A Fine Romance

'The job of the fashion editor is to "show" the clothes. That is, after all, why the public buys our magazines. Our needs are simple. We want a photographer to take a dress, make the girl look pretty, give us lots of images to choose from, and not give us any attitude. Photographers - if they are any good - want to create art.'

Anna Wintour, Preface to The Idealizing Vision.1

In the 50s, there was a move towards naturalism in fashion photography. Chic, in the genteel sense, was under attack. Ironically, the result of this change was to make glamour more glamourous. After the 60s, when naturalism became pure realism, the way was paved for the abstract. But always, it seemed, the world of fashion existed in another place. Technique, no matter how brutal, never took fashion off its rather ridiculous pedestal. Today, when a fashion photograph quite frequently doesn't show any clothes at all, one still has the feeling that one is looking at a banal suggestion of glamour. The reason for this, I suspect, is that fashion, constitutionally, must place itself 'above' us. In short, fashion is a show-off.

Serious fashion photography is used to show 'High Fashion'. The cost of a garment, for some reason, is supposed to increase its artistic validity. In terms of art, however, I would suggest that the coloured display-panels, as used in Marks & Spencers are more interesting, and more immediate, than anything printed in Vogue. The mass-market, you see, must use direct communication; it must be 100% efficient. As a consequence of this, it presents clean, uncluttered, figurative images. The impact of 'Another Swedish Blonde from Hennes', or the 'Twentieth Century Boy' Levi jeans commercial, is far more successful, as art, than either the posturing of I-D magazine or the 'lonely girl in a bar in Venice' photo-pictorials which the glossy magazines rely upon. Fashion, in my opinion, is too self-conscious to be allowed to photograph itself; the self-obsession which fashion embodies must be described from the outside. As the last bastion of pure capitalism, fashion will never possess the objectivity to describe itself artistically. Thus, making a serious photographer take pictures of clothes is rather like getting a novelist to work in Hollywood.

But this argument is not offered in the spirit of artistic superiority. I am writing here as a consumer. From Avedon, through Bailey, Donovan, Turbeville and Bruce Weber, some remarkable images have been produced from fashion. And yet they all seem to tell the same irritating story. In the world of fashion, the fashionable individual must transcend their surroundings; the clothes, as if by magic, must lift one away from dull reality, and recreate oneself as a partly mythic figure. And this is where the narrative fails. As with all successful fiction, one departs from reality at one's peril. Even magic realism, as a form of fiction, has worldly values at its source. I am reminded of Virginia Woolf's comment about Desmond McCarthy: 'But why did [he] never do anything?' Is this unfair to those photographers who have dedicated their lives to photographing clothes? Not so. In the world of fashion, criticism from outsiders is of no interest.

Theorists, of course, could have a field day with fashion photography. In The Idealizing Vision many have done so. In terms of sheer mind-numbing stupidity, what statement (about fashion photography) could be more pretentious than: 'Who can say that these photographs of beautiful women don't mysteriously affect the harvest, the weather, and global politics?'2 Gustave Flaubert once wrote that he knew of no political regime which was more painful than tooth-ache. In this, he acknowledged a subtle truth. Glenn O'Brien, on the other hand, has fallen under the Comus-like spell of fashion photography as erotica, and, in the process, seems to have lost his reason. The world is full of beautiful women; some are better-dressed than others. Fashion sterilises beauty when it gets half the chance. How many rubber-lipped bimbos and boys posing as bad method actors does one have to see in order to believe this? The determination, amongst fashion photographers, to capture the moment of longing (Stendhal refers to it as 'Crystallization' in his (still neglected) masterpiece of 1822: De L'Amour) will be the very quality which destroys both beauty and longing. It is for this reason that Michel Arnaud, who simply takes photographs of cat-walk shows, is most probably the best fashion photographer in the world. He creates a documentary as opposed to a costume drama.

There is only one hope left for fashion photography: to make use of Personalities. I suspect that we are witnessing the beginnings of this practice. Who can forget the memorable advertisements for 'Pepsi and Shirley at Top Shop' in 1988? Here we saw wit, irony, and objectivity. Such a move was worthy of Warhol. 'Gap' have attempted to continue the process, but their choice of London Transport buses as moving billboard has rather defeated them. Fresh hope springs from the cover of UK Vogue, December 1991 upon which we find HRH The Princess of Wales, photographed by Patrick Demarchelier. Not only does the Princess look beautiful, unaffected, and graceful, but she is also wearing black. The Princess of Wales, dressed in black, smiling off the cover of Vogue, makes this photograph one of the most successful images of the century. It ought, by rights, to be bought for (or given to) the Nation.

On a slightly lower perch, we find Vanessa Paradis, looking remarkably like a sullen attendant on the 'Clinique' counter in Selfridges, on the cover of The Face magazine, for December 1991. Not having the style of Princess Diana, Vanessa is wearing a rather frumpy turtle-neck (which she possibly knitted herself) but her appearance as the 'bird-cage girl' for Coco Chanel, suggests that we might be greeting a new super-model. The point of these two celebrity 'models', is that they bring with them a certain amount of gravitas and vigour. As signifiers, they embody their own narratives, and can thus be set (like Derrida's texts in Glas) to confront the garments they are wearing.

Fashion is taken seriously because it takes itself seriously. That it takes itself too seriously is the reason that it cannot, ever, become art. To be fashionable is a slender ambition. Photographers beware.

1. The Idealizing Vision; The Art of Fashion Photography. Published by Aperture, 1991

2. 'Pink Thoughts' Glenn O'Brien. From: The Idealizing Vision

Fashion, above all else, is an aspirational concept. Fashion is there to make us feel better about ourselves. Fashion seeks to create a moment of longing between a garment and its market. It is the job of the fashion photographer to describe this moment of longing. This can be achieved with varying degrees of sophistication.

Fashion tells stories. Usually, these stories, in essence, are little more than a bundle of clichés: insipid romantic novellas concerned with the triumph of glamour. At root, most fashion is extremely simple, pandering to the lowest fantasies of human nature. In many ways, fashion is a comedy, not dissimilar to Billy Liar. Photographers, confronted with fashion, must somehow make old stories seem interesting again. The best fashion photographers achieve this by experimenting with technique. To a non-photographer, however, fashion images continue to blur into one. The technique of fashion photography (to all intents an erudite science) is as boring to the public as how dance records are made.

No one cares, really, about the shifts in trends between Italian, American, and British fashion photographers. No one, that is, save other fashion photographers. What is left are the models and the clothes: simple, instant-gratification qualities. When we look at a fashion photograph, we don't give it very long to justify itself. We use fashion photographs, ruthlessly. Secretly, we have a rather low opinion of them. To the outsider, fashion is an arrogant, self-obsessed world. Much of our hostility towards fashion is derived from envy. We are all wannabes, in the face of fashion; most of us, sadly, are will-never-bes.