acceptance by the art world of a form
that it once denied legitimacy has raised more questions than it answers. Ostensibly an
image of a commodity, the image long ago became a commodity itself. Early in the
century, Olivier Zahm (2002, p. T28) wrote that, “Fashion photography is everywhere.
The fashion image is a meta‐image that totally transcends its object (clothing design)
and specific context (fashion magazines) ….” And in the era of Fashion 2.0, the interac-
tive world of the web has only increased the complexity of a form that “has its circum-
ference everywhere and its centre nowhere” (Zahm 2002, p. T28).
Despite the ubiquity of fashion photography, critical study of the genre has been
uneven. Barthes’ exhaustive structural analysis of women’s clothing in fashion maga-
zines, The Fashion System, remains a foundational text and, along with a number of
essays on clothing and fashion, his thinking permeates fashion scholarship in general
and studies of fashion photography in particular. Art and costume historians have
investigated both the genre as a whole, as well as the work of individual photographers,
bringing the analytical tools of art theory to the fashion photograph (Hall‐Duncan 1979;
Harrison 1991). Equally important has been the work of fashion scholars (see, for exam-
ple, Jobling 1999; Shinkle’s edited collection, Fashion As Photograph, 2008; and O’Neill
2013). Rebecca Brooks has interrogated the critical rhetoric of the image in a number of
insightful and original analyses; Maynard has considered the indeterminacy of the form,
working toward identifying what it is that makes fashion imagery so affective and fasci-
nating. And from around the turn of the twenty‐first century, a number of exhibition
catalog essays on the fashion photograph have added greatly to scholarship in the field
(Williams 1998; Cotton 2000; Lehmann 2002; Kismaric and Respini 2004; Keaney 2014).
Central to all is an understanding of fashion itself as image. It is through the photo-
graphic image that the latest styles and the current idea of fashion are disseminated
globally, entwining fashion and photography in a symbiotic relationship of economic,
esthetic, and social dimensions. This key theme of fashion as image is addressed
throughout this chapter and, following a brief discussion on the changing world of the
fashion photograph, is considered in detail. I then turn to the question of what a fashion
photograph is—a question, it turns out, that has no simple answer. The remainder of
this chapter delves further into understanding the fashion photograph. First, I explore
how fashion works in the street style fashion photography blog. From humble begin-
nings late in 2005, this genre has evolved to become a worldwide viral phenomenon.
With its rhetoric of “real” people in everyday clothes, it continues the legacy of the
The Complex World of the Fashion Photograph 255
“straight‐up”—the visual signature of i‐D magazine that celebrated street and sub‐
cultural style—and the more mainstream “vox‐pop” fashion portrait that became a
common feature of fashion journalism in the 1980s and 1990s (Rocamora and O’Neill
2008). Whether street style fashion photography blogs genuinely satisfy the often‐
voiced desire to see “real people in real clothes” is unclear. But with the favorite subjects
of the “blogarazzi” changing several times a day, these images also bear the imprint of
an opposing genre—traditional catwalk documentation—thus suggesting that the
“staged quality of ‘reality’” (Rocamora and O’Neill 2008, p. 192) remains hard to ignore.
In both scholarly and journalistic accounts of the street‐style blog (often echoing
bloggers themselves), the common claim is that they have reversed the chain of influ-
ence from fashion experts or insiders to “ordinary” consumers or stylish individuals,
democratizing fashion markets and media. However, the contribution of this genre of
fashion photography to the ongoing story of the democratization of fashion is not the
focus of my approach here. Instead, I consider the street style blog through a close
analysis of one of its most distinctive features—the combination of image and text—
where, I argue, the “backstage” machinations of how fashion imagery constructs a nar-
rative of desire are made visible. The centrality of the fashion commodity to this
discussion sets up the final section, where I consider the question of fashion photogra-
phy as art. This question, apparently settled for some, too often relies on a tendency to
identify connections and crossover between these categories without interrogating
what that might mean for fashion. Following a brief historical survey of this compli-
cated and contradictory relationship, I propose a shift in focus to a position where fash-
ion photography’s status as art is left open in order that a deeper and more meaningful
investigation might then begin.
The Changing World of the Fashion Photograph

