By the time the philosopher Walter Benjamin embarked upon the Arcades Project in 1927, the nineteenth-century shopping arcades at the centre of his magnum opus had all but disappeared from Parisian life. That was Benjamin’s contention; the arcade, an architectural phenomenon made possible by the latest technological innovations, had become a relic of modern life. With mass-industrialisation in the early nineteenth-century came glass and iron, materials that irreversibly changed the urban landscape into a space of spectacle and consumerism, a space that city-dwellers could experience at their leisure. Modernisation transformed the city, and the arcades embodied a culture of capital that came with it. But just as quickly as the glass and iron passageways appeared throughout the city, they would be rendered redundant by newer, more exciting innovations. As the art historian and critic, T. J. Clark, wrote in his review of the first English translation of Arcades Project in 1999, the arcades ‘were old-fashioned almost as soon as they declared themselves the latest thing.’¹ Along came the department store, and then, as the twentieth century progressed, the mall.

In the twenty years since Clark’s review, today’s shopping destinations face the threat of their own extinction. At the turn of the millennium, the expansion of internet shopping was already posing a threat or, at best, an alternative, to physical retail space. The idea was floated in Rem Koolhaas’ mammoth Harvard School of Design Guide to Shopping in 2001 that, perhaps, e-commerce could alleviate the problems retail faced at that moment, when retail space was becoming oversaturated and new space was running low.² For the most part, however, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have proven to be a bleak time for the physical shopping experience. The exponential growth of online shopping, alongside unprecedented technological advances that have made consumerism possible not only at the click of the mouse, but at the tap of a finger, has been devastating for brick-and-mortar retail. And even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, a change in consumer behaviour was affecting the sustainable future of shopping spaces, with a trend in spending on services overtaking that of goods by the end of the second decade.³ Over the past couple of years, department stores on both sides of the Atlantic have faced closure, shopping centre chains in the UK have fallen into administration, and the great British high street has been on the brink of collapse. The retail decline was not caused by Covid-19, merely sped up by it.

What, then, does this mean for physical shopping spaces? It’s a question that resounds through the (digital) pages of newspapers, business and fashion journals.⁴ With the emergence of pop-up stores, Instagram-savvy brands have identified a possible solution. The millennial pink in-store experience cultivated by beauty brands like Glossier is one such example of how the retail sector has cottoned on to consumer shifts towards the service industry.⁵

It’s clear, as Amanda Hess wrote for The New York Times in late 2019, that, in the post-shopping mall era, the ‘retail imagination has been transposed to Instagram, and shuttered storefronts have been infiltrated by “pop-up experiences” primed to monetise the selfie.’⁶ But the pop-up phenomenon is more a material manifestation of contemporary culture, than evidence of a permanent solution for physical shopping spaces.

As the retail crisis creates a growing retail wasteland, an alternative kind of shopping experience (one that isn’t quite so temporary) emerges. Koolhaas’ Guide to Shopping suggests that the reuse of ‘existing typologies’ could alleviate the looming retail crisis if e-commerce didn’t.⁷ And, sure: opening in 2018, Coal Drops Yard, in London’s King’s Cross’s recently-redeveloped Granary Square, is a high-end shopping destination combining two parallel nineteenth-century warehouses under one semi-covered arc-like structure, designed by Thomas Heatherwick (it’s worth noting that Heatherwick is responsible for the Vessel, a kebab-shaped ‘interactive sculpture’ in New York’s Hudson Yards – a $25bn private housing and shopping complex in the Lower West Side that opened in 2019). But reusing existing infrastructure isn’t such a recent phenomenon; in the 1990s, the former Birds’ Custard factory in another British city, Birmingham, was redeveloped into the Custard Factory, a space for creative start-ups and independent stores.

