Fashion Art

FASHION ART
Author(s): Anne Hollander

Source: Aperture, No. 122, THE IDEALIZING VISION: THE ART OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY
(WINTER 1991), pp. 32-61
Published by: Aperture Foundation, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24471967
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FASHION ART
by Anne Hollander
The beauty of dress comes alive in art. Ever since the by the brilliant images offered in the w
breathtaking achievements of the ancient Greeks, dressed can mold ordinary bodies to suit its o
perfection has been embodied in images, visions of en- the ordinary world always try to measur
hanced reality that teach the eye how to see clothes, and elegance that artists imagine and make
teach clothes how to look. Images show how artists tailor of the fashion camera are heirs to an artisti
the figure to suit the fashion, so that it wears its clothes to has continually established and reestablis
advantage. The eye is taught to see living clothed figures in of clothes.
the light of the image and to believe what it sees. The force For centuries, courtly artists attempted
of the authoritative fiction can create the truth of clothed figures as if they were eternal icon
appearances. timeless a harmony as possible, even if the fashions were
Living bodies can only shift a little to match artists' vi- bizarre. The stunning effect of B
sion of them—people can get fat or thin and alter their from the way the cumbersome c
posture; but fashion itself can change extremely, spurred easy and inevitable on his princel
JEAN-PAUL
JEAN-PAUL
GOUDE, Paris, 1984 GOUDE, Paris, 1984 33
SARAH MOON, Dior, Paris, 1990
SARAH MOON,
MOON, Callaghan,
Callaghan, Paris,
Paris, 1989
1989
HORST P. HORST, Paris, 1978
HORST P. HORST, New York, 1987
KOTO BOLOFO, Lucy
Lucy Carr,
Carr, Los
Los Angeles,
Angeles, 19*
1988
KOTO BOLOFO,
BOLOFO, Rebekah
Rebekah Powell,
Powell,Los
LosAngeles,
Angeles,1988
19É!
39
■
Fashion Art
and taxing it really may have been, and hard to keep in that showed no impulse to keep pa
proper trim. Although clothes were actually made by tai- serious art. As a result, fashionab
lors, fashion in the sixteenth century was inspired and seem more and more like vain foll
moved along by such artists as Titian and Bronzino, who and aesthetic prestige as its compo
could turn all absurdities and grotesqueries into graceful orate and its image less serious. F
adornments, and even produce a longing for more of them. clusively associated with women
In the superior world of the painter, noble personages in As fashion-plate imagery becam
all sorts of awkward gear were created and presented in a gesting insipidity and moral null
state of ideal dignity and refinement; and so a standard fects of puckered taffeta and drap
was set for perfect appearance that might be followed by of fashion seemed more spiritua
the living originals, who could feel beautified by their trap- odds with earnest pursuits an
pings instead of trapped. Consequently, still bigger lace flounces and braid, feathers and v
ruffs and even thicker silk skirts might continue in vogue, lines all took on the ambiguous and
even into the next generation, because Rubens and Van nine narcissism; and an elegantly
Dyck and their colleagues were at work rendering them unaccountable apparition, delici
glorious to see, wonderfully becoming, and apparently ef- threatening, disconnected from
fortless to wear. ments of life.
In the days of ducal courts, empires, and absolute
archies, the aim of such images was the suggestion
certain false permanence. The desired effect was of
nuity with all past and future greatness, so that fashion
figures in art tended toward substance and stasis, and
painterly realism had a sumptuous quality, laden with
the riches of tradition just as the actual clothes were
laden with padding, starch, and metallic embroideries
Later styles of painting followed later ideals of elegan
ing, with their different ways of seeing the beauty of f
ion; and fashion changed to suit. able personages tended to imitate the effects of old masters
Rococo notions demanded a sense of wit and delicacy in instead of exploring explicitly photographic ways to en
dress, even though the shape and construction of clothes hance fine clothes.
did not change very much; so painters freshened up the But painters did better. The glittering visions of the Im
palette of elegance and made all clothing seem light as air. pressionists added new possibilities to the aura of elegance,
Fashion required frothy accessories and mobile postures, new magic to the surfaces of silk dresses and powdered
all ideally offered in the compelling imagery of Boucher faces, which fashion illustration could never suggest; and
and Watteau, where billowing flesh and fabric seem made they offered a new integration of fashion with the general
of the same lovely stuff, a cloud of erotic allusion spiced texture of life, so that the beauty of rich clothes and the
with faint irony. The burden of greatness was lifted from beauty of the natural world need not seem at war. This was
chic; people could relax and lean back, or sit on the grass a prophetic move, one the camera undertook much later,
and flirt. Modern design and modern art wholly changed the look
In the 1770s, the inauguration of fashion plates caused of fashion for a few short years a
a significant new accord between art and clothes. Elegant tury. Fashion illustration took a leap f
paintings were no longer the only vehicles for the image of avant-garde style for the image of
dressed perfection. For the first time, printed pictures of linked it to all other objects designed
ideal figures sporting modish clothes with supreme flair reduction and abstraction. The in
were published in magazines wholly devoted to the mode. ern architecture and industrial design
The fashionable world, moreover, had outgrown the con- design itself much higher on th
fines of court life; it was living in cities, and mixing with design could once more come in
interesting strangers. The new fashion art suggested the im- creative endeavor, for the first ti
personal flow of urban visual life, and helped replace the Fashionable dress was quickly
fixed stars created by courtly painters of the past. Fashion- creased in clarity; women's clo
able dress now had to capture the idle, scanning gaze of tially abstract shapes of men's tailo
the general public, to seek appreciation even on the public the spatial character of male clothing
street. Anyone could play; and fashion plates—outrageous, out in waves of fantasy. The gra
