With:

Tim Blanks, editor-at-large at Business of Fashion

Thom Browne, founder & head of design at Thom Browne

Ralph Toledano, president of the Fédération Française de la Couture, du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, president of the fashion division at Puig, CEO at Nina Ricci

Jean-Jacques Picart, fashion and luxury goods consultant

Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons International

Glenn O’Brien, editor-at-large at Maxim

Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder & senior adviser for creative direction at United Arrows

Steven Kolb, president & CEO at Council of Fashion Designers of America

Nicole Phelps, director at Vogue Runway

Nathalie Ours, partner at PR Consulting Paris

Robin Schulié, brand manager & buying director at Maria Luisa

Andy Spade, co-founder of Partners & Spade, co-founder of Kate Spade, founder of Jack Spade, founder of Sleepy Jones

Tim Walker, freelance photographer

***

Glenn O’Brien: Do you know who the ‘pharmakoi’ were? They were the scapegoats in Ancient Greece. They were sacrificed annually, driven out of Athens or thrown off a cliff, in a purification ritual. That’s what we do to people who fail today. Drug addicts, criminals, people on ’entitlements’ – we ostracise them. In America we can’t accept failure; we can’t say that we’ve failed. Instead it’s the system that’s failed, the president that’s failed, the congress that’s failed – we never fail. I’m not a failure, I’m on the chamber of commerce for god’s sake! In fashion it’s the same thing: people are in denial about failure. The game is about how to transform failure into a perceived success.

Robin Schulié: The press release that was put out after Alexander Wang was fired from Balenciaga was pure propaganda. It was your typical statement where everyone praises each other to the sky. There was no reason given for the ‘separation’. And then Alexander Wang started giving interviews about his new store opening in London and none of them mentioned what had happened at Balenciaga – it was all airbrushed out of the success story that is Alexander Wang. Hilarious!

Jean-Jacques Picart: In fashion we treat failure as if it was a disease.

Steven Kolb: There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in this industry. It’s hard to tell how well a fashion business is doing: whether people are getting paid, what a company’s cash flow is like.

Ralph Toledano: Failure in fashion is not selling.

Steven Kolb: Look at Band of Outsiders. It was a ten-year business, critically acclaimed, on the radar of major editors; they’d won prizes and had a point of view. They grew from zero to seventeen million in a decade, and they just folded. Why? They just didn’t have the resources to take their business to the next level. You know, it’s easier to take your business from zero to ten million in a relatively short time span, but once you hit ten million it becomes much harder to grow. You need an influx of capital to really start investing in expansion, in distribution and stores, in control of inventory and wholesale – all those things are expensive. Lots of fashion companies take outside investment at this point, and most of those investors aren’t fashion people. That leads to conflict because people have different expectations.

Jean-Jacques Picart: Success or failure in fashion isn’t a measure of how talented you are as a designer. You can be the most talented designer in the world and still fail. There are so many incredibly talented designers who had to close their brands because they weren’t commercially successful. That they were the darlings of the press doesn’t matter in the long run. If you don’t know how to translate your creative vision into commercially viable products, this industry will spit you out.

Steven Kolb: Often designers get stuck on whether they get a bad review or no review for a collection, on what Suzy Menkes thinks. To me, that’s not failure. Going out of business, that’s failure. Not being able to deliver what you promise, not being able to pay your employees, not being able to feed the infrastructure you’ve created – that’s failure.

Nicole Phelps: Success in fashion today is about how many $5000 handbags you sell. That’s what determines if a designer stays at the head of a brand. How many bags a brand sells matters infinitely more than what I, Vanessa Friedman or Suzy Menkes might think.

Adrian Joffe: I’d say there’s a blueprint for success today – a certain path you need to tread. And an important part of it is being charming to reporters. Do the blah blah blah. Some people who are successful today are brilliant at it. They can charm the pants off anyone.