At both Coal Drops Yard and Custard Factory, the connection to an industrial past is central to their image construction: the former boasts that innovation and creativity is built into its Victorian heritage; the latter cultivates a hipster-y charm that stands in stark opposition to the overtly-commercial Bullring shopping centre just down the road. Embedded within these spaces is a connection to the past and a lucrative, aestheticised placemaking that emphasises authenticity – an especially important factor in a digital, social media-driven age. There’s an attractiveness attached to ‘authenticity,’ something that has prevailed since old factory spaces in dilapidated areas of cities, like New York, were made into cool loft apartments for a generation of bohemian creatives in the 1980s. As urban sociologist Sharon Zukin observes, ‘No longer is seediness ugly, it is now a sign of authenticity.’⁸

As the service industry has taken over goods, the parameters of conspicuous consumption have also shifted. The ‘lifestyle experience’ is how architectural theorist, Brian Lonsway, describes the subtle aesthetic choices used to complement the interests of target consumers.⁹ And for spaces like Coal Drops Yard and Custard Factory, where a creative, ‘edgy’ lifestyle is cultivated through its authentic-slash-heritage infrastructure, digital technology has been as essential as the buildings themselves. Photos of the public art murals and graffiti at Custard Factory often appear on the official Instagram account, encouraging users to experience the space’s ‘authenticity,’ which, in turn, is used to market its attractiveness. Meanwhile, the branding and marketing for Coal Drops Yard has been painstakingly strategised to be the opposite of ‘cookie-cutter’ malls;¹⁰ posts tagged by users on Instagram mimic this official strategy of celebrating quirky angles, carefully positioned coffees, and posed shots with the space’s nineteenth-century infrastructure in the background. One tagged photo sees the user pose with the brands of clothing he’s wearing also tagged, and the caption ‘Industrial Realness.’

In Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, internet culture specialists, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin, note that, ‘Locations become recognised for their aesthetic potential.’¹¹ Aestheticised placemaking at both Coal Drops Yard and Custard Factory provokes users to take, and share, carefully stylised images of the space on social media, whilst also identifying with the lifestyle that these shopping destinations market. Undoubtedly, as visually cultivated as these spaces are on social media, they are also pleasant to wander around in real life (that is, if you’re the intended customer and not seen as a threat to the chilled-out atmosphere).¹² And that photogenic quality is something that predates Instagram; as the architectural historian, Beatriz Colomina, argued in Privacy and Publicity, in the twentieth century, modern architecture has been fundamentally shaped by mass media.¹³ More recently, fellow architectural historian, Claire Zimmerman, has made this idea more explicit, stating that photographic practices are embodied within the architectural framework of buildings themselves. She takes up Reyner Banham’s concept of ‘imageability’ – that buildings should ‘perform like an image’ and thus be ‘retained like an image.’¹⁴ Today, as shopping destinations like Coal Drops Yard and Custard Factory incorporate the visual literacy of social media into their brand identity, perhaps the term now is Instagrammable; the Instagrammable shopping centre.

There’s a nuance to the Instagrammable shopping centre that sets it apart from the pop-up store. The visual cues provoking users to ‘create content’ aren’t quite so overt; think, the way the upper glass facade of Coal Drops Yard catches the afternoon sun, or how a string of fairy lights glisten in the evening at Custard Factory, rather than, say, a giant Adidas shoebox pop-up. To the digital theorist, Lev Manovich, the term ‘Instagrammable’ describes a specific style of Instagram image, one that shares the abstract characteristics of the New Vision photography of the early twentieth century.¹⁵ The movement’s ambition to view the world through the distorted lens of mechanical technology is mirrored in the images created through Instagram today. Of course, Instagram is more vernacular than an artistic movement, and a shopping centre is used by more than just those who want to capture its image.

What fascinated Benjamin about the Parisian arcades was the hunch that this nineteenth-century invention was a visual embodiment of history in the making, at the moment of its becoming and disappearing. Under the enchantment of the ‘phantasmagoria of capitalist culture,’ we are caught up in the magic of the arcade, of the department store, of the mall. The historian Bernd Witte sees Benjamin as being concerned that history, in a commodity-based society is unable to ‘generate anything qualitatively new, [but] perpetuates itself as a fashionable renewal of a corrupt and forever unchanging world condition.’¹⁶ All this is to say, the Instagrammable shopping centre has neither sprung up from nowhere, nor is it likely to save the retail sector from the real crisis it faces. But, in this moment of extreme change, the Instagrammable shopping centre presents a good indication of where we were, and where we may now be headed.

Ellen Madeleine Brown is a British writer and Courtauld Institute of Art graduate.

