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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 6]
The pronounced move towards a more ambiguous representation of gender in fashion photography coincided with other major shifts in stylistic modes of fashion of the mid to late 1950s. This move was quite subtle at first, with shooting scenes changing from domestic milieus to ‘natural’ outdoor settings. In turn, 50s day glamour characterized by pearls and immaculate suiting was slowly replaced by more casual and eventually tomboyish looks. “Androgynously toned fashions…reached their zenith in the unisex stylings popular from the late 1960s to mid 1970s” (Davis 35). “During the 1960s the narrow silhouette was evoked, to denote freedoms gained and the rejection of a preceding claustrophobic femininity” (Arnold 122). Helmut Newton was one photographer at the forefront of presenting this new construction. [Fig. 2] Beginning in the 1970s, women in his images were often masculinzed either in dress or behavior, featured with boyish haircuts, trousers, tightly rolled black umbrella, exaggerated shoulders among other things typically associated as men’s possessions (Ibid.34). Entwistle notes the emphasis on pushing the limits of gender masquerade in fashion photography, asserting [‘Fashion] is obsessed with gender, [as it] defines and redefines the gender boundary.’ So while it would seem that today’s fashions are more androgynous, even ‘uni-sex’ clothes display an overriding obsession with gender. Indeed, fashions in androgyny are further evidence of the degree to which fashion likes to play around at the boundaries of sexual difference (140). [Figs. 3, 4] This recurring theme in fashion photographic practice illustrates the continuing fascination with and concentration on conceptions of gender and the nature of display. The apparent timelessness of this aesthetic of representing models performing the ambiguities of gender in photographic images highlights the social influence on and regulation of the body. Fashion photography regularly tests these limits of social acceptability through unconventional and unclear representations. The degree to which androgyny is portrayed has varied over the different periods, but its quality has remained omnipresent. In a similar vein as the inconsistencies and transitory qualities of some figments of fashion photography, the representation of femininity has also been obsessively manipulated in the genre. The gaze, in part, has been pivotal in constructing photographic conceptions of femininity. While such constructs have shifted and changed form over the outlined periods, certain fixtures have remained in place. Regardless of the date of a photograph, the viewer can depend on the fact that the female model or models featured in the image will be presented in a subordinate and exploited fashion. Where risks have been taken and attempts to compromise or even overturn the gaze and the curse of inferior femininity, the gaze only shifts in that the featured woman now assumes the gaze of the male, while the male subject is feminized. The edifice is still in place. And regardless of the female ‘mastering’ the gaze and asserting her sexuality on her own terms, she is still presented in a manner where she herself has been eroticized. She is extremely pleasing to observe. Rodriguez supports this certainty of representation with a defeated quality. Sure women have seized more control of the way their bodies are represented and discussed in the media and female photographers have definitely contributed to a feeling that women are now celebrating their power and physicality themselves rather than simply being fashion’s victims. But the fact remains that the imagery we see on today’s magazine pages—even in the so-called cutting edge fashion magazines that often claim to be debunking the fashion industry—are by and large sexual fantasies about women made with men in mind. (51) And so it seems, regardless of changes in fashion photography evolving through different contextual, social and historical climates, presenting the female as a dominant or mere equal, has resoundingly failed. Even fringe publications and other venues of alternative, unconventional and de-institutionalized representation cannot resist the traditional aesthetic.
Theorists of the Frankfurt School offer more insight in interpreting fashion photography in relation to images as a commodity form with the onset of mass reproduction. Writing predominantly in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno (in the 1940s and 50s), confront modern issues of authenticity and its relation to the original image and transformations that occur upon its immersion in the public sphere. Adorno’s theories about mass culture and the culture industry can be specifically applied as another perspective in which to examine elements of fashion photography. Writers approaching the topic have utilized such concepts in strengthening its relevance in and to culture. Looking at the repercussions of the media age in regard to the fate of the original image, the figure of the fashion photographer as a star-maker links to this discussion of reproduction and representation in a mass form. Benjamin argues that as areas and elements of alternative and subversive culture are appropriated by mediums of mass production and representation and widely and eventually oversaturate the market, individual qualities are no longer distinguishable as originals. Using this idea, the increasing popularity of star and celebrity culture renders the artistic viability of fashion photography irredeemable and void. As the characters of Thomas, Mars and Avery, portraying fashion photographers in the previously referenced films, create their ‘stars,’ their novelty ‘products’ are compromised and reduced by their prepackaged approval of quality and marketability in the public sphere. Their images of the ‘stars,’ rather than the individuals themselves, become commercial currency. The photographers themselves become a kind of commodity, and simultaneous producers of commodities. Brookes interprets Adorno’s theories to make her argument about fashion photographers. [Adorno] saw the stamp of the machine everywhere, reducing everything to a ‘sameness,’ reflecting and reinforcing a sense of alienation in all aspects of private life and experience. As mass entertainment and advertising became more dominant, they increasingly leveled experience down to the ‘lowest common denominator.’ The threat of the culture industry was the production and reproduction of sameness in all spheres of cultural life. (20, 21) Through increased production and reproduction of images, identity and originality are nearly impossible to retain. Everything becomes a copy of some vague or possibly nonexistent entity. This purely non-sexual yet fetishizing and coveting of women of the aesthetic modes of other women argument seems difficult to substantiate, as emphasis is increasingly placed on the body, emphasis equal to or even greater than the garments resting on it. Indeed, in the beginnings of serious and focused fashion photography in the 1930s, the clothes were the paramount concentration. The body was de-emphasized. The pictured models did not assert any kind of independence; the clothes that covered them subsumed their bodies. Their corporeal nature was rendered abstract or denied outright (Radner 133). Emphasis on the garment over the body continued until the early 1950s. As the importance of the display of the model increased, shifts in presentation became more apparent. From the late 50s on, the body became the focus and existed in state of constant display.
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