Throughout the course of my curatorial journey, the relationship between fashion and photography has fascinated me. For many, fashion photography’s worth is low on the perceived pyramid of cultural value because of its almost magpie-like gathering of stories and relativity from the world at large, but for me, its porousness is central to the artistry of its most relevant cultural moments. Fashion’s storytelling can be forward-facing and positively disruptive – a predictive cultural force that visualizes the future, catalyzed by economic booms and crashes, cultural politics, and technological shifts.
Working at the Victoria and Albert Museum – the archetypal depository of all manner of human endeavour, including photography and fashion – in the early 1990s gave me the professional calling card to discover a creative industry in full flow. I arrived late to the first flush of London-based photographers, stylists, hair and makeup artists, models, fashion designers, and art directors shifting the cultural parameters and narratives of fashion image culture, but I was in time to chart their ascendance and global impact, recording life-story interviews that are housed in the British Library Sound Archive. By doing the fieldwork of going to studios, darkrooms, and offices, I learnt a history of 1990s and early 2000s fashion photography as it unfolded.
In the fast about-turns of fashion image-making, each epoch has its militating factors. New narratives within 1980s fashion photography were being shaped by club culture and independent magazines in London such as The Face, i-D, and BLITZ. These non-binary, gender fluid style magazines had the cultural reach and a gravitational pull for young image-makers who were still at least a decade away from being matched by an ecosystem of galleries that could support photographic practices that were part of the discourses of contemporary art. Editorial fashion photography was still an essentially analogue and “in-camera” process of chasing and capturing an image made first with a test Polaroid. There was time for young image-makers to forge their risk-taking, collaborative relationships with stylists and models, and to fully realize their editorial ideas thanks to far-sighted art and creative directors. A magazine editor who was starting out in the 1980s told me that the greatest patron of the arts in Britain had been the government – the bureaucratic source of housing benefits that covered the low rent payments that made it possible for a generation of young, predominantly working-class artists and performers to stay out of gainful employment and instead to hone their creative talents. The 1990s saw fashion’s commercial centres of New York, Paris, and Milan attempting to translate the visual narratives of a disruptively post-punk, anti-establishment generation of image-makers and fashion designers. Some of the emergent talents successfully negotiated paths into the heart of commercial fashion and brought new frames of reference for beauty and gender into the mainstream. The merging of hip-hop and skateboarding cultures in America and Japan took form in the 1990s and foretold the phenomenal rise of luxury streetwear. It ushered in new communication paradigms of viral campaigns and “drops,” and modelled how the power of the personal “brand” would drive the massive commercial growth areas of menswear – seemingly bypassing the often hasty tokenism, gender binarism, and rampant cultural bias of the fashion system.
At the turn of the new millennia, there were the first highly experimental proposals for how digital space would be the next creative terrain and also reconfigure the cultural meaning of fashion’s analogue and real-time constituent parts, which include the printed editorial “well” of magazines through to the glorious performativity of runway shows. The prospect of a creatively led era of fashion image-making in the 2000s was soon dashed in the wake of 9/11 and the concomitant return to conservative values. There was corporate caution about commissioning visual experimentation and a temporary jettisoning of fashion’s old standbys of sex and death as the relatable narrative tropes that could raise American consumer desire. By the mid-2000s, the digital carousel had arrived on fashion shoots – a large screen showing the digital capture of each shot, live on set. Viewable by an expanding congregation of fashion clients and the management of the almost pre-requisite celebrity talent in front of the camera, the selecting and editing of campaign imagery was now performed in real time; it was no longer the exclusive preserve of the photographer and art director, and hair, makeup, or creases could all be “fixed in post [production],” as they say. Shoot schedules became shorter, and the list of so-called deliverables became longer, including B-roll video footage, e-commerce banners, and online interactivity as brands began to deal with how to fill the seemingly unquenchable need for media content.
We are now in a social landscape of hyper-commercialization, where boundaryless fusions of performance and entertainment drive our vast media ecology, and in a time of thresholded exclusivity and VIP access within an overwhelming spectrum of audience experiences in a streaming-driven world of content. “Live shopping” and “Shop” features are becoming naturalized consumer behaviours where scrolling and buying literally become one and the same via a swipe. It is unclear whether luxury fashion will adopt the technological and e-commercial mechanics currently deployed by its categorically unsustainable close relative of fast fashion, but the 2020s mark an existential moment in the transfiguration of luxury fashion and its visual storytelling. As a dynamic system of rapid pendulum swings, fashion image-making is simultaneously resistant and receptive to reflecting upon what it ultimately, actively aims to achieve with its “cultural play.” There have been countless interlocutors in similar situations within the past forty years who have spoken directly – and in chorus – to their moment in time. In addition, since the early twentieth century, artists and talents have actively responded to cultural change and the disorientation of an “image explosion” and its implication of seeing and communicating in new ways. It remains beholden upon image-makers to attune to the complexity of creating at a scale and with such resonance that matches, to paraphrase Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway’s 1984 manifesto, what society’s cynicism, exploitation, and quest for Media Impact Value™ has the potential to destroy.¹