1. T. J. Clark, ‘Reservations of the Marvellous,’ London Review of Books, 2 June 1999: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n12/tj-clark/reservations-of-the-marvellous ↩

2. Juan Palo-Cascado, ‘e-urope,’ The Harvard School of Design Guide to Shopping, ed. by Rem Koolhaas and others, Taschen, 2001, pp. 366-369. ↩

3. Austan Goolsbee, ‘Never Mind the Internet. Here’s What’s Killing Malls,’ The New York Times, 13 Feb 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/not-internet-really-killing-malls.html ↩

4. See: https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/professional/what-will-stores-look-like-post-pandemic: https://hbr.org/2020/06/what-will-the-retail-experience-of-the-future-look-like ↩

5. Rebecca Liu, ‘Inside the millennial church of Glossier—the beauty brand that wants to be your best friend,’ Prospect, 15 January, 2020: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/london-glossier-pop-up-shop-rebecca-liu ↩

6. Amanda Hess, ‘Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall’, The New York Times, 27 December 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/arts/american-dream-mall-opening.html ↩

7. Palo-Cascado, Guide to Shopping, p. 369. ↩

8. Sharon Zukin, ‘Consuming Authenticity: From outposts of difference to means of exclusion,’ in Cultural Studies, 22.5, 2008, pp. 724-748. ↩

9. Brian Lonsway, Making Leisure Work: Architecture and the Experience Economy, Routledge, 2009, pp. 159-161. ↩

10. See https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/19-25-november-2018/coal-drops-yard-branding-its-not-just-fancy-shops-its-a-public-space/ ↩

11. Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin, Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, Polity, 2020, p. 72. ↩

12. See https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseudo-public-space-pops-london-investigation-map ↩

13. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, reprint, MIT Press, 1996, pp. 13-14. ↩

14. Claire Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), pp. 6-7; pp. 288-9. ↩

15. Lev Manovich, Instagram and Contemporary Image (2017), p. 122: http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/152-instagram-and-contemporary-image/instagram_book_manovich_2017.pdf ↩

16. Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. by James Rolleston, 2nd edn, Wayne State University Press, 1997, p. 186. ↩

It’s a swamp outside, but in here it’s Autumn/Winter 2017: brightly lit, well-climatised, vaguely perfumed. A speaker on a white desk hums. A shop girl wearing a breathing mask squints a smile. I stroke an iridescent nylon parka, a burgundy knit turtleneck, a razor-sharp satin mule. I lose track of time, exchange rates, exactly how I came to be here, fingering the tag of a powder-pink coat…

Chloé, the tag reads, and the glossy bump of the accent aigu is convincing. But then a suitcase bangs down a flight of stairs, and I remember where I am.

‘I designed it,’ Ms. Fen says. ‘But they’ll buy it if the tag says Chloé. The cut, the fabric, was my idea.’ The coat is made of silk the texture of butterfly wings. It costs 750 yuan, about $110.

Ms. Fen, a wholesaler, has glossy black hair and nails. She is twenty-eight years old. When we meet, she pulls up in a white Aston Martin, pristine except for a crack on the right rearview mirror. She is wearing an assortment of beautiful clothes: distressed jeans, a négligée tank, a forest-green Chanel bag. She’s aware of what this all conveys. ‘People see me and feel envy. But they don’t know what I went through to get here.’

I, magazine writer and emissary of New York City’s fashion industry, show up in a T-shirt and cargo pants, accessorised with a ripped plastic bag. But it doesn’t end up mattering, because Ms. Fen and I speak a common language. ‘Yeah, yeah yeah yeah! Like, Gucci before was half dead,’ she says, rapping her nails impatiently against a rack. My translator hears the word as Fucci, but I know what Ms. Fen meant.

‘So they hired all these stars to make them known in the Chinese market, but it’s people like me who give them brand awareness,’ she continues. ‘We adjust the clothes and make them more consumer friendly. The public is more powerful than the stars. My business is helping your business.’ She rolls her eyes, as if this is obvious to everyone.

Ms. Fen is a pseudonym. She sees counterfeiting as an underappreciated art, but knows that to China’s government it’s a crime, no matter how creatively it’s pulled off. The brands who lobby for anti-counterfeiting laws and fund raids on shops like hers agree. Their narrative goes like this: made of inferior materials, sold in second-rate stores, fakes smother cultural ingenuity with swaths of Prado polyester. Which, if you ask Ms. Fen’s opinion, isn’t exactly fair. Take this sweater. Unlike the Chloé coat, it is based on an actual Alexander Wang design. ‘The wool was scratchy,’ Ms. Fen says. ‘So I developed my own knit and added more cotton to the fabric. In the end, mine is nicer to wear.’