Tim Blanks: Look at who makes it today. Look at Proenza Schouler for instance; I find them banal but they’re cute and charismatic. Then again, there are designers like Joseph Altuzarra, who’s a genius in my book, so I’m glad that he’s so telegenic and gets a leg-up because of it. On the other hand, there are designers like Anna Sui who have forged ahead for years doing absolutely amazing work. Her shows now have a much better calibre of audience than they used to, but she never quite manages to hit the big time because Anna Wintour doesn’t like her.

Nicole Phelps: If you look at someone like Frida Giannini who was fired from Gucci recently, it’s very hard to see what her next act might be. She was always a bit aloof with the press, and that didn’t make her many friends in the business. That might affect her chances to get another high profile job. Let’s just say that she doesn’t have the world’s most powerful editor in her court.

Adrian Joffe: Rei has always said that she doesn’t think she has succeeded at all. She believes that if she was successful, she wouldn’t have to think about next week’s cash flow, she wouldn’t have to worry. Sometimes I ask her, ‘Can’t you just be happy? Just for one instant?’ One time she didn’t want to come to Paris at all, she wanted to cancel the whole show. She said, ‘This is no good, no one is going to like it, it’s not good enough.’ In fact, she says that every time, and every time I remind her that she’s always wrong. It’s getting worse though, the suffering and torture she puts herself through. I’m constantly reassuring her. I try to protect her and make things easier but it just gets too hard sometimes. But that’s what drives her, this dissatisfaction. For her, one instant of self-satisfaction would mean the end.

Thom Browne: Without sounding self-congratulatory, I’d define myself as someone successful.

Andy Spade: For me success means getting respect from my peers for the work I do. If Glenn O’Brien writes about what I do, if he likes it and thinks it’s brilliant, that to me is a success. Because he gets it. Success for me isn’t financial. I mean, I know how to do things that sell. That’s not a challenge. Success to me is doing something highly conceptual that sells. Then I feel like I’m fooling the public. I like the idea of pulling the wool over the consumer’s eyes.

Glenn O’Brien: A lot of times I’ve been distracted from what I should have been doing by doing stuff just to make money. I’m a family man: I have kids and I want to live well. By many people’s standards I guess I’m a brilliant failure. But navigating this corporate colossus world is hard. You exist only through benign neglect. Like, please don’t crush me, I just want to have a hot dog stand – I promise!

Adrian Joffe: The system is what it is and fashion can’t change that. Are you going to change the world with fashion? I don’t think so. Fashion is just a reflection of society at large. We live in a culture where poor people can dress up in nice things for cheap, and where rich people want to know that they’re the only ones to have what they have. That’s not new. Some people have yachts in the Caribbean; others have a shack to sleep in if they’re lucky. My point is that we need everything – ultimately it’s about balance. In fashion, we need Uniqlo, Louis Vuitton and Comme des Garçons. Nature is about balance, and culture is too. And the fact that that balance is never achieved is what keeps things moving. If we were to somehow achieve absolute balance, the world would end. And still that’s what we keep striving for. That’s the Tree of Life.

Tim Blanks: Everything moves forward according to a dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. We go through smooth and rough patches – that’s just progress. We don’t know what our world will look like in twenty years’ time. Maybe we’ll all be living in another Fascist regime. Or in Utopia. Though I doubt it – human beings are incapable of Utopia.

Thom Browne: If you want to fight the system – good luck! A lot of people complain about the fashion industry today, but the way I see it, there’s no use complaining. I prefer to live my life according to the way things are.

Andy Spade: Look, if you choose to ignore the system, if you’re just like, I want to do my own thing, fuck the world, I hate everybody – then you shouldn’t live in a capitalist society. You should leave. Where would you go? I don’t care – but get out of America! I hate it when people whine about the system. Figure it out! I didn’t have any backing when I started; no one paid for my samples. I didn’t have any patrons; I took two jobs to pay for it all. I think the system is working fine.

