Fashion Photography Research Articles

What is “Australian” Fashion Photography?—A Dilemma

Can we point to anything distinctive about Australian fashion photographs during the mid-twentieth century? This article traces discourses of both similarity and difference from European styles that permeated discussion of fashionable dress and comportment in Australia at the time. It shows there is little to gain from unraveling what characterizes “overseas” and what characterizes “local,” especially in image making. Indeed, we can scarcely find stylistic distinctiveness in photographs. What emerges is a seemingly contradictory network of opinions, texts, images, and related practices, complicating our understanding of local fashion photography and its relationship to the magazine industry. In the period under consideration, a coherent or identifiable style does not constitute fashionable attire and its representation in Australia other than at times a sense of the understated. It is in the ebb and flow of ideas, motifs, and references, even subtle urban variations, that we can situate the essence of Australian photography and perhaps that of Australian style as well.

Chicken or glass: in the vicinity of Clifford Geertz and Paul Hyman

Paul Hyman's photographs disrupt the narrative of American anthropology in Sefrou, Morocco in 1969. How the fashion photographer in fringe pants met Moroccans and photographed them, how he captured the contingent, the fleeting, the ordinary, the local, and the singular, is refracted in Paul Rabinow's reflections on some of the aims, assumptions, methods, and results of ethnography and photography.

A (fashion) photographer's reflections on fieldwork

Paul Hyman recalls his sojourn in Sefrou, Morocco in 1969, his encounters with anthropologists conducting fieldwork in the region, and his experience re-viewing his own photographs of Sefrou reframed in the context of the 2007 exhibition at UCLA's Fowler Museum, ‘Sefrou, Morocco Observed: The Photographs of Paul Hyman.’

De Meyer at Vogue: Commercializing Queer Affect in First World War-era Fashion Photography

This article analyzes the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer, a pictorialist whose work revolutionized fashion photography at Vogue between 1913 and 1922. After a brief discussion of de Meyer's life and work in Europe before emigrating to New York City in 1914, the essay draws on recent scholarship on “public feelings” to investigate the queer context of de Meyer's photographic work for US Vogue in the years surrounding the First World War. The essay argues that de Meyer brought to Vogue a specific Edwardian structure of feeling defined by a revolt against the rationality of the second industrial revolution and informed by a transatlantic aesthetic movement that privileged emotional life and expression. De Meyer brought together the aesthetic movement with a queer transatlantic counterculture whose style, borrowing from José Muñoz, can be characterized by “affective excess.” De Meyer's collaborator in several of the Vogue essays was the mannequin and Ziegfeld model-showgirl Dolores, who complemented de Meyer's camp excessiveness with her signature laconic performance of white affect. In the context of US race politics and commercial culture in the First World War era, de Meyer's queer aesthetic was also a racial project that played a central role in the commercialization of aesthetic feeling.

Gothic: dark glamour

From its origins in the eighteenth-century literature of terror to its contemporary manifestations in vampire fiction, cinema and art, the gothic has embraced the powers of horror and the erotic macabre. 'Gothic' is an epithet with a strange history - evoking images of death, destruction, and decay. Ironically, its negative connotations have made the gothic an ideal symbol of rebellion for a wide range of cultural outsiders.Popularly associated with black-clad teenagers and rock musicians, gothic fashion encompasses not only subcultural styles (from old-school goth to cyber-goth and beyond) but also high fashion by such designers as Alexander McQueen, John Galliano of Christian Dior, Rick Owens, Olivier Theyskens, and Yohji Yamamoto. Fashion photographers, such as Sean Ellis and Eugenio Recuenco, have also drawn on the visual vocabulary of the gothic to convey narratives of dark glamour. As the text and lavish illustrations in this book suggest, gothic fashion has deep cultural roots that give it an enduring potency.