Hers is one of several thousand stores in the South Oil Wholesale Market Complex in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, China. If the inside of her building is like a basement Bergdorfs, all corners and cashmere and hidden escalators and fur, the outside is like the nearby factories from where the clothes came: spartan, indistinct. Not all vendors in the market sell fakes. Guangdong, the province which encompasses Shenzhen, is the biggest garment-producing region in the biggest garment-producing country, exporting to nearly every other place in the world.¹ Copies are only a fraction of its output, although how big a fraction depends on how you define a copy. Ms. Fen takes us through the maze. We pass kid-size replicas of designer streetwear. We pass a fake Gucci based on real Gucci based on fake Gucci (more on that later). We pass piles of identical logoless sweaters, onto which the tags of dozens of brands with no relationship to one another will one day be sewn. Outside, we pass a Starbucks franchise. Another.

‘All brands steal from each other,’ Ms. Fen says, rapping on the wheel. ‘We’re only one part of the food chain.’

I’m in Guangdong because it seems like a place where the chain’s links converge. In a year, the province exports 2.21 billion pairs of shoes. It produces 6.635 billion pieces of clothing.² Within global fashion’s inscrutable supply chains and recursive inspiration boards and references that ricochet across space and time, most trends pass through here momentarily, on their way somewhere else.

Shenzhen, in its current incarnation, is not quite forty years old; the city was, in 1980, modern China’s first Special Economic Zone, through which the country opened to global capitalism. Guangzhou, 120 kilometres away, was a trade hub of another era, of three-masted ships and porcelain vegetable tureens destined for Massachusetts and the Netherlands, onto which anonymous artists painted the city’s white portico merchant buildings.³ Two hundred years later, I visit a wholesale district still teeming with export ephemera. I’m not here to shop, although resisting is difficult.

It’s not just that there are beautiful things. There are also ugly things, soft things, prickly things, shiny things. There is basically every kind of thing, right at your fingertips, and it’s probably cheap, but you have to hunt it down. At New China Plaza, a fashion wholesale market in a twenty-story glass tower, I find a thing that I want very much, in a stall demarcated only by an alphanumeric code. It smells of chemicals and is wrapped in a cocoon of packing tape, and when I unearth it, I must act quickly (and take a minimum of five), because tomorrow, a new bundle of things will arrive from a factory on the back of a sweating teenager, and that thing that could have altered the course of my life – you never know! – will be gone.

My translator doesn’t really get why I want this thing. It is a T-shirt advertising a Harley Davidson store in Yonkers, NY, ‘Designed by Korea,’ according to its tag. There is a picture on it too, of an androgynous skateboarding youth. Seoul is 2,069 kilometres away. Yonkers is 12,845 kilometres away. The text is perfectly replicated, down to the street address, except for one digit in the phone number, which is actually a letter. The vendor, whose factory produced the shirt, wonders if I’ve ever been to Yonkers. No, I tell her, and pay.

A Chanel store is a few kilometres away, in a luxury mall. In it, you can breathe perfumed air and try on ballet flats. In different mall nearby, there is a concept store, where you can buy a copy of Vestoj. There are two Zaras within a taxi’s distance, where you can dig through the racks and, once in a while, unearth something sublime. That, too, is a kind of hunt, although I prefer the one in the tower.

A European fast-fashion brand with annual sales in the billions of dollars has factories near Guangzhou, and I interview someone who works for one of its suppliers. The employee asks me not to use her nor her company’s name. She believes that the company would not want the following practice public, even though she argues it is widespread. ‘The hardest and most expensive part about designing a shoe is to develop its mold. But if you have the shape already, you can do it easily.’ When this company wants to replicate a Balenciaga shoe, it will create a mold using the shape not of an original from the Balenciaga store, but of a fake from someone like Ms. Fen. ‘Guangzhou is the best place for fakes,’ she says. ‘And they have contacts of the people doing the best ones, so they just call them up. There’s no need to go to Balenciaga.’ So it’s a copy of a copy? ‘Yes,’ she says.

