‘High Fashion Crime Scenes’: Recent trends in fashion imagery, a legacy of film noir

Abstract

Roland Barthes suggested that photographs are, essentially, about death. This article traces the relationship between crime scene photographs of the 1930s and 1940s, the visual aesthetic of film noir and a resurgence of the genre in high fashion photography. From the bruised-eyed runway models of Comme de Garçons in the 1980s to the preoccupation with death, trauma, alienation and decay in the work and promotions of Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Victor & Rolf throughout the 1990s, this trend has grown stronger in the new millennium, as seen in campaigns by leading fashion photographers, both in editorial and in advertising for luxury brands. LA photographer Melanie Pullen continues to explore these themes in her ongoing work ‘High Fashion Crime Scenes’. Drawing on Weegee’s Noir explorations of urban life and films such as Irvin Kershner’s 1978 film, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Pullen uses fashion as a symbol of the deceased’s everyday life, the mundane juxtaposed with the catastrophic. This imagery probes the unions between beauty and brutality, artifice and alienation, glamour and gore. Drawing on the seminal work of John Berger on photographic advertising in Ways of Seeing (1972), Jennifer L. Pozner’s work within the media, and Caroline Evans’ influential text Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Deathliness and Modernity of 2007, this article will attempt to unravel the relationship between high fashion and violent death within contemporary visual culture.