Fashion photography has many forms. When Barthes sat down to write The Fashion
System in the late 1950s, he began with the words: “I open a fashion magazine” (1983,
p. 3). Writing in 1991, Martin Harrison could accurately claim that, “Fashion photo-
graphs are made, almost exclusively, for publication in magazines” (1991, p. 10). And for
the most part, critical studies of the fashion photograph continue to take for granted its
appearance on the printed page. But opening a fashion magazine is no longer the only
way—or the primary way—to view images of fashion. Now we subscribe to blogs and
apps, search the Internet, visit websites, and receive constant updates in email boxes
and on social media platforms. This is a different experience to opening a magazine.
In the layout of the fashion magazine, nothing is left to chance; each page is pinned to a
board or laid out on a bench or floor while editors and art directors shuffle pages, creat-
ing narratives between advertisements, text, and the fashion editorial spread which, of
course, has a narrative of its own. By contrast, in the “decentralised universe of endless
blogs and platforms” (Kansara 2012), the narration of fashion is a wild card—a mash‐up
of chronology, style, and quality—as the organizing principle of the magazine is replaced
by a search‐engine algorithm.
The addition of screens to the “older forms” of the printed page, the billboard, the
bus‐side, and the retail store display has brought unprecedented exposure and access to
images of fashion, prompting discussion about the democratization of fashion markets
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and media (Smyth 2009; Berry 2010; Titton 2010; Pham 2011; Kansara 2012). The sea-
sonal collections of designers used to be an elite affair for a select audience of insiders
and experts; catwalk documentation was limited to postage‐stamp‐size highlights in
magazines and newspapers. Now anyone with a device, an Internet connection (and
time) can view every outfit worn by every model sent down every catwalk at every
fashion week in every city around the globe. With this saturation comes increased con-
fusion around what is a fashion photograph and what is simply a picture of someone
wearing fashionable clothes. The lines here are more blurred than ever. The costume
changes of celebrities—from sidewalk to red carpet—are faithfully recorded and avail-
able for immediate download; meanwhile, on personal fashion blogs and look‐sharing
sites, “ordinary” people are transformed into celebrities via the publication of amateur
snapshots and selfies. And on street style fashion photography blogs, the once‐defining
elements of the fashion photograph—model, fashion, commodity—are no longer essen-
tial as the practice of portraying “real” people in “everyday” clothes has moved from the
sidelines to become a dominant and influential trend.
For those who follow fashion, none of this matters; as always, the inspired fashion
photograph, those that “burn on the page,” is the main game. Few would deny that most
fashion photography is forgettable; at any point in time, as Charlotte Cotton (2000, p. 6)
has argued, “the ebb and flow of innovation in fashion photography is created … by only
a small number of image‐makers.” But in the hands of those who have had the most
impact on the genre, the fashion photograph continues to transfix, to fascinate, to initi-
ate flights of imagination and fantasy; it still draws us in. Even as traditional titles, such
as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, continue with the “now‐antiquated art of making maga-
zines” (Lee and Maheshawari 2018), and survive by increasing their digital presence,
they still produce issues the size of house bricks, as well as publishing local editions in
the burgeoning fashion markets of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, reflecting the
reality of fashion as a global phenomenon. Responding to the tactile and sensuous
delight of turning a page, the market in independent or niche fashion and style maga-
zines has seen a resurgence in recent years, with newer titles, such as System, Love, Acne
Paper, Gentlewoman and Fantastic Man joining established publications such as Purple,
Self‐Service, W, i‐D, Dazed & Confused, Oyster, doingbird, Tank, Interview, V Magazine
and AnOther Magazine to challenge the received wisdom about the “death of print”
(Lynge‐Jorlén 2012), albeit often by integrating digital content in sophisticated ways.
Blurring formerly strictly defined—and fiercely defended—categories, since the late
twentieth century, contemporary fashion photography has proved its “pulling power” at
museums and art galleries and merged with art photography in a process of cross‐
fertilization that has reinvigorated debates about fashion photography’s status as art.
As mentioned, there is also debate around the phenomenon of street style fashion
photography blogs. But with the most popular sites able to attract around 15 million
visits a month, if nothing else, there is clearly a desire by consumers to view images—
and lots of them—of people in fashionable clothes.
Fashion as Image
The first serious study to consider fashion through the medium of fashion photography
was Barthes’ The Fashion System. To give the impression that this text is “about” fashion
photography, however, would be misleading. Barthes adopted a methodological
approach that is remarkable on two counts, both of which he acknowledged would dis-
appoint the reader. The first was his decision to bypass clothing as it is worn (“real” or
“used” clothing) in favor of “represented clothing,” defined as “clothing in magazines.”
The second is his ordering of “represented clothing” into the separate categories of
“image clothing” (the fashion editorial photograph) and “written clothing” (its accom-
panying caption). The end result is a book that spends most of its 300 pages preoccu-
pied with the verbal language of fashion in a maze of symbols, tables, and analytical
tools which, not unfairly, has earned it the epithet of “structuralism’s Moby Dick” (in
Carter 2003, p. 144). This notwithstanding, the legacy of The Fashion System reverber-
ates throughout fashion studies. Most notably, the enduring value of Barthes’ analysis
lies in its shifting of focus away from a definition of fashion as a thing that is manufac-
tured and/or worn—a material object—to a thing that exists as representation and
meaning. As he explained elsewhere, “Fashion is not only what women wear, it is also
what all women (and all men) look at and read about” (Barthes 2006, p. 109).
Published in 1967 (under its French title), The Fashion System coincided with the
appearance of Guy Debord’s influential Société du Spectacle, with its bleak characteriza-
tion of “the ubiquity of the commodity form” and modernity lived as representation
(Evans 2013, p. 84). But even as Barthes was writing, the spectacle of fashion on the cat-
walk was establishing fashion as image. In the 1960s, the innovative use by Mary Quant
and Courrèges of photographic models on the catwalk, with their exaggerated gestures
and poses, revolutionized the fashion show. Writing in British Vogue in 1978, Susan
Sontag observed that, “What people understand of fashion is now mostly set by photo-
graphic images. More and more, fashion is fashion photography” (Sontag 1978, p. 177).
And writing about contemporary fashion photography a few years later, Rosetta Brooks
(1980) confirmed that, “the product is less important than the product‐image.” By the
mid‐1990s, the fashion show had transformed into an elaborate spectacle, with banks of
fashion photographers operating with a gravitational pull on the orbit of the model as she
proceeded down the catwalk. In this atmosphere the decision by Bernard Arnault, the
head of the fashion conglomerate LVMH, to exclude the press from Alexander McQueen’s
final show for Givenchy (in retribution for his defection to the rival fashion group of
Gucci), was to deny “real” clothing its essential transformation into image. The image is
fashion’s realm, allowing it to “live” even when it is not “imitated” by the market. As
Caroline Evans (2013, p. 86) has written of this period, “No longer mere representation,
the image frequently became the commodity itself … [making] previously elite fashion
accessible to a mass audience, but only as image, never as object.”
The importance of acknowledging this transformation from “the material form of
fashion” to the “immaterial domain” (Gill, cited in Evans 2013, p. 86) was not lost on
designers. Confirming what everyone already knew, on the cusp of the new millennium,
the avant‐garde Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf announced that “fashion doesn’t have to
be something people wear, fashion is also an image” (cited in Evans 2008, p. 17), and in
the British fashion press John Galliano was called “the greatest 3‐D image‐maker alive”
(Brampton, cited in Evans 2013, p. 87). In the hands of designers such as Viktor & Rolf,
Galliano, or McQueen, haute couture garments that were produced as “show pieces”
and intended for pure performance on the catwalk or with an eye to purchase by muse-
ums bypassed entirely the consumer and hence the episode in a fashion garment’s life
where it is worn. But this sense of fashion as only image does not apply exclusively to
haute couture, “the starriest of star commodities” (Evans 2013, p. 85). By the end of the
twentieth century, commercial imperatives in a changing global marketplace had
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already brought about the mutation of the fashion object into image. Ulrich Lehmann
underlines the significance of this:
Fashion only exists in representation … Clothing is elevated from its material

properties to an aesthetic idea through its representation as an image in the
media. It is only through this process that most clothing can become fashion
in the first place. And the most common agent in this process is fashion
photography, as the ubiquitous representation of garments in advertising and
journalism … (2002, p. T12)
Instead of seeing clothing as necessarily “made of fabric, cuts, seams, and fastenings,” he
concludes, we now see clothing as images (Lehmann 2002, p. T12).
The crucial point, made by both Evans and Lehmann—that consuming fashion
images is easier and far more accessible than the garments themselves—was earlier
observed by Barthes and was central to his privileging of written clothing (which elimi-
nates uncertainty) over the fascinating, slippery, and vague image: “The image makes
the purchase unnecessary, it replaces it; we can intoxicate ourselves on images, identify
ourselves oneirically with the model, and, in reality, follow Fashion merely by purchas-
ing a few boutique accessories …” (1983, p. 17). That this is what many of us do is con-
firmed by observers in Paris and London who have documented “the ordinariness of
everyday clothes” (Black 2009, p. 505) or the “malaise of the modern metropolis” where
“people dress so badly nowadays” (Hill, cited in Black 2009, p. 505). Even in fashion
capitals, it seems, when it comes to satisfying the urge to consume, to participate in
fashion, we do not need a new dress, suit, handbag, or pair of shoes. Most of the time,
the fashion photograph will do.
What Is a Fashion Photograph?