In China, trademark law protects registered logos and brand names, like the word ‘Balenciaga.’ The shape or colour or texture of a design is difficult to patent. To do so, the design must be totally novel, never before seen in the consumer market in China or abroad.⁴ And what design is ever totally novel? At a factory in Foshan, a city just west of Guangzhou, Fu Shi Cai, a manufacturer for menswear brands in Russia, Denmark, and Germany, describes the process of adopting other brands’ shoe design as a kind of translation. ‘All footwear trends come from Italy,’ he says. ‘But no two country’s feet are alike.’ Fu’s company, Kaitai Shoes, buys samples in Italy and France, from Ferragamo and Yamamoto, then takes them back to China to study them. They perform chemical tests and examine the materials, then make their own permutations, tailored to clients’ preferences. ‘European feet are longer, with a narrower instep,’ he points out. ‘Germans prefer conservative colours. Russians feet have a thick instep, but shorter feet.’

We walk through his florescent-lit factory floor. A hundred workers, mostly middle-aged women, sit at tables, working on sewing machines. They are wearing blue aprons, and a few of them have high heels, I notice.

‘Where do trends come from before they come from Italy?’ I ask Fu.

He thinks for a moment. ‘A great man, a star.’

‘Where does the star get it from?’

‘He gets it from the trend,’ Fu says. ‘It’s like a full circle.’

(Later, my translator tells me that the circle simile was actually hers, not Fu’s. Translation is a kind of imperfect copying, she says. ‘It’s like I’m having two conversations at once.’)

In Shenzhen, I have lunch with Ms. Fen, at a restaurant she’s opened the night before. We eat spicy crayfish, a dish from her hometown in Northeast China. The restaurant is a hobby, she says; wholesaling is her main business. Soon, she wants to start an original brand, using money from counterfeits to fund it. ‘I pay attention to good designs, I know I could come up with them.’

Ms. Fen’s parents were construction workers. They recently retired, and she now supports them financially. When Ms. Fen first came to Shenzhen, she had no job and no savings. But she had always been good at shopping, and she had an instinct she could start a business. ‘I studied fashion design in school, and then I worked in a store in a market in Zhejiang,’ a province near Shanghai. Most of the clothes at that market were from Shenzhen, she noticed. When she arrived in Shenzhen, she took pictures of the clothes at the markets, and sent them to her contacts in Zhejiang. ‘They’d say I want this piece for two hundred, and I’d order it.’

Ms. Fen now has twenty employees and three stores. Her goods are produced in collaboration with four to five workshops, mostly around Shenzhen. They are a reflection of her taste. ‘I’ll go to Paris for ten days, and spend eight visiting big brands’ stores. And so I have a very clear concept of their characteristic. For instance, this is very Miu Miu.’ Ms. Fen points at my translator’s dress. ‘When I’m in China, I visit the fabric markets, and I know from memory that this is really good for a certain brand.’ She also buys pieces in the stores to wear herself – which, maybe later, she’ll decide to copy. On a recent trip to Hong Kong, she went shopping at Balenciaga; on a trip to Paris, she bought a Burberry mini skirt, the replica of which now hangs in her store. ‘The price of the original is fair,’ she says. ‘Those stores have a lot of outlets, and they spend money on fashion weeks. I can accept that a piece of clothing costs $1,500. But not everyone can afford it.’ Ms. Fen’s clients are in China and Korea and Indonesia, some of them retail stores, some of them wholesalers. They know that Ms. Fen’s clothes aren’t real. ‘But they want good designs, too.’

In a busy month, Ms. Fen’s stores sell about 12,000 pieces, priced between 200 and 1000 yuan, or $30 and 150. This means in a busy month revenues approach $1 million. Globally, no one knows exactly how much counterfeiting grosses, although trade groups estimate the value of the annual trade at around half a trillion dollars.⁵ They also spend undisclosed millions to fight it. For years in China, a primary means to combat counterfeiting in fashion was by initiating raids against trademark infringers, says Alexandre Gapihan, now an attorney, who worked between 2008 and 2012 as a client manager for China-based intellectual property law firms, with clients comparable to Coach and Louis Vuitton. But the raids on factories and markets like the one where Ms. Fen works were never cost effective. ‘You might walk away with a hundred bags, and you just paid $10,000 for the policemen,’ he says. ‘Sellers are very nimble, and companies became disillusioned.’ Lately, he says, more brands are turning to artificial intelligence to monitor listings on online wholesale sites for fakes.