wondrous, captivating—showed the way to do it. was purveyed again bore a relation
Fashion plates sustained a high level of taste and an af- ments in modern painting and pr
finity with the best art of the eighteenth century; but they its dress became a clear-edged, str
declined a great deal during the next one. Nineteenth-cen- cubes and cylinders or of flat geome
tury fashion plates developed a separate illustrative style with dazzling finesse. Fashion ar
PATRICK
PATRICK DeMARCHELIER, Rome, 1986DeMARCHELIER, Rome, 1986 41
SERGE LUTENS, Mécanique
Mecanique Rouge, Paris, 1989
SERGE LUTENS, Suspens Colors, Paris, 1986
" * " i" p
1985
DEBORAH TURBEVILLE, Vaux-Le-Vicomte, Paris, 19^
DEBORAH TURBEVILLE, Sicily, 1987
Fashion Art
tions with the imaginative constructions of Braque and and changes totally. Transit
Leger, which lent further aesthetic luster to the whole idea by no visible process. M
of fashion. people fit into such images are now often made out of inex
During the first third of this century the camera had been plicable fabrics and by unseen means, in ind
continuously influencing the perception of the new archi- cesses that can also be swiftly adjusted to make
tecture and design, of all man-made things, and of natural sets of garments in great numbers on sho
phenomena. The vigorous beauty of the modern world was meant to live for a few perfect moments
being increasingly celebrated and virtually created by great placed by the next.
photographers, whose vision eagerly included the clothed Under the influence of the increasingly s
body along with deserts and bridges, cityscapes and rural ion camera, garments ideally look not only
desolation. Fashion photography, like the prints of the able but dependent for their current beauty
eighteenth century, began its life at the highest level of cam- swift changes of psychological ambience. W
era art, which manifested more aesthetic authority and ere- for its chief medium, fashion has come to see
ative power than any other graphic medium of the advanc- more like a sequence of costumes illustrating a
ing twentieth century. And so fashion itself was redeemed, inward events. The photographic message
not only from the tacky illustrative graphics of the past that modern men and women may keep visually
but even from the impersonal and static world of modern ing through clothing with no loss of true perso
design. or consistency, preserving their emotional equilibrium by
By the 1930s, in harmony with movies and photojour- dressing all the parts they play in the c
nalism, fashion photography began to render the passing their inner life. The postmode
chic moment for its own sake, instead of fixing the mode learned that disparate, incongru
in a timeless image indebted to the old history of painting not only cohabit in one closet, as if o
and engraving or to the new course of the decorative me- racks, but may now be combined
dia. This shift of emphasis in fashion imagery had a deci- conflict and ambivalence in most
sive effect on ideals of dress and irreversibly changed the In the new world of freewheelin
look of modern clothing. Instead of being designed objects camera images, old denim and fresh s
similar to chairs and cars, clothed figures in fashion art not just in quick succession but to
began to look like characters in small, unfinished dramas, Practical life is not directly add
caught in fantasy moments of acute tension and resonance camera, any more than it was ad
that had no future and no past. Fashion itself, the very Boucher. Women are in fact better
clothes themselves, gradually came to fulfill an ideal not tualities into their closets without dire
just of free movement through the action of living but of images; those, rather, are for th
quick replaceability. Mass-produced moments were to be the nourishment of the inner ey
swiftly lived through clad in a shifting sequence of mass- up useful collections of garments
produced garments, all ensembles soon giving way to com- negotiating the marketplace with wa
plete new ones, just as they did in the evocative pictures flame of pleasure and fantasy ne
that similarly came and went. their eyes, lending imaginative force to the enterprise, mak
In sharp contrast to past centuries, it became a modern ing it a creative act.
assumption that clothes were not to be remodeled or even It is the potent imagery of fashion art that provides the
radically repaired, only replaced. Although fashion glow and generates the true art of dress, feeding the imagi
changed constantly in the past, garments still represented nation and pushing the visual possibilities of clothing into
the sustained continuity of living. They embodied the new emotional territory. Designers need it and work under
phrasing of human life, the tough and flexible endurance of its influence, relying on the camera to realize what they
human society itself. When the mode shifted, extant clothes propose, to ratify its virtues and expound its value, just as
could be picked apart and the precious fabric refashioned the tailors of the Renaissance needed Titian. Today's fash
so that something new grew out of the destruction of the ion is almost entirely perceived and judged through photo
old. Even when society was actually breaking up and insti- graphs disseminated in the media. Most of the vast audi
tutions were crumbling, dress with its quasi-organic stay- ence for fashion sees the work of designers only through
ing power through fashionable change, with its vital link to the camera's eye, and responds not directly to fabric and
its own roots in known materials and handmade structure, cut but to fabric and cut explained, translated, and ulti
spoke to its wearers of survival and stability. Fashion built mately transfigured by varieties of photographic magic,
and rebuilt on its own past. Actual clothes can only follow in the camera's wake, doing
But the modern camera began to suggest the absolute their mundane work of enabling the flow of physical life
contingency of anything elegant, even something in itself and sustaining the social world. The deep aesthetic plea
stiff, thick, and still. Since the thirties, fashion photographs sure they can give, the sparks of visual delight they can
have continued to emphasize the dependence of desirable strike, are always largely in debt to the ideal fictions the
looks on completely ephemeral visual satisfaction, the har- lens has created, the vivid images that give fashion its true
mony of the immediate moment only, which exists totally life. □
46 BARRY LATEGAN, Water Lily, BARRY