When dealing with such a slippery and complex medium as the fashion photograph,
Barthes’ claim that it “is not just any photograph” (1983, p. 4) is as good a place to start
as any. Although his assertion that the snapshot and the news photograph have “little
relation” to the fashion photograph is now outdated, it remains true that fashion pho-
tography has its own specific language, its own lexicon and syntax, its own rules, its
own approved “turns of phrase.” For Barthes, the goal of the fashion photograph is una-
bashedly commercial; it creates desire, blunting the calculating consciousness of the
consumer and constructing us as participants in fashion’s self‐destructive “act of annual
potlatch” (p. xii). In her landmark survey of the genre, The History of the Fashion
Photograph, Nancy Hall‐Duncan echoes this notion of a seductive propaganda “so
potent it can beguile us into buying the most frivolous products” (1979, p. 9). Writing
30 years later, she is a little more flexible when it comes to thinking of the fashion pho-
tograph as exclusively commercial, defining it as “simply, a photograph made specifi-
cally to show (or in some cases, to allude to) clothing or accessories, usually with the
intent of documenting or selling the fashion” (2010, p. 300). In both instances she makes
the distinction that photographs of fashionable dress are not fashion photography.
What sets the fashion photograph apart is its “fashion intent” (1979, p. 9), which, in the
more recent definition, she explains as “intent to convey fashion or a ‘fashionable
lifestyle’” (2010, p. 300). Maynard (2008, p. 60) takes up the notion of “fashion intent,”
suggesting that what the “creative fashion editorial” or “high‐end” fashion photograph
has—and therefore, by implication, what the more prosaic fashion photograph lacks—is
“something beyond” its commercial rationale. What this “something beyond” might be
is, by its very nature, mysterious, hard to pin down because, she writes, “the highest
order of fashion image has the inscrutable at its heart” (2009).
A crucial consideration of framing and genre is brought to the question of under-
standing fashion images by Maynard, who reminds us that, although the genre of
fashion photography has “its own coherent histories, practices and expectations …
no text is generically pure” (2008, p. 55). Fashion photographs, particularly vulnera-
ble in this regard, are “in effect generically ‘unstable’” (p. 66). There is no one reason
for the diagnosis of this condition. Visual content, of course, plays a part—under
constant pressure to produce an innovative esthetic or conceptual idea, contempo-
rary fashion photography is acutely aware of developments and infinitesimal shifts in
the broader field of cultural production and, consequently, can be a hybrid of every
photographic and visual genre. Framing, too, is a factor. Fashion photographs can
initially appear in one context—traditionally the “fragile,” perishable, medium of a
magazine publication or advertisement—but can then be re‐purposed or re‐sited in
exhibition or book publication contexts. The image‐world of the web only compli-
cates this generic promiscuity. Within each context, the fashion photograph is sub-
ject to internal framing conventions, such as layout and captioning, the latter
typically disappearing as the context becomes less commercially oriented (or more
permanent) as, for example, when fashion photographs are reproduced in books or
hung on the museum or gallery wall (where they may be given a new or altered “title”
in place of the commercial caption). No longer anchored to its original purpose, the
fashion photograph mirrors the “Protean quality” that Elizabeth Wilson (2003,
pp. 10–11) has attributed to fashion itself; evading definitive translation and, “curiously
resistant to being imprisoned in one … ‘meaning’,” the fashion photograph enters into a
liminal state of becoming.
Writing about the changing nature of the fashion photo, Lehmann (2002, p. T13)
emphasizes what doesn’t change: the following of trends, “the being ‘in fashion’.”
However, “fashionability” itself can be an elusive term. Looking at fashion plates from
France’s turbulent past, Baudelaire (1995, p. 2) understood that, more than simply
clothing and accessories, they retrospectively contain “the moral and aesthetic feeling
of their time.” Hilary Radner (2000, p. 128) makes the same observation about fashion
photography when she writes that it “offers us evidence of the practices and ideals of a
given period.” A further point made by Radner—that fashion photography ties patterns
of consumption to notions of the self—shifts the focus from the clothes themselves to
the person (predominantly a woman) who is doing the wearing. Importantly, she does
this within the framework of the fashion photograph’s commercial function, but others
have emphasized the social, political, and psychological meanings—what Harrison
(p. 11) calls the “extra‐curricular motivations” —that the fashion photograph brings
into play. For Richard Avedon, fashion photography became an exploration into “the
complex nature of what it is to be dressed up, the vulnerability, the anxiety, the isolation
of being a beauty” (cited in Harrison 1991, p. 68). Irving Penn’s comment that he always
thought he was selling dreams not clothes again switches focus, this time to the specta-
tor‐consumer: the person looking at the fashion image.
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Avedon and Penn, two of the “greats” from fashion photography’s golden years,
between them, clocked up over a century of shooting fashion, but each generation
brings with it a new approach (and new technology), a new sense of presentness to
capture the spirit of the times. Periodically, this has entailed a quest for reality, an escape
from the inherent artifice of the fashion photograph. This tendency notwithstanding,
artifice remains a defining feature of the fashion photograph. Reviewing the exhibition
Imperfect Beauty, with its images of bodies that challenged the glamorous archetype of
the supermodel, the art critic Peter Campbell observed that, “Fashion, the most artifi-
cial of photographic genres, will use any style – no matter how un‐artful – to catch your
eye” (cited in Hartley 2007, p. 563). Even when fashion photography makes a fetish of
the “real,” it still must be studied, as Rebecca Brooks has argued, “as a process of the
mechanical production of the contrived image” (2007, p. 520). And, as I have argued
elsewhere (de Perthuis 2008), in the age of digital manipulation the latest trend or form
of sartorial beauty, constituted entirely within the image as a “synthetic ideal,” simply
makes overt a process common to all fashion photography.
For the researcher, sifting through the sheer abundance of fashion imagery, separating
the conventional from the radical, the inspired from the banal can be an overwhelming
task. Nonetheless, there are certain “turns of phrase,” recurring tropes and themes that,
if not always specific to the genre, fashion photography has made its own. Wealth,
glamor, and power; sex, narcissism and death; menace, voyeurism, and vanity; realism,
lifestyle and “the street”; fantasy, Surrealism and the exotic are as much a part of the
photographer’s kit as an 85‐mm lens. The fashion photograph will reference fashion’s
compulsive devotion to novelty and change, its deep artifice and the contrived nature of
its own production by distressing the image or including the photographer and shoot-
ing paraphernalia in the frame. It will pillage history as well as its own past, and shame-
lessly appropriate art, design, and other cultures so that a Papuan highland warrior, a
crowd on an Indian street, or soldiers in a global conflict are as much decorative props
as a Brancusi sculpture or a crystal chandelier. It will shift location: casino, beach, city,
country, home, office, playground, island, desert, film‐set, studio; and tell a million
small stories about essentially the same thing, using three basic signifiers—clothing,
body and mise‐en‐scène. At the center is the model, the object of our gaze, composed as
a figure in space, cropped, or full‐frame; leaping, dancing, running; frozen, waxen, or
corpse‐like; pouting, smiling, thinking; tousle‐haired and freckled; masked and pow-
dered; engaged or distant; ingénue or vixen; doll or mannequin, whole or in fragments,
alone or en masse; supermodel or waif; an ideal beyond perfection or flawed and
ungainly; a highly‐paid professional or a passerby on the street. Always fashioned,
always transformed (Figure 15.1).
How Fashion Works in the Street Style Blog1