Glenn O’Brien: Fashion and the big time art world have been corrupted. The only space noncommercial culture has today, is a little temporary space that nobody notices. Like the space for cheap buildings in big cities, you can fill them until they get knocked down in order to put something expensive in its place. It’s nothing new; it’s been this way since Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. But today we’ve reached this whole new level of stupidity orchestrated mainly by the mass media. Everywhere you look you see Caitlyn, Kim and Kanye. If people spend all their time thinking about ’The Real Housewives’ or ’Dancing with the Stars,’ they’re not thinking about poverty, police brutality or the exploitation of workers in Abu Dhabi.

Tim Blanks: The whole process of fashion has become fascinating to ordinary people. It’s a whole fallow area of escapism that hadn’t yet been exploited. Bread and circuses. The world has gone further and further down the toilet and fashion is glorious window-dressing. Nobody buys the clothes, but they sure like looking at them or reading about the people who make them or wear them.

Glenn O’Brien: Fashion is one of the main things that distract people from thinking about what’s important today: ecology and politics. It’s a manipulation machine. The celebrity system we have now doesn’t make people think bigger or question anything. It’s the opposite actually – it makes people think more and more shallowly.

Hirofumi Kurino: Money and politics have conquered fashion. In the press for instance, nobody dares saying anything critical anymore. To me, that shows a lack of love. If you really care about fashion, you should be able to say critical things when it’s warranted. Recently I had dinner with the editor-in-chief of GQ Japan, Masafumi Suzuki. It was just after LVMH’s Berluti presentation, and afterwards all the PR people were asking him, ‘Mr Suzuki, how did you like the show?’ I’m sure they expected the usual niceties, but instead he said, ‘It was the worst show I ever saw!’ He told them they were cheating the customer and ruining the heritage of the brand by making expensive, uninteresting clothes. The PRs were shocked, but what he said came from a place of love. He cares about the brand. And because he’s important, people listen and invite him back to see the next collection.

Nicole Phelps: The corporations are getting stronger all the time in fashion. I see new brands coming up all the time; they stay underground for a season and then they too move towards the corporations. Partly it’s because it’s too expensive and too difficult to develop a fashion line without support. But it’s also because the glamour that the corporations represent is irresistible.

Robin Schulié: When Bernard Arnault bought Christian Lacroix in 1987, it marked the beginning of a new era. Arnault was interested in building a fashion house in the traditional way – starting with haute couture, moving on to ready-to-wear and then diversifying into accessories and perfume. But Lacroix was extremely reactionary in terms of design, for the time I mean. Alaïa, Mugler, Montana and Gaultier were already huge by that point. But they were all kind of scary – too advanced for most consumers. Lacroix with his charisma, and his organza and puff skirts, could appeal to grannies. Instead of growing the business organically, Arnault invested a lot of money in Lacroix. Still, it never worked. No one wanted what he was selling.

Ralph Toledano: People who look down their noses at LVMH or Kering are just jealous. They envy their power and money. Look, the CEOs of these companies might wear grey suits and white shirts, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t get it. They do. François-Henri Pinault had the guts to hire Hedi Slimane even though everybody was sceptical and look at where Saint Laurent is now, so don’t tell me he doesn’t get it. As the president of the Fédération, I know that we need people like Pinault or Arnault to achieve our goals. They have the money.

Glenn O’Brien: The people who cooperate the most are the ones who are rewarded so there are always willing participants.

Robin Schulié: Is there any other way to play the game? If you want to compete with the big guys, do you have to do it on their terms? That’s the million-dollar question. Young designers today are often competitive. They want to prove themselves and play the game. But the market today is too fragmented, and the big brands have already honed their skills for several decades. How can a young brand compete with that? And anyway, is there really just one way to be successful? Young designers need to ask themselves if they would be satisfied with another model. Why does every designer seem to follow the same blueprint for success? Why do you need to please everybody? I can understand that Dior needs to, but Christopher Kane? What will happen to his vision once he starts making long dresses for the Middle East, short cutesy ones for Asia and conservative tailoring for Middle America?

