Current fashion photography is not chiefly concerned with an obvious presentation of a specific dress, jacket, or pants. In the fashion photographs by Sean Ellis, Luis Sanchis, and Nick Knight, for example, clothing is subtlety present, even secondary; the images create a certain attitude, mood, or impression rather than sell a specific item of clothing. Indeed, the photograph, more than the fashion represented, entices consumers and creates a magazine or label's public persona.
Free from expectations to present fashion in a purely descriptive manner, contemporary fashion photography increasingly reflects the photographer's personal interpretation or vision. Often, today's fashion photography references or comments on the medium itself. For instance, many photographers consciously subvert the viewers' expectations of fashion photography--glamour, perfection, and visual seduction. Fashion sells dreams, it creates atmosphere and it wants to provoke… to show this kind of pictures is the emergence of many independent and progressive fashion magazines, such as iD, face, Purple, Dutch, Dazed and Confused, and self service, from the mid-to-late 1980s, has been influential in bringing fashion photography and contemporary art increasingly close together. The magazines, which feature experimental and avant-garde photography, often place art photography and fashion editorials side by side, without clear divisions between the two. In addition, many of these magazines have been responsible for commissioning fashion editorials from photographers better known as fine artists. But otherwise these magazines offer a high level of creative freedom, providing experimental fashion photography a place in a popular medium. In the beginning the Face, for example, was largely free of the demands of advertisers, consequently evolving into a magazine that publishes the sort of imagery that industry of mainstream fashion magazines were ignoring. Emerging from this unique culture were photographers such as Juergen Teller, Nick Knight, David Sims and Wolfgang Tilmans. In the late nineties this breed of fashion photography has become widely spread making fashion more exciting and more accessable to different kind of people. The Face’s fashion photography fore-runners of the moment are Sean Ellis, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Mario Testino and Schoerner.
Fashion and women
When I took my pictures I recognized that it’s much more easier to take pictures of women than of men. There are more pictures to look at it’s very seldom to find pictures of men in fashion magazines. Also it’s more easier to cerate a scene for women, there are more accecoirs, better and bigger choices of clothes. Most of the people in the course who showed me their pictures illustrated women. I asked me why it is like that:
Clothes, the things that intervene between our naked selves and the world, affect our sense of both. They speak for - or against - us in complex, sometimes unpredictable ways, and they speak even when we are silent. 'Dressed in a tramp's clothes,' George Orwell, quoted by Judith Watt, observed, 'it is very difficult . . . not to feel that you are genuinely degraded.' The hope that a change of clothes will actually redress our situation is not therefore entirely vain, in either sense of the word.
In the 20th century, of which three of these books offer surveys, the appearance of men altered relatively little while women's was transformed. An Edwardian office clerk meeting his modern counterpart in the City would know him at once, even without a hat. His wife, however, would be thunderstruck by a trip to Selfridges, for so much of female clothing has been invented since her day, including things it is hard now to believe were 'invented' at all. Among the innovations of the last hundred years are knickers with a closed crotch; separates (tops and skirts that could be worn in different combinations); trousers; and, the great couturier Paul Poiret's stroke of genius, a dress that a woman could put on without assistance.
This discrepancy between women's experience and men's may be one reason why dress has come to be seen as a predominantly female subject, or at least one that is expressed in female terms. It is common enough to find books which purport to be about some universal aspect of human experience but turn out, on closer inspection, to be mostly about men. In the glass of fashion, however, all is reversed. Mendes and de la Haye write in their introduction that fashion is 'an indicator of individual, group and sexual identity' whose 'fluidity reflects shifts in the social matrix'; yet of the 280 illustrations that follow, nearly 250 are of women.
High fashion, defined by Oscar Wilde as 'a form of ugliness so unbearable that we are compelled to alter it every six months', has been a predominantly female phenomenon since the late 18th century. For reasons historians tend to associate plausibly if vaguely with the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the ever emerging middle class, male dress has been relatively sober and static for two hundred years. What happened in the 20th century, Judith Watt suggests in her introduction to Fashion Writing, was that the whole subject of clothes came to be seen as feminine or effeminate. For whatever reason, however, it is true that the average heterosexual man, once he hits middle age, becomes wary of expressing an interest in clothes, his own or anyone else's. He is not unaware of them, merely inarticulate. There are certain key garments - dinner jacket, shell suit, cardigan - on which he will know at once where he stands. But when he wants to project his physical identity on the world, drop designer names and spend thousands of pounds on useless accessories, he does it with a car. His role in the insider-out world of fashion where women and homosexuals (and, since the late Fifties, the young) are in apparent charge, is oblique.
It is sometimes suggested that fashion is either something inflicted by men on women or that it is engaged in by women for the benefit of men. Neither is usually true, nor do the proponents of such ideas fall into predictable political camps. Joan Smith, quoted by Watt, blows John Berger's famous dictum that 'men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at' smartly out of the water as just another male fantasy. If they are interested in clothes, women look at other women, because their clothes are more interesting. It might be truer to say that fashionable women's clothes were, for most of the century, the area in which certain aesthetic and social ideas concerning both sexes found their expression.