Ms. Fen has concerns about the illegal nature of her business. But because she copies what she considers niche brands – Acne Studios and Chloé and Alexander Wang, instead of Gucci and Louis Vuitton – she doesn’t see herself as a target, compared to some of the other vendors in her market. ‘But absolutely, worst case scenario would be that the whole market gets shut down,’ she says. ‘That’s why I want to open a company doing original designs. I want to transform my business model.’ Originality is this counterfeiter’s dream. The style of the clothes would continue to be her taste: ‘Casual, not so feminine, and low key, not with logos on everything.’ But the volumes would be lower, and the price higher. Ms. Fen is currently renovating an office in which she intends to host her new company and hire designers. But she fears original clothing will never be as profitable as counterfeits. Sometimes, Ms. Fen feels very tired. While she’s falling asleep each night around 2 am, thoughts about samples, promotions, and teaching her sales staff how to merchandise styles crowd her mind. The reality of the fashion business is this: ‘Consumers believe in brands,’ she says, glumly.

One morning in Guangzhou, I meet a woman who goes by the nickname Vivi, and who embodies faith in brands. She wears tiny slivers of tape over her eyelids to create a crease, and clutches three iPhones with manicured fingers. Vivi is twenty-six, and an internet celebrity on Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce platform. Her company of twenty employees makes and sells clothes inspired by Chanel’s and Dior’s, some 10,000 units for a hit product. They are not counterfeits, but ‘the feeling that you get when you first see them, is that this is very Chanel,’ she explains. Vivi is her company’s owner as well as its model, and she can afford real Chanel. Sometimes she drives her Mercedes SUV to the luxury mall in town, trying on clothes to buy or to use as reference samples. ‘I might change a button, or I might only keep a button.’

Vivi gets most of her ideas not at Chanel, but at New China Plaza, the twenty-story tower of fashion Babel, in Guangzhou. One day, we visit, and she orders dresses, five units of each size, at $15 a piece, from a stall. Amid the rip of packing tape, the mountains of factory deliveries, the lingering odour of plastic, the dresses give off no strong feeling. Online, where she’ll sell them for $22, they become more than thread and seams. Vivi pairs them with real Chanel handbags and bashful smiles, café lunches and strolls on vaguely foreign streetscapes. In some photos, she’s in a Seattle coffee shop, in others, a Seoul pizza restaurant or a Parisian hôtel particulier. I realise eventually that these streetscapes are sets, and start to notice other details. The grass is a glaring green, the sky more crystalline than the one outside.

Brands mask how clothes are made. ‘That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,’ wrote the philosopher Walter Benjamin, about the impact of photography on twentieth century visual culture. He could have been writing about clothing. For Benjamin, an aura was a kind of patina – a dressmaker’s fingerprints, the texture of handspun wool – that situated an object within space and time. Mass-produced fashion bears no trace of its birth or of its life cycle, of the manufacturers and markets and container ships through which it passes on the way to acquiring meaning. It does so through a brand. Brands are auras of our age, stitching together discrete objects into abstractions of coolness, nostalgia, elegance. This is as true for Chanel as for its Taobao imitators. Its fashion is sewn in ateliers, its salesmen versed on the provenance of textiles, but what authenticates an object as Chanel is something less concrete. It’s our idea of Chanel, of orchestras and dancing models and Tilda Swinton air kisses, Saudi princesses and ostrich feathers and jacquard wallpaper. In the stores, there are no orchestras – or ateliers – but there are racks, on which a dress might retail for $4,000, for no reason other than that the people who can afford to believe the fiction, do.

The construct can be deliberately deconstructed, for a result that’s ultimately the same. In New York, an Instagram account that posts runway images next to look-a-likes from the past is on everyone’s lips. ‘Ppl knocking each other off lol,’ its bio reads. Gucci hires the account to unpack the references in its latest collection. The brand collaborates with a graffiti artist, who had spent years riffing on its logo without permission. It hires Dapper Dan, the 1980s Harlem counterfeiter widely respected for his artistic ability, after controversy ensues when the company references his designs without credit. It makes a bag that misspells its own name as ‘GUCCY.’

One day at New China Plaza, I spot what appears to be a copy of a copy of a copy: a Gucci sweater for $15, whose spray-paint logos were the result of Gucci’s own collaboration with an appropriation artist. I talk to my translator about it at length; we use words like appropriation, recursive, mimesis.