Nathalie Ours: A designer with an independent brand needs money to develop his company. The big problem for young designers is that buyers might love what they do and order it, but to produce it they have to be able to pay their manufacturer. Bear in mind that buyers pay designers six months after they have delivered the goods, so there’s a gap in the timeline. If the designer doesn’t have a good banker or partner, how do they manage that gap? That’s the big issue. Every designer I know has the same problem. Sometimes with very new designers, a buyer accepts paying, say, thirty percent in advance. But after three or four years, the buyer says, ’Okay, we’ve supported you – enough already.’ So now what do you do? Can you afford to lose this buyer? Most designers can’t. That’s one of the reasons why many young designers are so happy to have a conglomerate behind them. It’s a way to survive.

Tim Walker: As a creative you have to work out how to direct the money into projects where you can capitalise on it. You have to know how to take your vision to a level that wouldn’t have been possible without the financial support available. That’s my tuppence worth.

Ralph Toledano: Big corporate monsters need to have a creative vision and a genius designer at the top. The public wants someone they can identify by name, someone with a recognisable face. They want a hero. That’s why fashion companies stage fashion shows – the public needs to dream. But this aspect of fashion is only partially important to the success of a business today. What really matters is the rest of the machine: the marketing, the supply chain, the location of the shop, the communication campaign. That’s where you make your billions. In this sense fashion is a commodity business. As the CEO of a company you go to the show, but in the end the quality of the show is much less important than currency fluctuations or the economic situation in China.

Nicole Phelps: The fashion industry has a knack for turning designers into stars. Look at someone like Alessandro Michele at Gucci; your typical backroom guy thrust into the limelight because of his position. We editors are storytellers by necessity – we need to create stars. We have pages to fill.

Adrian Joffe: Do multinational corporations abuse power? I’m not sure they do. They just do what they do, that’s all. They have power because they’re rich and because that lets them spend a million dollars a month in advertising budget on some magazine. And if they then expect the magazine to write nicely about them because of it, is that abuse of power? I’m not sure it is. They just do what they feel they have to do.

Glenn O’Brien: We live in a time where corporations are seen as individuals. But if you work for a corporation, are you allowed to have an individual opinion? Not really. You have to follow the company voice and the company line. It’s destructive to human beings. Me, I believe in a freelance world. Working for a company only for money is what Marx called ’alienated labour.’ Today we live in a world of alienated labour where people sell out – they sell themselves, their minds, their integrity. They become liars for money.

Andy Spade: Glenn respects commercialism just like Andy Warhol did. If I just did my work in some small corner of the world, I don’t think Glenn would respect it as much. What he respects is the fact that I built a business while still being subversive, working on two levels. I’m not claiming to be a designer or an artist or anything – I just like having good ideas that sell.

Adrian Joffe: Long live the one percent; they are the ones that change things.

Tim Walker: There’s been an incredible explosion of money and power in the industry. Today there are countless forces polluting the innocence of play and experimentation, and the impact on true creativity has been damning. From my point of view that’s a failure and a betrayal of sorts.

Ralph Toledano: Life is about power. It’s always been like that – it’s nothing new.

This article was published in Vestoj On Failure.

Erwin Wurm is an Austrian artist. These images are from his ‘Indoor Sculpture’ series, 2002.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj‘s Editor-in-Chief and Publisher.