A Study on the Blurring Boundary Phenomena Expressed in Complex Fashion Space of 21th Century- Focusing on the Theories of Gill Deleuze and Felix Guattari -

21st century post digital society orients co-existence, fusion, and blurring boundary than conflict, differentiation, and boundary, and makes a try liberal combination of various different objects. Furthermore, radical development of science and digital equipments offer technical possibility that could combine various fields. Hence, many different departments demolish their boundary, and combine for development of multi-functional and complex shape’s products. For job-nomads, fashion attempts to combine with architecture, furniture, daily necessities, and digital equipments spontaneously. This paper aims at consideration about the blurring phenomena expressed in complex fashion space of 21st century throughout empirical fashion photographs analysis, which show combination among fashion and various different fields. Blurring boundary phenomena of complex fashion space are classified with 4 parts as follows as: 1) furniturizing, 2) wearable dwelling, 3) lumiduct, 4) becoming fashion. Each parts are examined 8 aesthetical characteristics such as movement and lightness, hyper-link and openness, immateriality and inter-activeness, and diversity and ambiguity. 21st century fashion has changed more simple and light, and creates new form throughout combination with many other fields, and enlarges its function and sphere. I think this paper would help certificating practical use of fashion space as multiple and complex space, and makes contribution to forecast about fashion development of the future and offer inspiration about creative and innovative fashion design.

The Study of Aesthetic Value in Cindy Sherman's Fashion Photographs

Abstract The advent of various arts and remarkable development of mass media since 1980s accelerate fashion photo-graphs' advancement. The expression of fashion through photographs can represent characteristics of ages, societies, cultures, traits of designers and techniques of photographers. This study focuses on Cindy Sherman's fashion photo-graphs, which represent different kinds of respect to the women's states and identity. Cindy Sherman describes neg-lected women, sexual characteristics, and tries to overcome the limitation existing in modern society. By analyzing her fashion photographs, women's identities can be examined and the new trial of fashion photographs' expression is able to be considered as well. The results are summarized into two traits. The first is grotesque images, which have strange cuts, dissolved and deformed bodies. Those are expressions to subvert the stereotype of women. The second is amusement, which is expressed with uncanny and ridiculous appearances. These fun images are challenges to depict human instinct and also symbolic plays.

Fashion as photograph: viewing and reviewing images of fashion

Acknowledgements Introduction Section 1: Critical Contexts Caroline Evans A Shop of Images and Signs Susan Kismaric and Eva Respini Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990 Philippe Garner The Celebration of the Fashion Image - Photograph as Market Commodity and Research Tool Margaret Maynard The Fashion Photograph: An 'Ecology' Becky Conekin Lee Miller's Simultaneity Section 2: Processes and Politics Eugenie Shinkle & Roger Hargreaves Interview with Rankin Sascha Behrendt [need title!!] Eugenie Shinkle Interview with Penny Martin Section 3: Image and Identity Barbel Sill Stardom and Fashion: on the Representation of Female Movie Stars and their Fashion(able) Image in Magazines and Advertising Campaigns Stephanie Neda Sadre-Orafai Developing Images: Race, Language, and Perception in Fashion Model Casting Isabelle Wallace Sex, Sameness and Desire: Thoughts on Versace and the Clone Karen de Perthuis Beyond Perfection: The Fashion Model in the Age of Digital Manipulation Section 4: Reassessing the Real Agnes Rocamora and Alistair O'Neill Fashioning the Street: Images of the Street in the Fashion Media Kate Rhodes The Elegance of The Everyday: Nobodies in Contemporary Fashion Photography Eugenie Shinkle The Line Between the Wall and the Floor: Reality and Affect in Contemporary Fashion Photography Notes on Contributors.

The Research on Aesthetic Characteristics of Storytelling Expressed in Modern Fashion Photographs - With a Focus on Steven Meisel’s Fashion Photos -

The objective of this article is to examine the possibility of 'story-telling' as united concept of causality and subjectivity through sequence combination, and the 'similarity' between object and image in fashion photographs making diversity of meanings. To analyze and investigate the research, as evidential data this paper used the photos of Steven Meisel from 2002 till 2007 Vogue published in Korea, U.S, and Italy, as well as other visual data like graphic collections, catalogs, art-related data and internet data. This research runs both theoretical and positive investigations to suggest the function of story-telling in the Process of opened-communicative roles of fashion photos. Thus this paper investigated Steven Meisel's storytelling in his fashion photos; short moment of event, continuity of time, compound of sequence, and complexity of viewpoint. This paper also studied the aesthetic characteristics of Steven Meisel's fashion photos as categories of overlapped meaning, arbitrariness of interpretation, exclusivity of message, and decoding. The research result suggests that clothing not only includes current age's value but also among social constitutions it includes multilateral characteristics. Ultimately this paper is also making meaning alive by cutting off the chain of 'firm' meanings of fashion photo. That seems like opening the opportunity for correctly understanding fashion's meaning which has the aspects of ambivalence of changing meanings and values by the motivation of context and text.

