Fashion photography is the staging of a written play whose main parts are lost. A good fashion photograph does not tell a story – it provides a seductive surface of signs that evokes a story in its viewers’ minds.
Fashion as free play
The same is true for fashion as such: fashion isn’t a narrative in itself, it induces multiple narrations of different kinds. Fashion as a sign-surface doesn’t provide any distinct intrinsic meaning, but it is open to fluctuating assets of meaning according to how, where and when it is worn.
Fashion as a free play (I don’t speak about its merely functional aspects here, neither about an exclusively upper-class phenomenon) is neither a substantial nor a ‘lexical’ phenomenon, it is a structural and social one. That is to say it is not working symbolically in the way in which every word of a certain language has a specific meaning that all members of the linguistic community understand; it is on the contrary a loose system of indices where symbolical meaning can be temporarily linked, but never permanently attached. At its heart, fashion is anti-totalitarian, though it can be adapted by totalitarian purposes (remember e.g. how various regimes use fashion to create a rigid and enclosed aesthetics of power).
It is a main principle of fashion and one of its most subversive strengths that it can reverse any usurpation by appropriating the symbols of power and de-symbolizing them into an iconic-indexical play of cuts, colors and forms: the current military shapes that we saw in many of the A/W 2010 collections e.g. do not stand for something anymore as an inflexible code (like an uniform does in the army), but create a self-reflexive aesthetic value that merely causes associations of a certain social or historical field (‘military’) without signifying a particular denotation.
‘Dress’ as a complicity between clothing and body
It could be that the often-stated close relation between fashion, eroticism and death (as analyzed first by poets like Baudelaire and thinkers like Walter Benjamin) comes from this mode of fashion being a ‘zero-sign’ which structurally does not allow any clear signification of lexical meaning. Erotism and death are eruptive and discontinuous spheres in which the formation of symbolical meaning is dissolved into unintelligible vectors of desire, ambiguity and obliteration. Fashion can of course be a way to make these vectors visible on the body – up to their permanent inscription by means of body modifications, tattoos, and so on. And by doing so, fashion is deeply human: a singular enigmatic statement against all systematical knowledge. Every dress is one of a kind. Because a ‘dress’ is the complicity between clothing and body. And as serial as clothing may be – the body always is unique.
I think to argue in a (post-)postmodern society that fashion was simply a capitalist vehicle of reification is completely beside the point of such a complex phenomenon of contemporary culture. Fashion today is the self-conscious quotation of reification; it is an ironical play with commodity culture far more than a dumb assimilation to it.
Deeply superficial
Being a ‘fashion-victim’ thus would not mean to surrender to the bewitching forces of an all-devouring capitalism running at idle; it would just mean a thoroughly modern refusal to the cultural dictate of being a well-defined subject with a stable and unchanging substance. Fashion is a constant flux, a never ending re-invention of the self through the means of a potentially infinite alteration, combination and re-combination of surfaces that have no meaning in themselves but produce volatile and fragile associations of meaning exactly because they are put together to an actual dress. A free play of forces without a distinct goal other than creating the “cocktail effect” (Omar Calabrese) of style that makes the impact of a ’stylish’ or ‘fashionable’ dress much more than the sum of its single pieces of clothing.
Frankly said, I don’t understand photographers who aim to portrait people ‘like they really are’. It’s simply impossible for a two-dimensional medium like a photograph (that’s punctual and frozen in relation to time and space) to depict any reality even approximately adequately; – still the most ‘documentary’ picture is determined by a far too large variety of codes and selectional decisions on the part of the photographer and his camera to give a trustworthy evidence of ‘the real’. Today every child knows that images are digitally manipulated, and contemporary photography also self-reflects this fact in many creative ways (just think of Alison Jackson’s ‘celebrity’ portraits…). A photography does not make a decisive statement on what it is depicting. It’s making a supposition on what it could be.
This meta-discourse on the real is also always evident when it comes to photograph fashion. Even the most ‘provocative’ fashion pictures (think of Jürgen Teller, Oliviero Toscani or Terry Richardson) do not make a final statement. Toscani’s Benetton ads or Teller’s lipstick-Versace-heart shocked the public not because they had been ‘provocative’ per se, but because they had been taken for depictions of a reality that they never were and never could be. Taking into account that provocative potential of an image, it’s clear that it deals with reality; but it’s the socially coded reality of the viewer where the shock takes place, not the medially coded virtual reality of the image. The image always remains silent.
The razor blade within the picture
A good fashion photograph provides nothing than a surface structure that’s open to phantasies, stories and imaginations, but also to fears, prejudices and insecurities. This surface can be well-styled (e.g. in mainstream commercials), or it can be rough and full of trip wires. Of course the reality effect that is created when I look at an image and feel touched (no matter if positively or negatively) is starting on the side of the image – but it is solely my own reality that I feel if it ‘hits’ me. A bit like music or a poem: it gives you some hints, but it has to be felt and interpreted. And there’s never just one interpretation, one truth.
That’s what distinguishes literature and art from an user manual or a propaganda sheet, and it’s what draws the distinction of Teller and Toscani from simple porn; – of course you can get off to some pictures of Terry Richardson while other ones make you want to throw up, but his imagery can never be reduced to such a plain functionalization. It’s the implicit irony even in his most explicit photographs that make them a multi-directional surface on which any one-directional interpretation inevitably has to slide and fall. Every good picture has at least one element that can be substituted by a razor blade. (And that’s the point where the ‘real’ slips back into the picture… Roland Barthes knew that when he spoke of the ‘punctum’, and Jean Baudrillard was searching for it in his own photographs… and both were aware of the fact that this ‘reality effect’ was the only thing in a picture that cannot be planned or ’styled’.)
Fashion & fetish
Eroticism, desire, seduction and sexuality are surely parts of the ‘fashion drive’, and their influence on it cannot be valuated highly enough. High fashion and the sometimes exaggerated behaviors connected to it are often compared to fetishism; ‘commodity fetishism’ is a widely used term in sociology and cultural studies since Marx, Benjamin & Co., and I think we cannot deny there’s something true about it. But it is more than that. A ‘fetish’, by definition, is always fully determined: it is a (e.g. sexually charged) object that unambiguously stands for something, and this one-way-conjunction can be analyzed and named. Fetishism’s main difference to fashion however lies in the fact that fashion’s conjunctions are ‘open‘; actually, fashion brings no fixed conjunctions with itself, more a ‘connectibility’ which can develop associations in different and unpredictable directions, with its indices being invertible in a way that the whole system will be influenced and possibly even re-written: Aimee Mullins’ carved artificial legs in McQueen’s SS 1999 show for example are – needless to say – not some strange mutilation- or prosthesis-fetish (as a weird porn-movie would perhaps determine them); they are high-fashion items that provoke discussions on aesthetics, on fashion’s relation to the body, and so on. And it’s the images that make fashion’s communicative drafts public and effective.
An infinite wardrobe
Discourses on multiple layers (theoretical, sociological, historical, narrative, emotional, of course also functional and sexual) – that’s what fashion at its best accomplishes. And that’s what I have in mind when I shoot fashion pictures. Of course photographing fashion is a cool job and lots of fun, but more than that for me it’s the challenge of transposing a fragile system of textile signs that lives through its organic relation to time, space and the body into that fascinating two-dimensional photographic medium without obtruding it a meaning that’s cropping away the open (and at the end: ‘modern’ and ‘democratic’) communication value that it has when it’s worn.
Fashion provides the paradigm, photography the discourse. Or, simply but true: fashion is a huge wardrobe, pull out some pieces and suggest with your cam what they could mean…
