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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 2]
Popularizing and giving credence to an academic discussion of fashion photography and advertising is a daunting task given the widespread and long-standing bias against these forms of popular culture, often associated with frivolity, wastefulness and decadence. Attempting to situate these media in a respectable position is doubly hindered by prejudices against elements of both areas. Fashion has been a traditionally and frequently dismissed, criticized or mocked industry, practice and preoccupation. Joanne Entwistle comments on this sentiment in her book, The Fashioned Body, acknowledging the widely-held beliefs that fashion is, among other things, vain, elitist, and wasteful (53). Julian Rodriguez further attests to the difficulties of approaching the topic in the essay “Fashion’s Fantasy.” “‘Fashion,’ ‘Photography,’ or ‘History’—you are entering a minefield with these subjects, so writing in a subject which ties them together has to be fraught with problems” (49). With these kind of negative preconceptions implanted in the present public and scholarly minds, altering conceptions of fashion photography is no easy exercise. Fashion’s apparent wastefulness also impairs modern scholars’ ability to elevate the status of the form. The nature of fashion and fashion photography to be impermanent, its latent transience in ever changing and shifting trends, generates and exudes a perpetual ‘in-process’ quality. This quality is delusory however, as images and styles repeat themselves in carefully calculated and timed increments. Joanne Finkelstein suggests in her book, Fashion: An Introduction, The apparent instantaneousness of fashion lends it an attractive volatility. Fashion is really about maintaining the eternal sameness, preserving the status quo; it is a quixotic gesture, a con trick, a sleight of hand, which makes us think that change is happening when the opposite is closer to the truth…Fashions are not about putting into circulation the really new, because the genuine novelty cannot be absorbed quickly into the cultural formations of everyday life. (5) The form has to preserve a palatable character to remain commercially viable on a mass scale. The author continues, “Fashion—in its various guises as a practice, an industry and a social force—provides so such opportunity for a full engagement with the new. Fashions are being continuously recycled, and new marketing strategies are constantly being tried out to maintain this impetus” (Ibid.). Fissures in this illusion of constant innovation and flux have become apparent though. Like fashion, photography and advertising have their own less than esteemed opinions and interpretations by cultural critics. Advertising is a regularly demonized entity, and photography, as an art form, is still struggling to be recognized and validated, with prolific public debates on the topic tracing back to at least the 1970s. Hilary Radner makes a particularly damaging claim against fashion photography as a viable art form in the essay “On the Move: Fashion Photography and the Single Girl in the 1960s.” “Unlike ‘art,’ fashion photography obviously functions primarily within a marketplace that serves to sell clothes. Only belatedly does fashion photography sell itself as art, almost as an afterthought” (131). The author recognizes and emphasizes its commercial character, which is undeniable, and yet certain photographers insist on continual attempts to present fashion photographs as something more. Rosetta Brookes expands further on this photographic genre and its lowly perceived position in the essay, “Fashion Photography, The Double Page Spread: Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Deborah Turbeville.” Fashion photography has traditionally been regarded as the lightweight end of the photographic practice. Its close relationship to an industry dependent on fast turnover makes the fashion photograph the transitory image par excellence…[The] commercial sphere of photographs—the domain of the everyday image—represents the debasement of a conventional history of photography. Fashion advertising, in particular, is seen as negating the purity of the photographic image. We see the typical instead of the unique moment or event. (17) Clearly, the conflation of the two terms, fashion and photography, into one medium is thus rather problematic in regard to the business of solidifying the position of the form. Beginning by relating fashion’s function beyond a simple decorative gesture bereft of meaning, and fashion photography its equally empty vessel of expression, to its importance as a means of communication, I hope to reveal and present the multiple values and complexities often ignored in popular discourse. Fashion photographs in advertising, with their capacity to communicate social ideals, standards and taboos, operate chiefly to form their consumers—on one level, to make them buy products, and on another level, make them buy the illusion of a lifestyle and possibility for a new identity by gaining ownership of the featured products. Fashion periodicals are the primary purveyors of these images and subsequent identities, with Vogue as the gold standard for magazines in this arena. Through fashion photography, these publications exhibit and mediate the ideals of each era. Their role in such activities of dissemination and influence is problematic and damaging on several levels. Finkelstein highlights some of these more insidious functions, citing the fashion magazine’s didactic character. With the growing popularity and seductive appeal of this medium and the apparent innocuous quality assumed by it, of merely reporting new styles and where to obtain them, the publications’ more subversive edge remains hidden. Fashion magazines do not just present fashion, “[They] instruct in the creation of image and self representation” (46). Through these publications, women are able to imagine and construct the ‘best’ and ‘most desirable’ versions of themselves. “Fashioning the body becomes a practice through which the individual can fashion a self” (Ibid. 50). Whole distinct identities are formed through dress; social perceptions of wealth, class, taste and personality are mediated by the presentation of the body. The garment constructs the self, and the ‘individual’ captured in photography memorializes and makes permanent that self. Fashion advertising has been enormously instrumental in presenting and perpetuating these largely unattainable images and standards of style. Atkinson, in essay, “Fashion Photography: A Short Survey,” recognizes the changing role of the photograph. Beginning in the 1950s, photographers and advertisers alike came to recognize and “[promote] the value of a photograph ‘on its own’ as a very persuasive image for advertising products (304). Finkelstein expands on the power and influence expressed by advertising in recognizing the industry’s role in the dispersal of the fashionable. Advertisements give instruction on how pleasures can be pursued and enjoyed and offer chimerical lifestyles that help to stir up desire in all its states in the consumer. “[It] destabilizes the practices of the everyday in order to reinvent them” (46). The routine is upset by style. A particular skirt length is constructed and presented to be new; in a just matter of inches, another is passé. Novelty is presented as something that can be bought and sold and is misleadingly found in the most common of objects and behaviors. Advertising feeds into the visual pleasures of looking, partaking in images and encountering the fashionable, the novel, the risky and the sexual. The presence of such elements provides individuals with a sense of curiosity, wonder, envy or disgust or a combination of each. Advertising makes fantastical and elitist imagery available to the common observer; the privileged private is made public. This new availability has its consequences, however. The images presented in fashion advertising, with their glossy, seductive appeal, indoctrinate viewers and implant conceptions of beauty and self-display in the minds of consumers, whether or not the ideal is possible for the spectator to achieve. Advertising of this kind is present everywhere, and has two clear forms in commercial presentation.
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