The young woman vendor is uninterested. She doesn’t know the story of the sweater she’s selling, but it doesn’t matter. ‘It sells well,’ she says.

Raquel Sanchez Montes, an expat stylist in Guangzhou, is titillated by the phenomenon of misspellings on fake goods, and has been making work about it longer than Gucci. In a recent photo shoot of hers, two models sport T-shirts she found in local markets: Empdridarmani, Andersson Wang and Mscohino.

There’s a difference between these shirts and an imitation Céline bag, she explains. ‘They’re funny fakes! They’re creative. It’s not someone who wears something you know they can’t afford, pretending to be something they’re not.’

I realise this is a line of thinking I’ve followed, too, in choosing, when asked about my own real-seeming fakes, to boast unabashedly about their provenance. Self-awareness creates distance between us and what we’re wearing. It makes us feel smarter than our clothing, because we are able to rewrite its significance. Which is ultimately fine – but not really different from wearing a fake bag to seem richer. Or a real bag, to seem generous. Or one set of glasses to appear discreet, and another one to look feral. Or a white T-shirt in which you hope to confront the world as a blank slate, even when you know such neutrality will never be possible.

It’s all pretending, whether or not the clothes are fake.

The reporting for this article was made possible with the generous support of Tasha Liu and Labelhood Shanghai.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor.

DISNOVATION.ORG is a working group based in Paris, at the crossroads of contemporary art, research and hacking. It is composed of artist Nicolas Maigret, graphic designer Maria Roszkowska, artist and researcher Clément Renaud and designer Hongyuan Qu.

This article was originally published in Vestoj: On Authenticity, available for purchase here.

1. China exported $175 billion in clothing in 2015, according to the World Trade Organization; the next biggest exporter was the E.U. at $112 billion. In 2016, Guangdong accounted for 21.1% of China’s garment production. See: www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/
   wts2016_e/wts2016_e.pdf and news.efu.com.cn/newsview-1219680-1.html ↩

2. See: www.haiguan.info/newsinfor/ macroscopicaanalysedetail.aspx?id=1289 and www.gdstats.gov.cn/tjsj/gy/zycpcl/201702/ ↩

3. P.C. Perdue, Rise and Fall of the Canton Trade System, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Visualizing Cultures, © 2009. ↩

4. The registration process, meanwhile, can take over a year. See: Chinese Intellectual Property and Technology Laws, ed. R Kariyawasam, p. 25 – 40; 46 ↩

5. ‘Trade in Counterfeit and Pirated Goods: Mapping the Economic Impact,’ Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, April, 2016. www.oecd.org/industry/global-trade-infake-goods-worth-nearly-halfa-trillion-dollars-a-year.htm ↩

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. ↩

‘People will do the same things, again and again, there’s a way that we all have of mimicking our responses to things so that we become socialised. Everybody stops at the corner, looks both ways, and then darts into the street.’

Joel Meyerowitz¹

THE STREET PHOTOGRAPHER, AS opposed to a studio image-maker, engages with a working process that observes and captures events and arrangements of people, engaging with elements out of their sphere of control. New York-based photographer Joel Meyerowitz, inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and Eugène Atget, describes the actions of street photography as outward looking and observant, ‘as if we were fishermen in the stream of Fifth Avenue’,² in contrast to the studio image, for which the photographer directs their energy inward, and it is therefore an introspective practice. The same tension exists when observing the differences between fashion in street photography and the fashion image. The street photographer as a ‘collector’ is a key function in the artistic practices of Bill Cunningham and Hans Eijkelboom, both, although not strictly in fashion, diligently capture the repeated habits of the masses on the street.

Subversive to the fashion image, which is a highly composed, and orchestrated affair, the images of street fashion photography continue in the spirit of traditional street photographers. Fashion’s original street-style flâneur Bill Cunningham, whose work has spurred a contemporary generation of street fashion photographers, has granted the medium new attention and publicity on digital platforms and blogs (see Simon Swale’s article for the Vestoj blog ‘Fashion Blogs: It’s the World Around Us’).³ Cunningham, immortalised in the documentary ‘Bill Cunningham New York’,⁴ has a particular way of working that is immediately distinctive in his longstanding New York Times style column. Through diligent observation and documentation of the repetition of outfits, fashion mannerisms and trends, Cunningham formulates his popular feature to highlight emerging patterns of behaviour in the way people dress.