`Deux temps de lecture'

This paper explores the process and practice of inscription and impression in the photographic works of Natacha Lesueur. It suggests that while Lesueur engages with the idiom of the fashion photograph, this is to subvert rather than affirm the genre. Her photographs play with and speak to the nature of the photographic medium itself (which is time-based, materially ephemeral and, in the popular consciousness, linked with stereotypical portrayals of the female subject). They serve to show, like Cindy Sherman's work, that the stereotype and essential femininities are constructed in the act of looking, rather than in the act of representation. Finally, it proposes that the epidermal inscriptions made on the skin ( pellicula) of Lesueur's models can be understood to function as a mise en abyme of the photographic process itself ( pellicule). This leads to the conclusion that Lesueur's practice seeks at once to un-frame the real and to articulate identity as event.

Second-Long Fictions

Sarah Moon 12345 Royal College Of Art London October 17-25, 2008 Michael Hoppen Gallery London October 16-November 22, 2008 Sarah Moon 12345 By Sarah Moon with additional texts by Dominique Edde, llona Suschitsky, Magali Jauffret, Alain Fleischer and Robert Delpire London: Thames & Hudson, 2008 486 pp./[pounds sterling]95.00 (sb) It is a testament to the lasting appeal of Sarah Moon's photography that her soft-focused grainy aesthetic remains so evocative of the romantic femininity peddled in the pages of fashion magazines from the 1970s. Although undeniably nostalgic, the original celebrated advertising campaigns for Cacharel and editorial shots for Vogue and Nova were rarely cloying or overly sentimental, haunted as they were by an underlying narrative of disquieting uncase. Describing her photographs as second-long fictions, Moon continues to explore the various facets of feminine experience in both her fashion photography and personal practice--two distinct but overlapping strands that were reconciled in two exhibitions of the photographer's work in London this Fall. At Michael Hoppen Gallery, the display focused on examples from Moon's thirty-year commercial career, while at the Royal College of Art more experimental work was included, with rooms dedicated to two recent films. shows coincided with the publication by Thames & Hudson of Sarah Moon 12345, whose title reflects its composite structure of five chapter-like notebooks in a slipcase cover. A personal rather than chronological retrospective in which Moon attempted to revisit and update the past (3), the book's pages mix and present in an album-like format that was echoed in the installation at the RCA. Hung four or five deep on the gallery walls, the undated and untitled photographs weaved an unresolved narrative that emphasized the work's dream-like quality, as if fleeting snatches of memory on the brink of being forgotten. It was in this display of personal work that a darker vision of femininity emerged. Strange motifs recurred--of lone women wandering lonely streets and abandoned fairgrounds or waiting in the wings backstage, conjuring a sense of unfulfilled anticipation as a distinctly feminine condition. Particularly pronounced in Moon's reworking of the fairy stories The Little and Bluebeard in the new films Mermaid of Auderville (2007) and Red Thread (2005), that sense of suspense was heightened by the combination of still shots and moving images to tell tales of adolescent femininity on the verge of sexual awakening, marked by periods of waiting, longing, and ultimately of disappointment. Elsewhere, that awakening had more sinister consequences: in shots produced to illustrate Creative Education's 1983 edition of Little Red Riding Hood, the viewer took the position of the big bad wolf stalking its prey through the urban forest. Pictured only as a nightmarish shadow cast from a position behind the camera, our identification with the wolf's predatory presence implicated the viewer in a narrative of desire in which female sexuality was to be consumed. …

A Young Woman, N.Y.C.

“A Young Woman, N.Y.C.” explores post-war representation in American fashion magazines through fashion photography and fashion journalism. It considers the contributions of Maeve Brennan and Diane Arbus to this field and maps a connection to the urban field work that defines their later careers as a writer and a photographer respectively.