In the sometimes‐opaque world of the fashion photograph, one path to understanding
its complexity lies in the interactive commentary of the street style fashion photography
blog. Here, a “conversation” between image and text voices Barthes’ two distinct repre-
sentations of the garment—image clothing and written clothing. As Lehmann (2002,
p. T17) reminds us:
Figure 15.1 Viviane Sassen, Kinee Diouf for An Other Magazine Fall/Winter 2013–2014. Styled by
Mattias Karlsson. Source: Courtesy of Viviane Sassen.
In the fashion photo a number of garments are present, even if we see only one in
the shot itself. The first item of clothing is a photographed reality … [the second]
is a written reality that exists in the caption ….
In the street style fashion blog, there are two “captions.” The first is the “official cap-
tion,” which is provided by the author‐photographer; the second is the “unofficial cap-
tion” provided by users in the comments section of the blog. Described by Scott
Schuman, creator of the influential site, The Sartorialist as a “living fabric” (cited in
Berry 2010), what unfolds in this interactive commentary acts as a kind of backstage
pass, voicing the traditionally unspoken process of how the fashion photograph con-
structs or invents a narrative of desire around a fashion object. In this narrative we see
the process of how fashion works.
To understand the significance of the caption, it is important to recognize that, for
Barthes, the description of a garment “serves a specific purpose, which is to manifest or
better still to transmit Fashion” (1983, pp. 21–22). As construed by Barthes, this is not
something that the image alone can do; information conveyed in the photograph is
vague, slippery; the novel or “fashionable” elements of an ensemble are uncertain; it is
description that pins fashion down.
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As an illustration of how this works in the traditional format of a magazine, an edito-

rial spread from British Vogue, The Joker’s Wild, serves as an example. Photographed by
Paulo Roversi with Lucinda Chambers as fashion editor, it presents the model Magda
Laguinge wearing a kaleidoscopic array of stripes and checks; blazers, tights and bal-
looning pants; sequins and diamantes; ruffles, frills, and over‐sized bows; broderie
anglaise and maribou feathers; pearl‐pink platforms and chunky checkerboard shoes;
her face is alabaster with Pierrot eyes and rosebud lips. Framed as a porcelain doll in a
Wonderland playing card, the effect is fabulous, it intoxicates, it draws you in. But like
the innovative styling associated with certain high‐end designer labels on the catwalk,
the fashion in this editorial risks spilling into “costume.” On the catwalk it is the job of the
fashion journalist to translate the “look” for the consumer; in the fashion editorial this
work is done by the caption which, in this instance, invites us to: “Place your bets on
fashion’s winning stylistic tricks – elaborate ruffles, marionette frills, beguiling makeup
and the impresario’s black and white.” In duplicating what is clearly visible in the photo-
graph, the caption functions emphatically. Because no part of the garment is privileged
in the image, it is “consumed as an immediate whole” (Barthes 1983, pp. 14–15); the
commentary, on the other hand, singles out certain elements (frills, ruffles, black and
white), and stresses their value for the consumer‐spectator, thus corralling a diffuse and
complex photographed reality.
This process is mirrored in the street style blog in two ways. The first is when the
official caption points to the dominant narrative of the photographed reality. Schuman,
for example, regularly highlights a new fashion detail with the caption, “If You’re
Thinking About …” followed by a featured trend, such as Peekaboo, Racerbacks, Baseball
Jackets or Socks and Sandals. This focus on the detail is crucial to understanding how
fashion works. Because the idea of fashionable dress tends not to change from top‐to‐
toe, but in increments, change in fashion is made up of such stylistic gestures. As
Prudence Black (2009 , p. 503) has pointed out, this is how fashion’s creators work—
subtle additions, subtractions, and alterations to what already exists form a “new reality”;
the detail is the necessary “spark” that propels fashion into the future. With “a single
inexpensive detail,” she writes, everyone is given the opportunity “to participate in the
fashion system”; or, in another common scenario, the detail can “transform what might
be ordinary into something special” (2009, p. 505). When the official caption of the
street style blog omits or avoids identifying the fashion detail or feature, it emerges
instead through the interactive commentary of the unofficial caption.
By way of illustration, Schuman’s photograph, “On the Street …. The Nine Streets,
Amsterdam” (The Sartorialist, February 3, 2013), serves as an example (http://www.
thesartorialist.com/photos/on‐the‐street‐the‐nine‐streets‐amsterdam). The image
shows a hip young woman standing on a snow‐covered street, wearing black rubber
biker‐style boots, a short black coat‐dress and a chunky tomato‐red scarf knotted at the
neck. As a look, it divides users who debate whether it is “very cool and sexy” (Sarah,
cited in The Sartorialist, February 3, 2013) or “spectacularly boring” (Andy, cited in The
Sartorialist, February 3, 2013). It is, however, her legs that attract the most attention.
Apparently bare, they produce a discussion that ranges from the weather to the wisdom
of braving deep winter without appropriate protection from the cold—practical issues
that do not intrude on the conventional fashion photograph with its license for fiction
and fantasy. Once users realize that the subject is not, in fact, bare‐legged, but wearing
“skin‐colored pantyhose” or “shimmery tights,” the conversation shifts to a question of
esthetics and taste—the tights are either “truly awful” (Juanita, cited in The Sartorialist.
February 3, 2013) or produce an effect that “is lovely in the sun” (James W, cited in The
Sartorialist, February 3, 2013). When fashionabiIity is introduced, it is done so tenta-
tively, posed as a question: “um, are shimmery sheer pantyhoses [sic] back??” (Ava, cited
in The Sartorialist, February 3, 2013). The inherently promiscuous nature of the com-
ment roll (one is tempted to call it “over‐written clothing”), still allows for the intrusion
of reality and esthetics (are the tights warm enough?, are they attractive?), but these
attributes do not detract from the “proper aim of description,” which is to “direct the
immediate and diffuse knowledge of image‐clothing through a mediate and specific
knowledge of Fashion” (Barthes 1983, p. 17). We can think of it this way: on being noted
or described, the ambiguity that exists in the photographed reality is removed and Ava’s
question becomes a statement that mirrors the caption of the fashion magazine: shim-
mery sheer pantyhose are back.
The intrusion of reality and the discussion of issues beyond the usual realm of the
fashion photograph evidenced in the example of “The Nine Streets, Amsterdam” con-
stitute a narrative around the social meanings of fashion that, Jess Berry (2010) has
argued, “‘re‐socialises’ fashion outside of the meanings provided by consumer capital-
ism ….” In another post on The Sartorialist, “Why Can’t I Buy Gloves Right Now?,” such
a narrative is instigated by Schuman himself when he bemoans:
It has been snowing all day today …. and yet, I can’t buy a pair of gloves in New
York City. There’s something wrong with this system. It seems super ridiculous
that the shops are full of Spring merchandise right now. Do you really want to be
buying shorts in this weather? (The Sartorialist, February 16, 2010)
In a flurry of comments, one or two users suggest Schuman himself plays a role in this
“system,” but many more commiserate, share their own experiences and offer helpful
suggestions as to where gloves could, indeed, be purchased. Such social communica-
tion, however, does not preclude a parallel or alternative narrative that invents or con-
structs a story around clothing as a desirable object of consumption. In her article

