Underlying all the different units of Orientalist discourse … is a set of representative figures, or tropes. These figures are to the actual Orient … as stylised costumes are to characters in a play.[i]
The primary focus of this blog is exotic imagery – photographs – in fashion magazines in Britain, the United States, and Europe, from the 1960s through to the present day. In this period, fashion is just as much about images as it is about actual garments designed and worn. ‘As fashion becomes pure appearance, it finds its perfect summing-up in photographs. What people understand of fashion is now mostly set by photographic images. More and more fashion is photography.’
In 1974 the late, highly respected American critic, novelist and essayist Susan Sontag (1933-2994) wrote an article for Vogue magazine. In ‘The Avedon Eye’, she cast her critical gaze on the work of the hugely successful and influential fashion photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004), as well as on fashion photography in general. She wrote: ‘It is the photograph that confers celebrity, that makes something fashionable, that perpetuates and comments on the evolving idea – that is, the fantasy – of fashion.’ Sontag was very prescient in her critique; over the past twenty or so years a number of writers and photography curators have argued a similar case for the fashion photograph. In Adorned In Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Elizabeth Wilson argues ‘Images of desire are constantly in circulation; increasingly it has been the image as well as the artefact that the individual has purchased … Fashion is a magical system and what we see when we leaf through glossy magazines is “the look”. Like advertising, women’s magazines have moved from the didactic to the hallucinatory. Originally their purpose was informational, but what we see today in both popular journalism and advertising is the mirage of a way of being, and what we engage in is no longer only the relatively simple process of direct imitation, but the less conscious one of identification.’
More recently, Ulrich Lehmann has written ‘fashion only exists in representation … Clothing is elevated from its material properties to an aesthetic idea through its representation as an image in the media. It is only through this process that most clothing can become fashion in the first place.’ Why should it be the case that the fashion image has come almost to replace the actual fashion garment? Put simply, it is because ‘the representation of fashion is more readily accessible and easier to consume than the actual garments themselves.’ Few of us can afford John Galliano’s creations for Dior, but most in Europe and America can afford the price of a fashion magazine.
Roland Barthes has argued that there is a significant difference between the way actual garments and representations of them are consumed and produced, therefore, in an assessment such as this, it cannot be assumed that exoticism – Orientalism – manifests itself in fashion imagery the same way that it does in the work of designers. What fashion photography is concerned with, Barthes argues, is to persuade us to ‘overlook the mundane materiality and utility of the garments portrayed, and to ruminate instead on the symbolism of fashion’. In our image-saturated, multi-media society, this concept is truer today than when Barthes conceived it in the late 1960s.
‘Avedon has taken pains to show that fashion photography is not limited to fashion – a development that now seems inherent in fashion photography itself.’ In other words, fashion, that is to say physical garments, often has very little to do with fashion photography. What, then, is it about? Irvin Penn stated that his job at Vogue was selling dreams, not clothes. Iconic 1960s photographer (still working today) David Bailey has written that ‘a good fashion photograph works on many levels, the most important being as a social document ... a fashion picture ... reflect[s] the attitudes, technical, sexual, and environmental, of a period’.
Fashion photography, despite the creativity harnessed to create images, trades on conventions and standardised fantasies for people to buy into – preppy Americana, chic urban living; pastoral romanticism, and of course, far-flung exoticism; fashion is, after all, a means to an end, it exists to encourage us to consume, and as such (particularly in high-end commercial fashion magazines that rely on advertising) the images are not there to challenge conventions. ‘Even the best fashion photography is still an industry in service of industry. It is an industry of images in service of a specialized industry … that is itself on the cutting edge of a global capitalism increasingly dominated by the system of fashion (the acceleration of cycles, the imperative of the new, the aestheticization of consumption etc.).’
All the same, Anna Wintour, the powerful editor-in-chief of American Vogue for the past twenty-one years, points out that even the most ruthlessly commercial fashion magazine editor knows that it is a ‘combination of clothes and art that makes the memorable photograph we all yearn for’.