A Heady Relationship: Fashion Photography and the Museum, 1979 to the Present

This article looks at the relationship between fashion photography and the museum between 1979 to the present, giving particular attention to the emergence of fashion photography as a part of museum programming in the late 1970s. It explores the often uneasy relationship between photographers and their fashion practice and the ways in which the museum has used fashion photography to increase and democratize audience.

Aesthetic Characteristics of Evening Dress in Contemporary Fashion -Focused on Valentino's Evening Dresses-

The purpose of this study is to contemplate evening dress in contemporary fashion, thereby to analyze aesthetic characteristics of evening dress. For such purposes, this thesis first provides the historical survey of evening dresses, and to conduct a case study of survey of fashion photographs covering -porter design products from 2000 to 2007 presented by Valentine. Based upon the historical survey, there are five representative styles in evening dress. Flapper chic looks could be characterized by frequent usage of sleeveless straight silhouette with long or mini hemlines, expressing sensuality, luxury, and ethnicity. Satin Siren looks were characterized by bias-cut, slim, long silhouette, expressing sensuality and luxury. Feminine Ideal looks were characterized by hourglass silhouette and decolltage with feminine details such as bow, pleats and frills, expressing historicism, luxury and sensuality. Freedom and fantasy looks were characterized by ethnic details or modern silhouette with transparent, printed materials, expressing ethnicity, sensuality, and luxury. Finally, postmodern glamourous looks were characterized by body-conscious silhouette with transparent, shiny, or stretch materials, expressing sensuality, experimentalism and luxury.

Caps, Canes, and Coonskins: Princeton and the Evolution of Collegiate Clothing, 1900–1930

Winner of the Best Graduate Student Paper Award at the 2007 American Culture Association Conference The study of fashion is proving to be far less capricious than it was considered two decades ago; the subject has received attention from scholars ranging from anthropologists (e.g., Tranberg Hansen; Eicher) to sociologists (e.g., Davis; Crane) to scholars of material culture (e.g., Barnard; Steele). However, it is the visual manifestations of fashion that have most often caught the eye of scholars; fashion photographs, designer's illustrations, magazine layouts, and the garments themselves document the dramatic shift in the American wardrobe over the course of the twentieth century. While the evolution of the era's aesthetic is well-studied, questions remain as to how specific trends evolved and came to national prominence. There has been limited inquiry into the social, cultural, and economic forces that bring fashion trends to life and inexorably lead to their demise.1 This is a case study of the clothing worn by students at Princeton University between 1900 and 1925. It aims to demonstrate how the University's homogenous student body actively crafted a clothing style to fit their leisure-focused lifestyle. Long before sportswear was acceptable street attire, Princeton men wore it on a daily basis to socialize and to study. Clothing carried much currency on the Princeton campus and one's tie, hat, or lapel decoration told of his social standing. Yet not everyone enjoyed the privilege of participating in the campus's fashion system. Freshmen were forced by convention-and roving bands of sophomores-to wear a specified uniform, consisting of a black sweater, corduroy pants, and black shoes. This well adhered to pecking order actively controlled the clothing of all students. Each class was allowed more and more freedom, and, by the spring of their senior year, students earned the right to wear the coveted beer suit-a white canvas suit perfect for protecting Brooks Brothers jackets from leaky keg taps. Both gender and class provide analytical frameworks for this study. The sportswear worn on the campus year-round signaled a dramatic shift in menswear styles and in notions of manhood. The article explores how the University's elitist and self-regulating student culture played a pivotal role in redefining the American man as youthful, leisure focused and casually, yet carefully dressed. Class is central to understanding how students were able to indoctrinate and monitor newcomers. Unapologetically homogenous, Princeton was a rich boy's university; in the period studied, more than eighty percent of its students came from private high schools. Fashion flourished in this well funded and fertile ground. The focus here is twofold. First, this study considers the elite nature of the Princeton student body and the role private high schools and selective eating clubs played in keeping it so. In this birds of a feather environment, club-associated regalia took on increased meaning, as it connoted belonging and honors earned. Varsity sweaters and sports team blazers spoke of an involvement with sports. Princeton men were avid sportsmen who took to the links and courts with fervor-and they dressed the part. The dominance of leisure clothing illustrates the interface between class and gender; fashions associated with elite sports, such as golf and tennis, were worn around the clock and across the seasons. Princeton men implemented casual attire such as knickers and oxfords into their wardrobes on a year-round basis, a harbinger of the casualization of menswear. The second aim is to understand how the University's elaborate social hierarchy served as a means of turning a Princeton boy into a Princeton man. Regulating what freshman could and could not wear was part of the initiation into a campus culture that stressed the importance of clothing. The cultural significance of these rituals was seen when their usefulness was called into question by the students themselves. …