There are, of course, differences. Walter Benjamin likened photography to a violin, a musical instrument; the art was in the playing of it, not in the instrument itself. Similarly, Susan Sontag¹ suggested that photography was a language, and, like language, it was not an art in itself, but rather the process from which art might emerge. Photography was born as an industrial process, the salient feature of which is the mass reproducibility of the image. Fashionable dress was originally artisanal; however it too has been wholly incorporated into and transformed by mass production. In addition, fashion styles today are disseminated globally by means of the reproducible image, so that quite aside from the characteristics they share, fashion and photography are economically entwined. This economic symbiosis has a further dimension in that both mass fashion and the mass image have aestheticised the world – or at least large parts of the globe – massively contributing to the visual culture in which we now live.

A further similarity between fashion and photography is that in contemporary society both function as potent visual representations of history, of the past. This does not just mean in terms of images in the press and other mass media; the rise of mass photography has meant that amateur photography – the snapshot – has become a major bearer of personal memories, just as images in the mass media become the archives of public memory.

My interest is not in discussing the status of these two forms, fashion and photography, and whether they qualify as art, or not. That debate tends to rely, at least to some extent, on an idea of Art with a capital ‘A’. Art with a capital A disavows vulgar commerce, claiming to be driven by individual genius, when in fact the art market is as much a market as anything else. By contrast, the obvious relationship of both fashion and photography to consumer capitalism is one reason why many commentators and critics have wanted to deny them a place in the Art pantheon. Walter Benjamin quotes from a nineteenth century German newspaper to illustrate the philistinism of the conventional view of art, with its romantic conception of genius – to which we still, rather surprisingly, cling to today. The article from which he quotes is an attack on photography: ‘to try to capture fleeting mirror images … is blasphemous. Man is made in the image of God, and God’s image cannot be captured by any machine of human devising. The utmost the artist may venture, borne on the wings of divine inspiration, is to reproduce man’s God-given features without the help of any machine, in the moment of highest dedication, at the higher bidding of his genius.’² The intervention of an industrial, mechanical process negated the possibility that an aesthetic product could be ‘Art’.

And in one way or another, for the bourgeois romantic, Art was in some sense sacred. It was difficult to fit fashion into this category; its relationship to the body and its association with novelty and change at a time when Art was held to express the eternal, disqualified it.

The originality of the great theorists of modernity, Baudelaire and Benjamin, lies in part in their challenge to this view of art, and their understanding that modernity changes art. Photography and fashion were for them portals through which they approached this understanding. Baudelaire wrote of finding the eternal in the ephemeral as well as of how modern fashion expresses the beauty of its epoch, but the radicalism of this insight did not succeed in freeing fashion from the taint of mutability. Fashion could never, it was assumed, express a universal truth. It was always a sort of meretricious gloss on modern life and for moralists a kind of lie, concealing the underlying ugliness of consumer capitalism, not to mention the sinfulness of the human body. Thorstein Veblen’s is the best known, and still widely revered, statement of this position. Couturiers, nevertheless, claimed and continued to claim that they are artists, driven by inspiration and genius. Charles Frederick Worth even wore a Rembrandt-style beret to prove that he was such an artist.

By contrast, photography did seem to be the bearer of truth. The camera cannot lie. We now know this is not true. Even before the advent of digital photography and the computer, which bring endless possibilities of altering the raw image, it had been realised that every photograph is taken by an individual who brings his own bias and evaluation to the construction of the image. Nevertheless, photography continues to benefit from the idea that it bears witness, that it is objective. At the same time this supposed documentary objectivity distinguishes it from Art. It is, as it were, visual journalism rather than visual literature.

Photography nevertheless became an important dimension of modernism. Susan Sontag describes the process in this way: ‘Everyday life apotheosised, and the kind of beauty that only the camera reveals – a corner of material reality that the eye doesn’t see… or can’t normally isolate… when ordinary seeing was… violated – and the object isolated from its surroundings, rendering it abstract – new conventions about what was beautiful took hold. What is beautiful became just what the eye can’t (or doesn’t) see: that fracturing, dislocating vision that only the camera supplies.’³ In other words she implies that photography paves the way for abstract art, rather than abstract art being a reaction to the objective realism of the photograph.