Alexander Liberman, a long-serving art director and fashion editor at Paris Vogue and American Vogue called photography, a modern ‘opium of the people’. In order to achieve its goal, fashion photography needs ‘to seduce – to interest and to transport the spectator into a world of illusion.’ One of these worlds of illusion is one where the spectator, imaging herself as the model in the image, becomes a traveller transported from one ‘exotic’ locale to another, clad always in the chicest of clothes.
Exoticism in the fashion photograph manifests itself most commonly, and significantly, as picturesque scenery; the non-Western landscape and non-Western people as theatrical backdrop to the fashion model and the clothes. These are the kinds of images under discussion here; a very many have been produced for fashion magazines since the late sixties, when ‘ethnicity’ became chic; but as the picture at the top of this post shows, they were in circulation well before this time.
Sontag wrote of how ‘fashion treats the world as décor … the body and face [of the model] in their perfection are seen in sharp focus against the (usually) out-of-focus “picturesque”’. In ‘The Imaginary Orient’ Linda Nochlin argues that Orientalism falls under the category of the picturesque. She states that one of the important functions of the picturesque is to ‘certify that the people encapsulated by it, defined by its presence, are irredeemably different from, more backward than, and culturally inferior to those who construct and consume the picturesque product. They are irrevocably “Other’’.’ The exotic fashion photograph pivots around axes of tradition versus modernity, pastoral versus urban, and the familiar versus that which is foreign.
This image (‘Antonia At The Star Ferry’. Photograph by Franco Scavullo) is an example of these conventions in action. In the photograph, the model in contemporary Western clothes is contrasted with local people – in this case Hong Kong Chinese – wearing clothes that, compared with Western fashion, resemble timeless, exotic ‘uniforms’. In addition, the photograph gives ‘the visual impression of a human wave of Chinese surrounding a lone white female’.
In ‘The Imaginary Orient’, Nochlin discusses the painter Jean-Leon Gérôme (1824-1904). Gérôme’s paintings are characterised by their apparent absence of art. At first glance, images such as Snake Charmer ( c.1870, Sterling and Francine Clarke Art Institute, Mass.), which presents a young naked boy with his back to the viewer, charming a snake for an audience of Muslim men wrapped in robes and scarves who sit facing the viewer against a wall of intricately patterned Islamic tiling - appear simply as reflections, or snapshots of life in the Orient. However Nochlin argues that ‘the painting should really be called The Snake Charmer and His Audience, for we are clearly meant to look at both performer and audience as parts of the same spectacle’. Likewise, in exotic fashion photography ‘our gaze is meant to include both the spectacle and its spectators as objects of picturesque delectation’.
Unlike Orientalist painting, in which the Western presence is conspicuous by its absence, in fashion photography, the Westerner must be present, in the form of the fashion model, to show off the clothes and to act as the channel through which the spectator is transported into the fashion fantasy. One questions that arises is whether there is a difference between the messages transmitted by images that contain black and Asian models, and those that do not?
A final consideration is whether non-Westerners are guilty of ‘auto-exoticising’ themselves in Orientalist fashion imagery. Have they colluded with Western photographers, fashion editors and art directors to reduce themselves and their countrymen to clichés whilst reproducing the rules of spectacular domination’? Does their willing participation in the creation of these images give an implicit approval of the exotic fantasies of fashion photography? ‘
Ulrich Lehmann, Jessica Morgan and Gilles Lipovetsky, Chic Clicks: Creativity and Commerce in Contemporary Fashion Photography, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art in collaboration with Hatje Cantz, New York, 2002, p. 1.
Irvin Penn quoted in David Bailey and Martin Harrison, Shots of Style: Great Fashion Photographs Chosen by David Bailey, V&A Publications/Faber & Faber, London, 1986, p. 13.
In recent years, this art has come in for serious artistic scrutiny. In 1985 the V&A museum held an exhibition of fashion photography entitled Shots of Style: Great Fashion Photographs. This exhibition has been followed with a spate of shows at the V&A and at other museums and galleries – Imperfect Beauty: The Making of Contemporary Fashion Photographs at the V&A (2000-01), Chic Clicks at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (2002), Guy Bourdin at the V&A in 2003, and Fashioning Fiction in Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2004. All of these exhibitions serve to confirm that the fashion photograph has a significance that transcends the pages of the magazine that they appear in.