“Flaneurs of Fashion 2.0,” Berry cites Glennie and Thrift’s argument that “consumption
is primarily driven by ‘quasi‐personal contact and observation’ … rather than by instruc-
tion or advertising” (cited in Berry 2010). She goes on to make a case for a model of
consumption that is “increasingly driven by everyday people rather than designers or
the fashion press” (Berry 2010). Of more immediate interest, however, than this democ-
ratization‐of‐fashion refrain is the way in which a narrative of social communication
merges with a narrative of desire to replicate the commercial rationale that we expect of
the traditional editorial or advertising fashion photograph.
The photographed reality of “Why Can’t I Buy Gloves Right Now?” has no direct
relation to the written reality of the caption (http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/
why‐cant‐i‐buy‐gloves‐right‐now). In the photograph, what we see is an elegant woman,
her head and body blanketed by a large indigo‐blue shawl—an evocative and romantic
stylistic gesture that leaves only the hem of her skirt, her semi‐opaque stockinged legs
and her stiletto heels on view. Because she is walking away from the camera, the soles of
her shoes are visible; lacquered a hi‐gloss red, this “unexpected surprise” of color in an
image otherwise dominated by snow‐dappled inky tones “makes” the outfit. (As many
users point out, it is a detail that also “makes” the photo—it is one of Schuman’s best.)
264 Markets
True, it is snowing, but the subject’s hands are hidden; hence, the gloves exist only in the
caption. The misalignment between the written and photographed reality we observe in
“Why Can’t I Buy Gloves Right Now?” produces the sort of intriguing ambiguity that is
more often associated with creative commercial fashion photography than with street‐
style blogs which, predicated on “realness,” typically tell us what we are looking at.
Although we might reasonably expect the omission of a prominent feature or detail to
distance the spectator from identification with the fashion object, such an omission or
ambiguity, on the contrary, draws the spectator into “an enigmatic yet thrilling space
hovering between what we see and something unknown” (Maynard 2009). Thus
intrigued, the spectator is urged “to personalize her or his emotional involvement”
(Maynard 2009), producing alternative readings in a process that potentially creates as
many consumers as possible (Lehmann 2002, p. T16).
Again, this alternative reading unfolds in the living fabric of the blog. The red lac-
quered sole is of course, as fashion‐literate users are quick to point out, the trademark
of Christian Louboutin shoes, a signature detail famous enough to have been the sub-
ject of both a court‐case and its own feature film. For these user‐consumers, the red sole
communicates as directly as a logo or a brand name in an advertisement and represents
an iconic consumer object of desire that retails for around $1000. For others, perhaps
unfamiliar with the brand, the Louboutin trademark evokes a poetic response—the red
sole of the shoe is “like the hungry open mouth/of some darkened feral beast” (Hans,
cited in The Sartorialist, February 16, 2010) or it simply makes for “Nice shoes!!!!”
(Anonymous, cited in The Sartorialist, February 16, 2010). Either way, it is the detail
that enacts the necessary identification with the consumer object, transforming it “from
the picture plane to the realm of the commodity” (Lehmann 2002, p. T15). Through
such quasi‐personal contact and observation, spectators and users are instructed and
informed about Christian Louboutin shoes via a model of consumption that replicates
the commercial relation between fashion photograph and commodity that we expect in
advertisements or editorial spreads. Because of the truncated and repetitive nature of
the conversation on the street style fashion photography blog, this process of observa-
tion, identification, and instruction occurs over and over again, unraveling ambiguity,
directing desire, and constructing a narrative that returns us back to fashion photogra-
phy’s traditional motivation and back to its commercial heart.
Is Fashion Photography Art?

Fashion and art have always had a complicated relationship. Like photography before it
(see Chapter 25 in this volume), fashion has traditionally been marginalized by the art
world. Fashion photography, as not only a photograph but also a photograph operating
in the commercial realm of fashion, is a doubly marginalized form (Harrison 1991, p. 19;
O’Neill 2013, pp. 157–158). However, from initial forays in the 1970s (Williams 2008;
O’Neill 2013), fluidity and exchange between the two forms have led to the embrace of
fashion by art. Postmodernism played its part here. By dismantling the traditional hier-
archies that divide the categories of creativity and commerce, it allowed for fluidity
around the very definition of art (see Chapter 26 in this volume). For its part, fashion’s
status as “a life‐style symbol provider” (Wollen 1999) and its position as the most imme-
diately recognizable indicator of the excesses of consumerism and spectacle have
strengthened the conviction that it is a powerful sign of culture, worthy of sustained

critical and theoretical analysis. An often‐cited reference point in the blurring of the
boundary between art and fashion is the February 1982 issue of Artforum magazine,
which broke new ground by featuring on its cover a rattan bodice by the avant‐garde
designer Issey Miyake (Spindler 1996; Evans 2003, p. 70; Svendsen 2006, pp. 97–98).
Ever since, fashion and art have been “breathing the same air,” dancing around each
other in a relationship that is sometimes flirtation, sometimes seduction, sometimes
courtship, sometimes marriage. It is a relationship that David Bate has explained, with
reference to Freudian psychoanalysis, as neurotic (in Uhlírová 2004, p. 90). This is a
compelling notion, for as Markéta Uhlírová (2004, p. 90) writes,
… by persistently watching, making forays into, and deterritorializing one