It was just this kind of arty photography that Benjamin disliked. He writes: ‘The more far-reaching the crisis of the present social order… the more has the creative – in its deepest essence a sport, by contradiction out of imitation – become a fetish, whose lineaments live only in the fitful illumination of changing fashion. The creative in photography is its capitulation to fashion. The world is beautiful – that is its watchword. Therein is unmasked the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connexions in which it exists.’⁴ Benjamin – here anticipating Warhol in the most uncanny way – rejects the ideology of Art for Art’s Sake, as would any good Marxist of his time. But the kind of photography that is closest to painting does lose some of the distinctiveness and disavows some of the other possibilities of photography. To think of photographs in some abstract sense as Art also tends to distance both from the realm of the Everyday; when it is as reminders and memorials of the everyday that their hold is so potent.

Fashion, for all its hype, is also quintessentially about the everyday; everyday life. Clothes are what we put on every day; even those who most strenuously insist that what they wear has nothing to do with fashion and that they are not interested in fashion, are nevertheless wearing clothes as directed by fashion in one way or another. Fifty years ago no-one wore jeans to the office or to a party; men (let alone women) did not wear shorts in town. The casualisation of dress, which has made it possible for many individuals to feel that they have opted out of fashion, is in fact a fashion in itself, even were it not that the jeans we wear today are subtly different from those of ten or twenty or fifty years ago; as are t-shirts – and again, fifty years ago no-one wore a vest, that is to say an undergarment, to work.

For Sontag, ‘photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still.’⁵ Photographs preserve the past. This insight echoes those of Benjamin and Roland Barthes, the latter in particular insisting obsessively on the mournful nature of photographs which present us with the past without enabling us to re-enter it.

This might seem to separate photography radically from fashion. We choose the clothes we wear every day in order to look right now – today. In that sense fashion is very much about the present. It is about fitting in, while, perhaps, remaining distinctive. It’s to create an impression and to persuade others that this is who we are, this is what we are like. In that sense the everyday practice of fashion has nothing to do with the past or with memory. In fact, the wish is to efface the past, to erase any memory of our having been other than what we are or how we wish to appear today.

Fashion photography is rather different from some other kinds of photography, since it essentially makes images of this eternal present. In the early and mid twentieth century fashion illustration, whether drawing or photography, aimed to be more informational than is the case today. Fashion photography today aims to create an ambience; at least in the upmarket fashion magazines and equally in broadsheet newspapers, there is very little information in that it is often difficult to see exactly what the garment looks like; instead there is a photographic creation of a mood – floaty summer dresses worn by a model whose curled up position set against a woodland scene is purely atmospheric. Fashion photography today is indeed as Carol Tulloch wrote ‘a legitimate if contentious art form’.⁶ Fashion photographers such as Corinne Day and Juergen Teller or the ‘heroin chic’ spreads of the 1990s have aimed to extend their art beyond the narrow perimeters of the garment itself to address, however superficially, social concerns. Theirs is thus a creative and engaged form. But although Paul Jobling,⁷ among others, has made a strong case for the importance of this kind of fashion photography, and although it would probably misunderstand the whole enterprise to reject Juergen Teller and others for reducing drug addiction to the glamorous and picturesque, nevertheless, fashion photography offers something very different from and much more self conscious than the presentation of clothes in all those photographs that are not fashion photographs. For one thing, fashion photography creates an enclosed, self-sufficient world encapsulated from the past – and that remains true even when it references the past. Inevitably – proposing as it does the right way to look now – it effaces the past, or at least creates a strange disjuncture from it, or else creates a stylistic pastiche of pastness that bears little relation to any actual past. This is consistent, of course, with the present day-ness of our fashion practice. Photographers such as Teller and Day share the concerns of non fashion photographers such as Nan Goldin – and thus with other art forms – in proposing what was once the new aesthetic of the dark, the deviant, the disturbing, a reaction against the formalist notion of timeless beauty; but unlike Nan Goldin they do not capture and memorialise an actual subculture, they simply reference it.

