Weird Beauty

International Journal of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences Studies, 2021

Contemporary societies are expressed from codes and visual mechanisms. The vehement and constant stimulation of pictorial information within the postmodern media has complicated individuals' ability to recall a fashionable advertising image within the abundance of digital photographs, illustrations, images, or effigies. This article focuses on a study and analysis of the compositional elements of fashion photography, through a series of bibliographic reflections by theorists, editorial photographers and creative directors in order to generate a better understanding of the compositional, technical and theoretical dimensions. that make up the aesthetic phenomenon of contemporary fashion photography.

A Companion to Photography, 2020

This chapter surveys the recent history of fashion photography and provides an introduction to current scholarship and scholarly debates on the topic. It argues for the centrality of the image to fashion and explores the changing world of the fashion photograph. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ two distinct representations of the garment - image clothing and written clothing the author provides a close analysis of the street style fashion photography blog, The Sartorialist. The unclear status of fashion photography as art is also explored. The question of what a fashion photograph is – its ontology – is a key concern. Traditionally a commercial image created by professionals in the service of the fashion industry, fashion photography now exists in numerous forms, contexts and functionalities. This has not altered its fundamental nature. Inventing something 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 fashion photography.

Central Saint Martins, 2018

This thesis examines the female gaze in conjunction with fashion photography. It incorporates a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, embracing feminist and psychoanalytical discourse and semiotics. 'In Search of the Female Gaze: Women as Practitioners of Fashion Photography' uses the imagery of photographers Helmut Newton, Miles Aldridge, Deborah Turbeville, Corinne Day and Maisie Cousins as case studies in order to investigate the nuances between the way men and women look at and photograph women. The aim of this paper is to explore the underlying meanings behind traditional representations of women in the fashion photography milieu and to evidence how fashion photography mirrors culture, thus carrying symbolic value and ideological codes. Additionally, through a descriptive approach, it intends to showcase fashion photography as a vehicle to debate gender and sexuality within patriarchy. A central idea of this paper is to emphasise that femininity is a social construct and to present the manner in which the female gaze eschews its conventional stereotypes. As a foundation to my argument, I draw a parallel between the depictions of women in film studies and in art history, taking in consideration the discursive fabric of theorists such as Laura Mulvey, John Berger, Mary Ann Doane, Linda Nochlin, Rosalind Gill and Rosemary Betterton. French feminists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous are also of great influence in this thesis, as well as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. By engaging critically with the representation of the female body and how meanings are mediated between producers and viewers, 'In Search of the Female Gaze: Women as Practitioners of Fashion' Photography. An Analysis of the Politics of Representation promotes a discussion of fashion iconography within gender and media research.

Aperture 216, "Fashion" issue, 2014

This article looks at a range of ways in which the contemporary fashion film coexists and overlaps with the practices, institutions and aesthetics of fashion photography.

Fashion Theory

Fashion Studies, 2018

In this review, I critically examine the fashion and art exhibition "fashion after Fashion," April 7-Aug 27, 2017 at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, curated by Hazel Clark and Ilari Laamanen. The exhibition design was commissioned work by six interdisciplinary artists/designers who incorporated a mix of sculpture, performance, and audiovisual material into their installations. The different installations, taken together and experienced together, acted back and upon each other in interesting ways in the exhibition, which was a strength of the curators' method; the use of commissions exclusively acted as a kind of artistic method in itself. The first and most notable thing about the exhibit was that there were no clothes on mannequins. While the exhibition's premise was on fashion, the intentional absence of clothing was a risky strategy the curators pursued to intervene in how viewers think about fashion. The installations were purposely amorphous and abstract as well to inspire a broader consideration of what fashion can be and what bodies can do. Though the relationship between fashion and the body has been a constant topic in fashion scholarship, this exhibition offered a new perspective through commissioning and showcasing the category-defying work of recent fashion and art school graduates and performance artists.

2015

Post-war fashions of the 1940s and 1950s are frequently regarded as overtly feminine , signifying a return to traditional gender roles. In particular, Christian Di01·'s 'New Look' of 194 7 and its subsequent imitators symbolically represented feminine virtues of constraint and compliance due to the structural design of garments that stylised the female body in an hourglass silhouette redolent of the nineteenth century. In part, fashion photographers, including Ceci I Beaton and Richard A vedon in the late 1940s, contributed to the prevailing mythology of the New Look, whose studio-based images of the style aimed to inspire luxurious and aristocratic fantasies of feminine glamour. However, representations of this style are often contradictory. Specifically, the article argues that an alternate image of the New Look and associated fashions was also present during this era, where the backdrop of the city that featured in the photographs of Norman Parkinson, Willy Maywald, a...

Stanley Donen's film Funny Face (1956), starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, is generally regarded as a benchmark in the Hollywood musical for its exuberant use of colour and songs, a pleasurable feast for the eyes and ears. Alexander Walker, (1999:13), for example, called it ‘an amorous photo session of the utmost elegance’. But, in the way that it deals with the intertextual nexus between fashion/photography and film, it is not only a cinematic locus for the mediation of fashionable identities but one that deals with their mediatization as well, dwelling on a new style of photographic representation, which came to be known as the 'New American Vision'. Accordingly, in examining how the theme of captivity is elaborated in Funny Face, I want to analyse the way it depicts the performative dynamic between the fashion editor, photographer and model. Specifically, I shall take into account the dialectic of looking, gazing and power it involves between them in creating a physical (and metaphysical) space for fashionable female identities.

Art Monthly, 2011