another, art and fashion have become something of a unity, a potent confluence
looming over museums, galleries, style magazines, and design studios, causing
anxieties about their respective cultural validity and purpose.
Writing in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, Valerie Steele (2008, p. 8)
observed: “Along with the catwalk show and the retail store, the museum has become an
increasingly important site for fashion.” And Val Williams (2008, p. 217) has outlined a
convincing case for the relationship between fashion photography and the museum as
now “firmly established,” albeit “complicated (and sometimes compromised).” Fashion
may have taken up permanent residence at major art institutions and museums, such as
the V&A and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but traditional hierarchies and preju-
dices have a way of resurfacing. No‐one denies fashion’s blockbuster appeal, nor the
pulling power of the fashion image for institutions eager to shed their reputation as
“old‐fashioned, elitist (and usually empty)” (Williams 2008, p. 205). But critics are quick
to claim that the relationship is sustained, not by any inherent artistic merit that may
belong to fashion, but by the potent aphrodisiac of money, power, and glamor that it
exudes as its birthright. The relationship remains fraught with sensitivities. Even when
fashion is given equal billing to art, it can still be cast in the inferior role, with art quot-
ing, appropriating, and speaking about fashion from a “superior distance, rather than
falling for, or being led astray by fashion” (Uhlírová 2004, p. 92). Denied a clear voice in
the presence of the more “serious” discourse of art, for some, the conversation between
the two is “a dialogue that never happened” (Uhlírová 2004, p. 92).
So, where does this leave fashion photography? One place to start is to consider where
fashion photography and contemporary art photography cross over. Both, argue Susan
Kismaric and Eva Respini, have evolved against the backdrop of consumer culture and
an increasingly image‐saturated world. In what they describe as “a vibrant exchange”
(2004, p. 12) between the two mediums, art photography has absorbed commercial
photographic techniques; fashion photography, in turn, has been influenced by the
techniques, perceptions, and esthetic sensibilities of the art world. It helps that the fash-
ion photograph, unlike the fashion object, is less inflected by the immediate materiality
and functionality that is attached to things we wear. Operating within the world of rep-
resentation, the fashion image is more readily deciphered according to the conventions
of art criticism and its formal and conceptual concerns (framing, lighting, composition,
etc.). One early, brilliant, example of such criticism is Rosetta Brooks’ analysis of
Guy Bourdin’s lingerie catalog for the department store, Bloomingdale’s (Brooks
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1981)—proof, if ever it were needed, of the ability of the fashion photograph, in the
hands of the right practitioner and the right interpreter, to rise above the inherent
banality of its subject matter. Nevertheless, Brooks was an exception and, as with the
broader question of fashion and art, fashion photography’s status as art has been incon-
sistently addressed. And so, despite several excellent attempts to engage with the ques-
tion since the turn of the century, it is one that remains open.
Historically, the exchange between the two was all one‐way, with fashion photogra-
phy consistently pillaging the esthetic style and even subject matter of “art photogra-
phy.” During the legendary reign of Carmel Snow (as editor) and Alexey Brodovitch (as
art director) at Harper’s Bazaar, photojournalists and “art” photographers were actively
sought and encouraged to shoot fashion. A similar approach was taken by Diana
Vreeland and her art director, Alexander Liberman, at Vogue. Martin Munkácsi, Man
Ray, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, William Klein, and Robert Frank are among those who
shot fashion (with varying degrees of willingness) from the 1930s on. Avedon and Penn,
the “greats” of fashion photography’s so‐called golden years in the 1950s and 1960s,
were able to successfully follow dual paths, separating their fashion and commercial
photography from more personal projects. In the 1970s, photographers such as Helmut
Newton and Deborah Turbeville did the same. But as a general rule, fashion photogra-
phers have been reluctant to call what they do art with a capital “A.” The exhibition,
Shots of Style, held at the V&A in 1985 was a collection of “great fashion photographs
chosen by David Bailey,” but Bailey himself remained ambivalent about a practice he
described as “shifting frocks” (cited in Harrison 1991, p. 214). Guy Bourdin, who helped
define fashion photography in the 1970s, is recognized as being incredibly influential
and the template for many others, but once he had achieved commercial success in the
“perishable media,” he turned his back on the art market, and made no effort to con-
serve his vast œuvre beyond storing photographs in shoeboxes. Wolfgang Tillmans was
one of those most responsible for the crossover between art and fashion in the 1990s,
but by the end of the decade, now operating exclusively as a visual artist, he denounced
fashion photography as “completely conservative” (cited in Williams 2008, p. 213). From
the start, the attitude of art and photography critics was equally dismissive. Reviewing
the 1975 exhibition, “Fashion Photography: Six Decades” for The New York Times, the
art critic Hilton Kramer, writes Alistair O’Neill, “was unwavering in his view that fash-
ion photography was undeserving of the kind of critical engagement offered by a gal-
lery” (2013, p. 149). Similarly, Martin Harrison (1991, p. 19) cites as representative of
the times the view expressed by Jonathan Green that “the end result of fashion photog-
raphy is not art, but increased sales and corporate control.”
The 1990s stand out as a breakthrough moment for fashion photography, with work
that genuinely broke new ground and permanently changed the notion of what a fash-
ion photograph could be. If contemporary art photography reflected the sheen and
glamor of the fashion image, fashion photography increasingly looked beyond the her-
metic world of fashion, engaging with and explicitly referring to broader social and
cultural issues, as well as turning a critical eye upon itself and its subject matter. The
generation of fashion photographers that emerged in the final decade of the twentieth
century was steeped in a different visual culture from its predecessors and the photog-
raphers took as reference points the music and club scene of their own lives. The stage
had been set in the 1980s by independent style magazines, such as The Face and i‐D,
which provided an alternative to mainstream fashion magazines with their
supermodels and the impossible perfection of aspirational ideals. Already, pop, punk,
and “the street” had “bubbled up” to the catwalk, and now street style—and youth
culture in general—emerged from the shadows to become the driving force behind
fashion. This shift was accelerated by a new breed of designer—often graduates of art
schools—who engaged with fashion on an experimental and conceptual level, harness-
ing its inherent taste for fantasy and ambiguity, while also deconstructing the fashion
garment itself and unpicking the tightly stitched narrative of fashion’s past to expose a
history of objectification, exploitation, misogyny, and industrial commoditization.
In this atmosphere, the critical rhetoric of the fashion image in the 1990s followed
two broad stylistic trends. The first sought to incorporate “the distilled signs of ‘real’
life” —personal histories, meanings, and fashion (Cotton 2000, p. 6). This esthetic wore
heavily the influence of individual artists like Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, and
Richard Prince, and though numerous fashion photographers, including Corinne Day,
Alexei Hay, Glen Luchford, Craig McDean, David Sims, Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson,
and Mario Sorrenti produced work of lasting significance, in less sure hands, the
demand for images that were street‐savvy, grungy, and over‐the‐top eventually devolved
into the debased form of “heroin chic” (Wallerstein 1998; Arnold 1999; Jobling 1999;
Evans 2003). Running parallel to this approach from the middle of the decade was its
opposite—the hypertrophic artifice of “the impossible image” —which used computer
technology and digital manipulation. Created by skilled photographers such as Nick
Knight, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Vincent Peters, Phil Poynter,
Rankin, and Ellen von Unwerth, the aspirational ideal and fantasy world of the conven-
tional fashion photograph was given a contemporary twist, atomized to produce images
that went “beyond perfection” (de Perthuis 2008). In both instances, fashion photogra-
phers were served by conditions that allowed them to work with freelance stylists and
without the commercial constraints imposed by the mainstream publications’ respon-
sibility to advertisers. Taking advantage of the affordances of desktop publishing, there
was an explosion of independent fashion and style magazines. Publications such as
Purple, Self‐Service, doingbird, Oyster, and Dutch joined more established independent
titles in taking for granted the intersection of fashion, music, art, and design, collaborat-
ing with contemporary art photographers, such as Cindy Sherman, Goldin, Tillmans,
Larry Sultan, Tina Barney, and Philip‐Lorca diCorcia, as well as allowing young photog-
raphers the space to create experimental and innovative work. Design houses Prada,
Miu Miu, Matsuda, Alexander McQueen, and mass‐market brands Sisley and Diesel (to
name a few) also stand out at this time for their willingness to go beyond the surface of
fashion and “explore the proper meaning of the word: the notion of change, the shifting
concept of beauty, and the ironic refusal and subversion of tradition—both social and
visual” (Lehmann 2002, p. T5).
Eventually, the best (or most representative) of this work found its way to the gallery
wall in a number of important fashion photography exhibitions: Look at Me: Fashion
and Photography 1960 to the Present (1998), Imperfect Beauty: The Making of
Contemporary Fashion Photographs (2000), Chic Clicks (2002), Fashioning Fiction in
Photography since 1990 (2004), and Face of Fashion (2007). At the beginning of the new
millennium, so deeply enmeshed were art and fashion that the question was raised: had
art swallowed fashion, or had fashion invaded art (Campbell, cited in Hartley 2007,
p. 562)? Whatever the position, it is one that has served to underpin the “intelligent big
bucks editorial photography” that Penny Martin (in Smyth 2010) suggests characterizes
268 Markets
the cutting edge of fashion photography in the first decade of the twenty‐first century.
Knight, Teller, Luchford, Paulo Roversi, as well as Tim Walker, Stephen Meisel, Nadav
Kander, Viviane Sassen, Miles Aldridge, Erik Madigan Heck, Sølve Sundsbø, Mert Alas,
and Marcus Piggot are only some of those who could be named as producing advertis-
ing campaigns and editorial spreads of a complexity and skill that compete with con-
temporary art photography in both relevance and conceptual sophistication.
And yet, the ontology of fashion photography—its primary existence as a commis-
sioned image—always disturbs its glossy surface. Intentionality counts. Fashion photog-
raphy is not created as art. It is only after the fact that it arrives on the gallery wall or is
packaged into “commodified style statements for the secondary art market” (O’Neill
2013, p. 152). Nonetheless, wherever one stands on the question of its status, what can-
not be ignored is that the fashion photograph remains an invasive global icon that pro-
motes the commodification of women and men and stands accused of being “the most
aesthetically advanced form of … the spectacle in the service of capitalist domination”
(Zahm 2002, p. T32). Fashion photography’s industrial base, as the founding editor of
