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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 5]
Fashion publications such as Vogue were instrumental in creating this new exposure and mode of visual consumption. Further, they served to open a new perspective with an intended female audience and readership. The magazines sold a certain self, one changing over time, that they constructed to attract and compel women to fashion themselves after. Vogue and other women’s fashion magazines were the first medium to present images of women for the consumption of women, rather than men, and this kind of exchange granted a more democratic and empowered structure for female readers to exist in. Radner writes, “The women depicted in the photographs—who after all represented their readers—began to be cast in active as opposed to the passive roles traditionally assigned to them in art” (130). And so, at some level, at least in the early representations of fashion magazine images, such publications were not entirely destructive in their influence. However, this early characteristic of fashion photography coming into vogue in the mid to late 1950s was short-lived. While models were presented with new features of power and agency in scenes inspiring independence and confidence, this representation was soon to be usurped by more submissive and restricted poses, more receptive to the dominant male gaze. After this brief moment of semi-equilibrium in photographic representation, the more traditional gaze, as referenced by Berger, became increasingly present and pronounced. The fashion ads may have been for women, but they appealed to men in their construction and positioning of female subjects. Even today, images continue to be habitually constructed to put women in a position of submission or exploitation. Finkelstein expands on this area, commenting on the assumption made by most photographers that their viewers are heterosexual. Despite this assumption, images always offer an essentially eroticized presentation of the female form, regardless of the consumer’s gender or sexual preference. [Women are encouraged] to gaze at other women with that “homospectatorial look.” ‘The entire fashion industry operates as one of the few institutionalized spaces where women can look at other women with cultural impunity…Women are encouraged to consume, in voyeuristic if not vampristic fashion, the images of other women.’ (59) Interestingly, this same-sex gaze is no longer limited to women. Indeed, this kind of reciprocity in same-sex gazing has increasingly appeared in the images created for men’s fashion, especially in the work of Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber in the mid-1980s. This, among other experiments in restructuring the gaze, has inflected the interpretations of photographic images in fashion. From the early Calvin Klein Jeans campaign in the beginning of the 80s, to the seemingly omnipresent current Abercrombie and Fitch advertisements, the idealized and fetishized male form is becoming more and more commonplace in fashion photography. Women are no longer the sole recipients of the gaze or the objectified and sexualized construction of photographers. With the growing presence and popularity of men’s magazines with fashion sections or an exclusive focus on fashion, now men are being compelled to consume ideals of themselves as well (Finkelstein 60). “In the 1970’s, portrayal of women erotica in the fashion images of [Newton] and Guy Bourdin responded to and confronted changing concepts of femininity” (Brookes 25). *Find source! In turn, in the 1980’s, there emerged a photographic version of the ‘new man.’ Conceptions of masculinity and sexuality began to be presented with specific qualities, with a focus on the body, rather than the garment (ibid.). Bruce Weber has been responsible for creating some of the most sexualized images of men in fashion photography. He is widely considered the master of this kind of imagery and has continuously come under fire for his overtly erotic work, especially in the homoerotic presentation of his male models. Steel emphatically stresses his influence, calling his photographs for Calvin Klein underwear in the early 1980s, “profoundly revolutionary” (126). Weber pictured Adonis-like men clad only in the advertised product, with camera angles and lighting giving his models a godlike aura and enhancing their masculine physiology. The sexual nature of the photographs was not what made Weber’s images unique or groundbreaking. The gender of the models was the uncommon and shocking aspect. Steel explains, “Erotic images of women in lingerie were nothing new, but a lingering puritanism and homophobia had militated against the portrayal of men as sex objects” (Ibid.). Other advertising campaigns that posed the question of whose gaze have included most pervasively, the Levi’s ads of the 1990s. Focusing on themes of gender construction and deception, the images of the campaign raised such questions as “Would it be possible to structure things so that women own the gaze? Would women want to own the gaze? What does it mean to be a female spectator?” (Barnard 137). In a 1994 ad for Levi’s, these questions are answered. [Appearing] to be set in late 19th century rural America, two young women leave the picnic they are enjoying with their parents and run down towards the river, where they find a pair of discarded Levi jeans. Hiding behind a tree, they watch as the young, male, well-muscled and attractive owner of the jeans rises up from out of the water. The young women seem to almost vibrate and quiver with mounting excitement; Stiltskin’s crashing chords reach a crescendo as the camera appears to move down his torso towards where his jeans would be if he were wearing them. (Ibid. 137) In such an advertisement, the male body is on display, the female becomes the modern voyeur and power shifts to be in her favor. And yet, this apparent shift in giver and receiver of the gaze is delusory because, as Barnard suggests, “while the gaze might not be male, to own and activate the gaze is to be in the masculine position” (140). So, it cannot be convincingly argued that such images or advertisements are truly successful in contesting or rendering void the structures of the gaze, nor that these images enable women to form their own specifically feminine type of pleasure (Ibid.). While there have been failures on the part of fashion photographers in compromising or reversing the direction of the gaze and the gendered spectator, experiments in the constructions, conceptions and perceptions of gender, sexuality and androgyny have been numerous. Another Levi’s advertisement with a slightly different concept in mind illustrates this idea. The ad from the mid-90s features a New York transvestite being leered at by a lecherous taxi driver until ‘she’ notices some facial stubble and begins to shave (Barnard 58). This image plays on the viewer’s own definitions and opinions of sexual identity and relies on the elements of deception and surprise of discovery and realization to achieve its effect. Another way in which the object of the gaze has been confused, confounded and tampered with has occurred in the non-conformist presentations and manipulations of gender, via ambiguous dress and posturing. In constructing conceptions of the gaze, notions of gender and sexuality must undoubtedly be confronted and examined. Finkelstein observes fashion’s role as an indicator of social change and progress, writing “[fashion weakens] the prescriptions around gender-appropriate dress” (3). Two of the most significant explorations into these areas during the 50s, 60s and 70s were the representations of hyper-sexuality and androgynous or sexually ambiguous figures. With each passing decade, these experiments of identity become more frequent and extreme. Fred Davis concedes in Fashion, Culture and Identity, “The history of Western fashion is marked by a profound symbolic tension arising from the desire, sometimes overt though more often repressed, of one sex to emulate the clothing and associated gender paraphernalia of the other” (33). At the same time members of society have been presented or confronted with images of consistently sexualized and ultimately submissive women, photographers have long experimented with conceptions and constructions of gender—masculinity and femininity—by popularizing the androgynous aesthetic.
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