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The Counterfeit Body: Fashion Photography and the Deceptions
of Femininity, Sexuality, Authenticity and Self in the 1950s, 60s and 70s [Page 14]
Jo’s initial resistance to fashion, modeling and the whole enterprise is persistently weakened, mostly by Avery’s increasingly unsubtle influence. During their first encounter, as the crew from Quality invades the bookstore, Jo expresses the shop owner’s attitude about the industry they represent and espouses some Frankfurt School-like rhetoric. “He doesn’t approve of fashion magazines. It’s chi-chi and an unrealistic approach to self-impressions and economics.” As for herself, she attempts to avoid being included in the frame with, “It would be hypocrisy for me to lend myself to this sort of idealism!” Ironically and pointedly, Jo speaks not her own mind, but the mind and opinions of her boss. The audience never really gets her attitude about her involvement with what she has now unexpectedly become a part of. After the shoot has finished, Avery remains to help Jo clean up the enormous mess produced by the fashion intrusion, she admonishes him and the industry further. "A man of your ability wasting his talent photographing silly dresses on silly women…” She cannot believe his commitment to such a frivolous enterprise. Additionally, she complains of the nature of his industry, writing off the model’s appearance as “mostly synthetic beauty.” Indeed, as the turn of events in the film illustrates, the transitional years of the 1950’s signaled a marked change in aesthetics in terms of modeling framing and presentation. Funny Face makes several comments on and references to the industry as well as visualizing several changes that occurred within it during this period. One such reference is the transition from pure and controlled studio shoots to on location and street shooting, the latter developed by William Klein. In these latter situations, the elements of each fashion photograph become significantly more dynamic because the new environments necessitate and make available so many opportunities for spontaneity and chance. Also, bringing the models to specific sites instead of the often lacking and unintentionally hilarious attempts to produce studio substitutes creates a higher sense of realism. Avery complains of the limiting nature of the studio in his first shoot with Marion. He is the one who proposes going to an actual bookstore to finish the shoot. At first his colleagues look at him blankly, but soon enough, they are marching out the door. This instant in the film memorializes the birth of the practice of on-site shooting, being as revolutionary a moment in fashion and fashion photography, as it was for Hollywood films shooting on location. While changes in both industries were significantly motivated by advances in technology, fashion photography's transition was largely influenced by a shift in sensibility, not just simply more sophisticated lenses, flashes, film stock or other equipment. Even today, the film still retains some of its cultural relevance with numerous references to and within contemporary cultural products. The character of Jo Stockton and Audrey Hepburn the person, have become almost interchangeable at some level. This ‘hybrid’ persona was most recently featured in an advertisement for Givenchy’s L’Interdit perfume. The ad consists of Hepburn (or Stockton?) in her free-spirited yet elegant Paris-cavorting garb. [Fig. 7] The copy line reads “Celebrating 50 years of style. Created for Audrey Hepburn. Once forbidden. Now reborn.” Funny Face’s poster girl has also made appearances in the form of references in recent films, including Robert Altman’s 1995 feature, Ready to Wear. “I feel as though I’m about to break into the “Bonjour Paris” number from Funny Face,” one character in the film remarks.
The following quote from notorious 1960s photographer David Bailey makes painfully clear how he earned his reputation in the world of fashion and insinuates the more extreme and sexualized direction his medium is about to take. “I like high heels—I know it’s chauvinistic. It means girls can’t run away from me” (Barnard 160). Other remarks added to the photographer’s vulgar infamy. “The only reason I ever did fashion was because of the girls,” and “A model doesn’t have to sleep with a photographer but it helps,” are two comments that can be credited to him (Radner 137). Bailey’s crass, bad-boy, sexual-predator style persona has been linked to his cockney, working-class roots. “[He] achieved fame as a fashion photographer while largely ignoring the clothes. “A frock is a frock,” he said dismissively” (Steel 60). Instead he chose to focus on the model’s sex appeal. Photographing a fashion model was a sexual act, Bailey implied, and the camera was like a phallus (Ibid.). The arrival of Bailey on the fashion scene, as a figure of this profession, signaled a major shift in fashion and thus, fashion photography. A member of the notorious “Terrible Three” photographers—Bailey, Terrence Donovan and Brian Duffy—working-class Londoners with an irreverent attitude to the world of fashion and the pretensions of its protagonists, Bailey reconstructed and redefined the persona of the fashion photographer for the 1960s (Smedley 146). This figure was now presented as a sexual conquistador, rude and abusive to his models, but always successful in getting them into bed. This new breed of photographer was best personified by Bailey, and ‘Thomas,’ the character modeled on him in Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blowup. This representative persona makes a forceful impact, with rock music pounding in the background, David Hemmings, (the actor) kneels over a writhing model, his camera clicking away. [Fig. 8] Automatic camera drives revolutionized the process of photography,” Bailey likened the bzzz bzzz bzzz of the apparatus to sex (Steel 60). This highly sexualized, aggressive and controlling individual came to dominate the period. Even the equipment of fashion photography assumed this new sensibility or lack thereof. The camera, in this era, came to embody the male gaze, become its equivalent. The nature of presenting clothing on women in pictures was in diametric opposition to the tasteful, inhibited and pure compositions of previous years. Sexuality was the new essential dynamic. The aesthetic was a few steps beyond ‘freedom’ and ‘independence.’ The images of women were about sex. Bailey and his colleagues sought a departure from the prim, proper and restrained; they wanted to sex things up. Their vision was just as problematic as the impossible ‘Single Girl’ ideal of the 50s. Fashion photographers of this school developed a theme of women’s independence, yet also placed value on beauty, sexuality and success. “In summing up their style, Brian Duffy stressed the fact that the three of them were ‘violently heterosexual butch boys…We emphasized the fact that there were women inside the clothes. They started to look real’” (Smedley 146). At once, it seems as though Duffy was attempting to lift the veil of homogenized anonymity from his models by giving them valid identities through his presenting them as ‘real’ people. Yet at the same time, the majority of his fashion work, as well of that of his colleagues, manifests a far different effect. Duffy’s referencing of creating ‘reality’ in the fashion photograph was not a new comment or innovative endeavor in fashion photography. Many photographers strove for and claimed to achieve the same effect in the aesthetic of their work. And like those before him, this attempt to recreate the real failed because of the intense stylization of the images, regardless of the insertions of ‘naturalness’ in posturing or setting. More possibly honest and valid versions of a realist fashion photographic style would be attempted later, most significantly in the work of Corrine Day, among others.
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