Purple, Olivier Zahm (p. T34), reminds us, anchors it to the comfortably familiar, dead-
ening, effects of “the illusory, alienated world of consumerist glamour.” In an essay in the
catalog of Chic Clicks, he goes to the heart of the matter: “Even the best fashion photog-
raphy is still an industry in service of an industry … Hence most fashion photography is
applied art, commercial art, interchangeable art destined for the trash can along with
the magazines in which it appears” (p. T29).
In his essay, Zahm called for a new type of fashion photography, one that might turn
against itself and question its own rhetoric and, certainly, on the pages of Purple and in
the Chic Clicks exhibition, what stands out is a breaking of the “rules” of fashion photog-
raphy. Indeed, common to the rhetoric surrounding the fashion image’s successful “inva-
sion” of the art gallery and museum at the turn of the century is a series of denials which
encompass everything we commonly associate with the conventional fashion photo-
graph—clothes, beauty, ideals, professionalism, glamor and, even, fashion. It begins with
Val Williams’ opening essay in the catalog to the exhibition Look At Me. Under the title,
“Fashion was the least important thing,” she writes that “Close investigation of contem-
porary fashion photography suggests that it does not really exist” (1998, p. 100) —an
obviously rhetorical claim that nonetheless bleeds into Lehmann’s assertion that the
contemporary fashion photograph is “largely unconnected to the manufacture and sell-
ing of clothes” (2002, p. T12). Charlotte Cotton, the curator of Imperfect Beauty, backs
this up, noting the introduction of DIY fashion and the use of model’s or stylist’s own
clothes, the proliferation of non‐professional models, and an overall questioning of
beauty stereotypes. Zahm goes further, railing against the production of “beautiful”
images and the rules of esthetics. On the other hand, equally instructive is what is not
denied. Fashion’s commercial interests, writes Lehmann, work both for and against the
erosion of borders between art and fashion; and, for Zahm, they are at once its limitation
and its central characteristic, both its strength and its weakness. Finally, more recently,
Cotton has warned that fashion photography rejects its commercial origins at its peril.
The trend to re‐purposing the fashion image for the art gallery, she argues, risks turning
it into “this slightly pretentious rarefied object that doesn’t carry the energy of what it
means to be a fashion photographer working in the industry” (cited in Smyth 2010).
The fashion photograph, it seems, cannot be unhooked from its commercial, indus-
trial base. Where that leaves us then is this: the crossover, the exchange, the blurring of
the border, the relationship between fashion and art is firmly established. Of course,
fashion will continue to channel art—and art will continue to channel fashion; from
where we are now, there is no going back. But instead of an annoying relationship,
punctuated by denial, where the voice of one partner goes unheard, where all the com-
plexity, all the strength, is given over to art, why not accept fashion for what it is? Could
we not at least agree to leave fashion photography’s status as art an open question? If we
accept it as both “art” and “non‐art,” we could then pose a different question—or a dif-
ferent set of questions. What does it mean for the fashion photograph to be categorized
as “art”? How might an art context actually have the effect of confining fashion photog-
raphy? What gets lost when fashion photographic practice is viewed through the lens of
contemporary art?2 Moreover, when considering the significance of fashion photogra-
phy in the broader field of cultural production, why not give credit to fashion photogra-
phy’s skillful negotiation of the balancing act it continually performs between commerce
and creativity, between art and non‐art, between the business suit and the beret? What
fashion photography does without parallel, without equal, is always exist in the present,
while simultaneously trying to imagine the future. Once created, it immediately
becomes a visual record of the soon‐to‐be past. This dance with time is a very hard
thing to do—and it is not often acknowledged because, like all skillful performers, fash-
ion photography makes it look effortless. Propelled by the need to constantly reinvent
itself, it doesn’t care if it falls. In this, its “ephemerality” saves it; because it doesn’t need
to last, doesn’t need to mean something, doesn’t need immortality, it has a license to be
radical—sometimes more radical, even, than art.
Conclusion
For most of its history, the fashion photograph has existed as a commercial image,
either as an advertisement or as editorial content in magazines. Over the past five dec-
ades, some of the “best” of this enormous image‐bank has found its way into mono-
graphs and edited collections or been re‐sited in the museum or on the gallery wall.
Having finally broached the fiercely defended barricade that divided the categories of
commerce and art, in the twenty‐first century, the fashion image—true to its reputation
as a restless form—traverses and complicates a different set of categories. In the vast,
decentralized, and fragmented terrain of the Internet, the fashion magazine is no longer
the default position for the production or the consumption of fashion photography.
While the majority of creative or innovative fashion photography continues to be pro-
duced by professionals for initial publication in the traditional form of print media,
brands are increasingly developing and releasing Instagram‐only campaigns (Sherman
2018). Two formerly minor categories of fashion photography—catwalk documentation
and street‐style—are published directly online, in the first instance, making fashion
information immediately accessible and, in the second, recalibrating the network of
influence between fashion markets and media.
Fashion brands and publications continue to produce new advertising campaigns and
editorial content, as well as opening up access to archival imagery, adding to an endless
stream of fashion photographs created, published, or embedded by amateurs and pro-
fessionals, from bloggers and influencers to museums and end‐consumers. Complicating
any categorization of “amateur” sites as being “non‐commercial” is the tendency of the
270 Markets
industry to target any niche that could be transformed into an engaged consumer base,
as key players are invited to partner with brands and monetize their audience (see
Connell 2013; Lewis 2015; Luvaas 2016; Findlay 2017). E‐commerce systems (such as
shoppable apps or “click and buy” technology) are changing the ways in which fashion
can be marketed and purchased online. Any image is now potentially a commercial
image (BOF Team 2017; Sherman 2018), fulfilling the prediction that “the entire web
could start to look like a radically decentralized marketplace, where any encounter with
a piece of inspiring content can become a sale” (Kansara 2012).
While critical study of the rapidly evolving field of the digital production and con-
sumption of fashion imagery has gathered pace (see Mora and Rocamora 2015;
Rocamora 2017; de Perthuis and Findlay 2019), scholarly consideration of the most
recent technological developments is currently under‐theorized. Closely related to
fashion photography, and also offering scope for further research, is the field of moving
images—the online fashion film, webcam, and interactive media. From early experi-
mental, technologically‐driven, and non‐commercial projects (showcased on
SHOWstudio, the forum launched by Nick Knight and initially edited by Penny Martin),
the fashion film has gone from an “extra aesthetic indulgence” (Beard 2008, p. 184) to an
essential element of any major brand campaign or collection, with practitioners from
fashion, art, and film backgrounds collaborating to contribute to a medium that, it has
been argued, redefines the fashion image as no longer “still” (see Khan 2012; Uhlírová
2013). SHOWstudio remains a pioneer and innovator in the field of digital fashion
imagery, multimedia technology, user‐generated content, and the merging of social
media platforms with official content, engaging with a future that the digital strategist
Vikram Alexei Kansara has argued will be defined by “lots of little experiments” (Kansara
2009). In one such “experiment,” the Spring–Summer 2015 issue of AnOther Magazine
merged print and video, physical magazine and digital platform, moving image and still,
when it released a limited edition box set that comprised a digital cover with a video
directed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.
Notwithstanding this state of experimentation, flux, and promiscuity of genre,
traditional issues concerning the content of fashion photography remain relevant. The
politics of representation, issues of diversity, questions of identity, the commodification
of women and men and the field of men’s fashion photography—as well as its role in
broader economic, esthetic, cultural, social, and political contexts—all continue to offer
avenues for further research. The numerous contexts, formats, mediums, and function-
alities of the fashion photograph have not altered its fundamental nature, which remains
an alchemical mix of creativity and commerce. Sharing the imperative to invent some-
thing other, something new, and the endless quest to imagine the future while creating
desire for a soon‐to‐be‐forgotten present, fashion cannot be understood without fash-
ion photography. In the fashion photograph, a compelling, mysterious, unexplained
world of fragmented narratives unfolds; it is here that we see fashion’s imagination in
action. The fashion photograph is an image of fashion as its ideal self.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Bronwyn Clark‐Coolee for her generous suggestions
and useful comments on an early version of this chapter.
Notes
1 An excerpt from this section appeared in the article, “People in Fashionable Clothes:
Street Style Blogs and the Ontology of the Fashion Photograph” (de Perthuis 2016), and is
published here with the kind permission of Fashion Theory.
2 My model here is provided by the curator Charlotte Cotton, whose introductory ques-
tions at a panel discussion held at LACMA on the “intentionally dumb” question, “Is
Photography Really Art?,” can be usefully adapted to the current discussion. The original
questions posed by Cotton were: “How are artists who work with photography asked or
conditioned to categorize themselves and their practices? What does it mean for a photo-
graph to be categorized as ‘contemporary art’? Is something indeed lost or misunderstood
about the plurality of photographic practice when viewed through the lens of contempo-
rary art? How might an art context actually have the effect of confining or redefining the
history of photography?” (Cotton 2009, p. 27).
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Further Reading
Conekin, B. (2000). Fashioning the playboy: messages of style and masculinity in the pages
of Playboy magazine, 1953–1963. Fashion Theory 4 (4): 447–466. An accessible account
of the early representation of the fashionable male.
Ditner, J. (ed.) (2009). Dress Codes: The Third Triennial of Photography and Video. New
York: International Centre of Photography A photographic essay curated by the
International Centre of Photography as part of ICP’s Year of Fashion. Explores the
notion of clothing and personal style, featuring works from the nineteenth century
through to the first decade of the new millennium.
Herschdorfer, N. (2012). Coming Into Fashion: A Century of Photography at Condé Nast.
London: Thames & Hudson. Images from the archives of Condé Nast, the publisher of
Vogue, Vanity Fair and Glamour, published in conjunction with the international touring
exhibition of the same name (2012–2017).
Loreck, H. (2002). De/constructing fashion/fashions of deconstruction: Cindy Sherman’s
fashion photographs. Fashion Theory 6 (3): 255–275. An insightful analysis of dress, art
and the gendered body in relation to Cindy Sherman’s fashion advertising and editorial
photographs.
Maynard, M. (2009). What is “Australian” fashion photography?—A dilemma. Fashion