From Magic Lantern Slide to Digital Image: Visual Communities and American Culture

Contemporary American culture is intensely visual. We transact with our visual culture in complex, participatory, sometimes disorienting ways; our boundaries of identity, place, time, and subjectivity seem to be constantly shifting. We drift variously between the sensations of observation and of surveillance, both pleasurable and uncomfortable, and between consuming and being visually consumed. Our interface with visual culture occurs in both and virtual spaces, in which there are a variety of visual speakers and viewers, viewpoints (Mirzoeff 18), multiple channels and directions for transmitting meaning, and multiple levels of access to production and consumption as well as manners of transacting. A digital photograph posted online was unimaginable to the average person in 1990; today the average teenager cannot seem to survive without a personal posting. In 1990, a photograph was an image produced in a camera, chemically reproduced, and printed on paper; today anyone with a cell phone can be a media photographer and see his or her work on the six o'clock news. The digital photograph is a specter or a ghost of the chemical photograph: it is saved in computer code, it is infinitely mutable, infinitely producible (as opposed to reproducible), and it is mediated through the computer or television screen. It does not seem to be quite because it is not solid, but neither is it inert. It is semiotically active and unfixed. Like an actual ghost it is a powerful and affecting force that can change the spaces and people whom it haunts. In 1802, the Phantasmagoria opened in London as a ghostly show of magic lantern slides with spectral figures projected onto diaphanous screens that swooped and howled around a darkened room as a narrator told a tall tale of horror to a supposedly terrified audience. The combined thrill of magic, fantasy, and terror made the Phantasmagoria, its spin-offs, and the magic lantern slide technology of painted and photographed images on glass slides among the most popular public visual spectacles of the nineteenth century. By the late-nineteenth century magic lantern slides had two major markets: they were sold in large collections for public entertainments or for educational (or therapeutic) lectures, and they were sold in small collections for viewing in the home. The viewer was led to believe that the image on the magic lantern slide, when used educationally, was indexical: it bore a direct, unfiltered relationship to the or original object. It functioned as a transparent slide-literally and metaphorically-and it was intended to be read as a visual surrogate for the real thing. Lecturers even called these slides transparencies. When used to entertain, the slide was presented with a fictional image: frequently it was altered, manipulated, or even openly falsified. These images told moral, romantic, and sad stories; they presented visual deceptions such as giant fleas beside tiny men or they revealed ghostly apparitions. They were manipulated in both content and meaning, and were thus opaque on two levels: literally (manipulated) and metaphorically (fictional). The digital image appears in both transparent and opaque forms. Its comparison with the magic lantern slide is useful because a transparent digital image can masquerade as an opaque digital image and more dangerously, an opaque digital image can masquerade as a transparent image, confounding and inverting our sense of the indexical, the reliable, and even reality. The digital image is infinitely malleable; it can be altered in form and content in ways that many of us cannot even imagine. Even the tyro snap-shooter of a digital camera knows how to eliminate red-eye, lighten or darken images, add or subtract color, make figures taller and thinner or shorter and stockier, cover skin blemishes, rearrange body parts, and add or delete backgrounds. Professional photographers use as many as thirty digital images to create a single fashion photograph. …

A Study of Femininity and Masculinity Represented in Men's and Women's Fashion Magazine in Korea since 2000