Maldives, 1990
LATEGAN, Water Lily, Maldives, 1990
% '
HIRO,Black
HIRO, Black evening,
evening, dress dress in flight,
in flight, New
New York, 1963York, 1963
HIRO, Akiko in Rudi Gernreich sheath, India, 1966
48
<r
F2f
CHERYL KORALIK, Vienna, 1986; opposite: Vienna, 1986
50
PETER
PETER ZANDER,
ZANDER,TThe
/7 eRussians,
Russians, Milan,
Milan, 1987
1987
52
s
lip
aai
•If
-,v
g
:w sag M
f s,
fjfci
> /
JEAN PAGLIUSO, New York, 1986; above: New York, 1986
55
PAOLO ROVERSI, London, 1985
198s
PAOLO ROVERSI, Paris, 1987
GEORGE HOLZ, Face with Checkers, New York, 1987
GEORGE HOLZ, Face with Shadows, Milan, 1984
js
ARTHUR ELGORT,
La Coupelle, Paris, 1988
61

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FASHION ART

Author(s): Anne Hollander

46 BARRY LATEGAN, Water Lily, BARRY

HIRO, Akiko in Rudi Gernreich sheath, India, 1966

CHERYL KORALIK, Vienna, 1986; opposite: Vienna, 1986

GEORGE HOLZ, Face with Shadows, Milan, 1984

La Coupelle, Paris, 1988

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