Theory 13 (4): 443–460. A thoughtful and accessible exploration of mid‐twentieth‐
century fashion photography in the Australian context.
Mora, E. and Rocamora, A. (Eds.) (2015). Fashion Theory 19(2). A special issue on fashion
blogs, with contributions by international scholars in the field.
Sanders, M., Poynter, P., and Derrick, R. (2000). The Impossible Image: Fashion Photography
in the Digital Age. London: Phaidon. A compilation of the innovative work of
practitioners working with digital technology at the end of the millennium.
Smedley, E. (2000). Escaping to reality: fashion photography in the 1990s. In: Fashion
Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis (ed. S. Bruzzi and P. Church‐Gibson),
143–156. London: Routledge. An excellent introduction to the documentary realist style
of fashion photography in the 1990s. Includes a discussion of Corinne Day’s
controversial images of model Kate Moss before she became the icon of a generation.
Troy, N. (2003). Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. An accessible analysis of the links between modernist art and fashion in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that provides a model for a sophisticated
approach to the critique of the art/fashion relationship in the current era.

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253

A Companion to Photography, First Edition. Edited by Stephen Bull.

nonetheless, remains defined by the representation of women’s fashion. From 1980,

The Changing World of the Fashion Photograph

Fashion only exists in representation … Clothing is elevated from its material

What Is a Fashion Photograph?

How Fashion Works in the Street Style Blog1

As an illustration of how this works in the traditional format of a magazine, an edito-

structs a story around clothing as a desirable object of consumption. In her article

Is Fashion Photography Art?

strengthened the conviction that it is a powerful sign of culture, worthy of sustained

… by persistently watching, making forays into, and deterritorializing one

php?journal_id=152 (accessed June 20, 2016.

chapter‐of‐content‐and‐commerce‐integration.html (accessed June 20, 2016).

Luvaas, B. (2016). Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging. London: Bloomsbury

London: I.B. Tauris.

Maynard, M. (2009). What is “Australian” fashion photography?—A dilemma. Fashion

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