The purpose of this study is to typify femininity and masculinity represented in mainstream women's and men's fashion magazines in Korea since 2000 and infer sexual ideology appearing in contemporary Korean society by content analysis with the view of plural sexuality. For the content analysis total 259 editorial fashion photography was analyzed. As the result, 5 femininities and 5 masculinities were typified, and then sexual discourse was inferred out of the frequency of each type and texts with the images. On the basis of previous studies and historical considerations of this topic, the types of sexuality represented in mainstream fashion magazines in Korea since 2000 were classified as follow.: in women's fashion magazines Traditional Femininity and Androgynous Femininity were almost similarily dominant sexuality, and Glamor Femininity, Babydoll Femininity, and Genderless sexuality were alternative. Meanwhile, in men's fashion magazines Traditional Masculinity formed clear dominant sexuality, and Macho Masculinity, Androgynous Masculinity, Adolescent Masculinity, and Genderless sexuality were alternatives. In addition, Androgynous Masculinity in women's fashion magazines occupied the highest frequency, while Glamor Femininity in men's fashion magazines did so. From this sexual discourses represented in mainstream fashion magazines in Korea since 2000 are as follow.: First, mainstream fashion in Korea sticks to the modern values preserving traditional sexual ideology even in this postmodern period of the former 21C. Second, Androgynous Femininity as another dominant femininity with Traditional Femininity connotes the change of conception of femininity in Korean society. Third, Androgynous Masculinity to females is preferred, while femininity to males is still regarded as fetish or adorned object. Fourth, the appearance of various alternative sexualities leads to pluralization of sexuality, and then fashion gradually codifies youthfulness and feminine values, such as body and sexual desire more than before.

국내 패션 잡지의 표지디자인에 나타난 패션에 관한 연구

This study is an attempt to examine fashion elements appearing in the cover-page design of fashion magazines published in Korea and aims to find Korea#s own fashion identity in fashion styling and designing of those fashion magazines. In order to do so, the study reviewed the related literature and analyzed the issues of Vogue and Harper#s Bazaar magazines published between 2004 and 2006. The results of the study can be summarized as follows: In case of fashion photographs, the largest number of 72 sampled cover-model photographs is in approximately three-quarter cut size. For the items, most take the form of one-piece dress and feature the use of a variety of accessories. In case of dresses, most are the creations of foreign designers and famous fashion models or celebrities show up, mostly alone, as features on the cover pages. Because of the nature of fashion magazines, their primary emphasis is put on the dress among other things, but on the other hand some of those magazines have differential cover pages where the model#s face is highlighted with the look of makeup or a famous female actress stands out. However, the fashion in designing the cover pages of magazines is, rather than to show the dress itself, to create a new combination of different elements as total fashion or convey an image based on such a fashion style.

DOCUMENTING KATE MOSS

In the early 1990s a new image of British national identity emerged on the pages of The Face, Dazed and Confused and Vogue. Fashion and style photography created an aesthetic out of the lives of young Londoners and the places they lived in, including second-hand markets, the rave scene and shared flats. Corinne Day's seemingly private photo-diaries became the basis for her fashion magazine work. In these pictures she featured her friends, her flat, her sofa and fairy lights, and also a girl called Kate Moss who “didn't look very much like a model.” For Day and other innovators, new ways of documenting contemporary reality were achieved through fashion and women's magazines, rather than by classic photojournalism.

타투 패션에 따른 패션감성과 감정연구

The objective of this study is to provide the basis to planning the design of commercial products and effective image coordination for various situation in investigating the existence of Tattoo with an examination of fashion sensibilities and emotions as well as in analyzing Tattoo fashions which have an effect on the unique image coordinations in the fashion collection. Stimulus pictures have collected from fashion photographs appeared Tattoo expression released on the fashion collection and selected 35 pieces of pictures out of total through the analysing process in many times. Valuation tools have used with 19 pairs of adjective as fashion sensibilities valuation tool and 13 questionnaire as emotion valuation tool. Data has been collected from August 30th to September 17th on the subject of 20's men and women who live in Busan city area and those data has been analyzed by using SPSS statistics package program. The summary and conclusion of verified outcomes on this study are as follows: 1. Main factors of fashion sensibilities about Tattoo fashion are composed of three factors, such as Attractiveness, Visibility, Maturity and those factors have explained by 60.9%. On the other han, the fashion emotions are composed of negative emotion and positive emotion and explained by 66.3%. 2. The image of Tattoo fashion has shown four groups; Sexy, Romantic, Grotesque, Natural. 3. The positioning according to the image of Tattoo fashion has interpreted that X-axis as Grotesque-Romantic, Y-axis as Simple-Dazzling according to design features.