It seems impossible to discuss photography for long without stumbling upon Surrealism. It has been almost universally held against Surrealism that it proved so compatible with fashion, advertising and consumerism. Surrealist photography has been held in high esteem – Susan Sontag, for example, thought that it was the outstanding achievement of the Surrealist movement, although her assessment of the movement as a whole is much more ambivalent than is that of Benjamin. Nevertheless, the relationship of Surrealism, photography, fashion and advertising is paradoxical. On the one hand Surrealist design, surrealist tropes transformed into clichés, were held to be debased by their association with glamour and the way they enhanced the glamour industries; but on the other hand Surrealist photography was the art of memorialising the objet trouvé, the detritus of modern life, or what Freud termed the refuse of the phenomenal world. But it did not necessarily try to transform its images into abstract art in the way that Edward Weston, for example, did.

Surrealism was also fascinated with the outmoded and outdated, with, as Benjamin put it, ‘the dresses of five years ago’.⁸ Now the fashions of five years ago represent – or exist in – a fashion or taste limbo. They are what we have just thrown out, the Kristevan Abject, the garments that don’t look quite right, that seem momentarily to have no style, to be aberrant mistakes. Only years later will their style emerge as something distinctive and of its time; although even then that style essence of ‘the Twenties’ or ‘the Eighties’ will represent only very partially what people actually wore in those decades.

In many ways this means that fashion photography could be less interesting than, say, amateur snapshots, photographic images of fashion in everyday life that memorialise the ephemeral. A fleeting moment is captured on a piece of paper or celluloid, or, today, on a chip. To capture the ephemeral, giving it the permanence of an image, is not exactly the same as to find the eternal in the ephemeral. Snapshots, photo-journalism and news pictures capture people wearing clothes in the situations in which they actually wear them, in the street, at home, at parties, in demonstrations or in crowds at sports events – clothes in use, rather than the presentation of an ideal of fashionable dress which is what fashion photography is. Even the contrast between the fashion pages and the gossip spreads at the back of Vogue or similar magazines – and the celebrities on these pages are normally expensively dressed with an eye to being photographed – presents a telling difference between the ideal and the actual.

I may have seemed to contrast the authenticity of the street-scene or family photo with the artificiality of the fashion shoot. And in a sense I have. Fashion photography is utopian and the contrast is rather poignant between it and the reality of clothes as actually worn. Research into dress relies heavily on the investigation of actual garments. Less attention seems to have been paid to the photographic images – moving as well as still – of our visual records of the past.

Benjamin, Sontag and above all Barthes dwell on the melancholy estrangement of the photograph. ‘The most precise technology,’ writes Benjamin, ‘can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us. No matter how artful the photographer… the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has, so to speak, seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.’⁹

This is not any kind of vulgar (as Sontag would see it) realism. Sontag says that ‘photography’s programme of realism actually implies the belief that reality is hidden… something to be unveiled.’ Photographers aim, she asserts, to ‘catch reality off-guard, in … the “in between moments”.’¹⁰ For her this is in fact again formalism, the de-familiarisation or estrangement of formalism reworked.

This is not the kind of realism or reality discussed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.¹¹ This book was written shortly after his mother, to whom he was devoted and with whom he lived, had died. It is an act of mourning and dwells on the impossible search for the lost loved one in the photographs of her that survive. At the same time the theme of the book is more or less that searing or reality, the spark of contingency mentioned by Benjamin. Both writers – Sontag too, for all her doubts about photography – write of the magical quality of photographs. They differ from paintings in that what they show us really was. These persons actually lived; these streets did exist. But they are stuck in the past and we cannot reach them. The photograph can never become Alice’s looking glass, which dissolved so that she could move into the alternative world within or behind the glass. As we stare at a photograph we remain locked out of its reality. ‘What renders a photograph surreal,’ writes Sontag, ‘is its irrefutable pathos as a message from time past.’¹²