Although not necessarily defined to the realm of mainstream fashion, Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom’s carefully constructed grids of people on the street function in almost the same way as Cunningham’s work, but sit in an art context. Coming from a conceptual art background, Eijkelboom’s body of work is based on observation, interrogation and documentation of the social tendencies of individuals and groups. In one such early work, the photographer asked strangers on the street to point out someone who they deemed to be ‘beautiful’ and someone who they thought was ‘ugly’, Eijkelboom then documented their responses compiling the series ‘Mooi – Lelijk (Beautiful – Ugly)’ in 1980. From 1992 to 2007 Eijkelboom worked on his epic project ‘Photo Notes’ for which he took between one and eighty images every day between these years of people on the street, collecting a mass of images of people and their repeated gestures, clothes and adornment. Eijkelboom explains that, ‘Only in their combinations and repetitions, […] do the photographs make visible moments that have possibly played a part in the development of my world view.’⁵ Like Cunningham, Eijkelboom⁶ has been working in his process of serial image-taking for much of his career, his images seek out sartorial motifs in order to highlight their symbolic power in our culture, but in doing so he is documenting and archiving culture within a timeframe.

The cinematic alignment of bodies and gestures to create a surreal, ‘decisive moment’ is a concept that traditionally drives a street photographer, building on the notion of the street as a stage, and Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘flâneur’, a wanderer and observer of the life on the streets. Here is the point of departure for Cunningham and Eijkelboom, who both look for commonalities in repetition, to create a story or communicate a message about how we appear in mass, and in doing so, offer a cultural mirror. Working within quite different contexts, individually the work of these two photographers is read quite differently – Cunningham the fashion columnist and Eijkelboom in an art context, however both photographers have fundamental similarities in the functions of their practice.

1. ‘Joel Meyerowitz: What you put in the frame determines the photograph’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xumo7_JUeMo ↩

2. ‘Joel Meyerowitz: Street Photography’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2DMUcnD7qU, 1981 ↩

3. Simon Swale, ‘The World Around Us’, http://www.vestoj.com/current/?p=1195. ↩

4. Richard Press, ‘Bill Cunningham New York’, 2010. ↩

5. Hans Eijkelboom, ‘Diary 8-11-1992 – 8-11-2007’, http://www.photonotebooks.com/PDF/Diary-ENG.pdf ↩

6. Dieter Roelstraete, ‘The Mass Ornament — Revisited: Hans Eijkelboom’s Photo Notes’, published on afterfall.com. ↩

When dealing with a subject matter like power, the most obvious examples of fashion and architecture in modern-day culture is perhaps the so often lampooned massive shoulder pads of the 1980s and the mirror-glass skyscrapers of the same era – so much so that big shoulder pads and high rise buildings have become a cultural shorthand for strength and leadership. In other words, they are signs framed within a system of meaning that helps us understand and explain cultural and social practices.¹ Created and perceived as symbols, these objects are captured in a system of meaning created by our society as a form of cultural embodiment.

So what happens when the symbiotic relationship between fashion and architecture is portrayed in fashion photography? As the images of the following Thierry Mugler looks, commissioned by Dutch AVENUE magazine in 1988, show us, the result is meant to be as impressive and awe-inspiring as the objects on show. Echoing one another in form and appearance, chrome, glass, sharp angles and severe tailoring merge to put on a powerful spectacle for the benefit of the viewer

Considering the shape that female empowerment took in the 1980s, it comes as no surprise to see a photo shoot staged in the midst of the iconic architecture of New York City. Skyscrapers are after all phallic symbols that convey the social and cultural ideals of a city or country, in this case most obviously the wealth, success, strength and power of a patriarchal culture. In his Passagen-Werk, the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that ‘fashion and architecture belong to the dream consciousness of the collective’² and considering the buoyant and confident mood of the era, it is no surprise that its most notorious symbols are as audacious as they are razor-sharp.

All images by Thierry Mugler from AVENUE magazine, September 1988.

Merel van der Toorn is a writer and researcher in contemporary fashion.

1. P J Wilson, The Domestication of the Human Species, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1988 ↩

2. W Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 858 ↩