Fashion

Roland Barthes

Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body

Calculating, industrial society is obliged to form consumers who don’t calculate; if clothing’s producers and consumers had the same consciousness, clothing would be bought (and produced) only at the very slow rate of its dilapidation.

Andrew Richardson

Advertisers have inflicted such great demands on fashion magazines big and small since the 2008 crash that they are no longer creative outlets. There’s been no new interesting fashion photographer or movement in fashion since the ’90s. The next great fashion photographer is going to be a fashion blogger or someone with a YouTube channel. Communicating a sophisticated message in a still photograph, which a great photographer can do, is too rarefied. The fashion business doesn’t really want great, provocative images from us anymore.

When we look at fashion photographs, are we looking at commerce or at art? Why do so many fashion photographs seem to ignore the fashion? What is being sold — articles of clothing, a designer line … or something intangible? If the latter (as it so often seems), what? And why do designers and magazines and advertisers shell out so much money to produce photographs that tell the viewer precious little about the clothes? 

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Fashion

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