The persons caught on camera are ghosts from the past, testifying to the relentless passage of time. The clothes they wear as they stare out at us form an integral part of the image and of their ghostliness. The past, out-of-date fashions of which they as often as not seem so proud, contribute to the pathos of these figures. In this way fashion and photography are central to a presentation of the past and of transience. It is essentially their fashionable dress, or dress of its time, that now underlines the transience of these lives. Significantly, a common reaction to such images of the past is mockery. How could we have worn those dreadful clothes! How could they, our forebears have put up with these fashions? How ridiculous they are! This is a form of protective disavowal which seals off the sadness we might otherwise experience at seeing our much younger self with long hair and silly sideburns or with enormous 1980s shoulder pads. This suggests that there is a protective aspect to the fashion cycle. And a brief essay by Sigmund Freud tends to confirm this: On Transience, published during the First World War. In this piece Freud describes a walk in the countryside with two companions on a beautiful summer’s day. One of his companions was a young poet – I believe it was actually Rainer Maria Rilke – who recognised but could not rejoice in the beauty all around. ‘He was disturbed,’ Freud tells us, ‘by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create … [it was] shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.’¹³

Freud suggests that this despondency is one of two possible reactions to the thought of the mortality of all things. The other is rebellion and refusal, which is actually a demand for immortality. Freud rejects the possibility of immortality, yet unexpectedly he also rejects the melancholy that we feel when faced with the reality of transience – the melancholy experienced also by Benjamin and Sontag when contemplation of photographs forces them to recognise it. First, Freud argues that just because something beautiful – or everything beautiful – lasts only a short time, that does not lessen its value; on the contrary, it makes it all the more precious. Secondly, the poet’s despondency is a form of mourning for the lost object of desire. Yet mourning spontaneously comes to an end – at least in most cases, although not in the case of Roland Barthes. The mourning process is purposeful and ultimately it frees us from what is lost.

Could it be, then, that the changes that take place in fashion with its continual and recurring incitement to find beauty in the new, represent a beneficial impulse? Far from signifying a trivial and superficial attitude to life and to the world, could it be that fashion’s cycle testifies to resilience and optimism? This is to skate on thin ice, for one could argue that many, indeed most societies did not have a fashion cycle at all in the sense in which we understand it. But clothing rituals have existed in all societies and per haps one should see modernity’s fashion cycle as the ritual of a dynamic and hectically innovative society in adjusting to the force and pace of change and helping us live with it.

Elizabeth Wilson is an author, researcher and pioneer of fashion academia.

Carlotta Manaigo is a fashion photographer, traversing New York and Europe.

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Material Memories.

1. Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Penguin Books, 1977. ↩

2. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Smaill History of Photography’, in One Way Street, London: Verso, 1979, p 241. ↩

3. Sontag, op. cit., p. 90. ↩

4. Benjamin, op. cit., p.255. ↩

5. Sontag, op. cit, p 16. ↩

6. Carol Tulloch, ‘Letter from the Editor’, Fashion Theory, Volume 6, Issue 1, Special Issue on Fashion and Photography, March 2002, p 1. ↩

7. Paul Jobling, ‘On the Turn – Milennial Bodies and the Meaning of Time in Andrea Giacobbe’s Fashion Photography’, in Fashion Theory, op. c.it., pp 3-24. ↩

8. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in One Way Street, London: Verso, 1979, p. 29. ↩

9. Benjamin, op. cit., p 243. ↩

10. Sontag, op. cit., p 111. ↩

11. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, London: Vintage, 1993, trans., Richard Howard. ↩

12. Sontag, op.cit., p 54. ↩

13. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Transience’, in Sigmund Freud, Volume 14, Art and Literature, Harmondsworth, Mddx: Penguin Books, pp 287. ↩