IT USED TO BE that our consumption was tightly controlled by a few big corporate beasts. We were their captive audience; they knew who we were, our appetites seemed predictable enough and so they all fed us much the same thing. Now however, they’ve emerged blinking into a new environment populated by many different species, each of which seems to want different things… Survival in this new terrain, however, is not of the fittest but of those with the best fit with their environment. More than anything, it depends on finding something you feel strongly about and cultivating it. Find a clear niche and you make it fantastically easy for people to find you. Fail to do so and you risk ending up on the list of endangered species.¹

James Harkin, from ‘Niche: Why the Market No Longer Favours the Mainstream’, 2011.

Though journalist James Harkin’s theory sits in the context of economics, it could be applied to the rise of niche fragrances we are currently witnessing. While large beauty corporations like Coty, Givaudan or International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) continue to thrive, small ‘niche’ companies have proven to be highly successful competitors. Le Labo Fragrances, a boutique fragrance brand based in New York and London, has expanded into a business with over $US20 million in annual retail sales since it was founded in 2006. In October 2014, the company was purchased by cosmetics giant Estée Lauder², indicating the increasing importance of independent brands even in a mainstream market. This once small sector of the industry has experienced exponential growth, begging the question: has niche grown too big for its own niche?

By definition, a niche fragrance company is characterised by an independent and smaller production scale, as well as a select number of specialist stockists as opposed to the department and chain stores of its mainstream competitors. This more artisanal approach towards production, means that niche scents often – although not always – carry a higher price tag, adding to the notion of a more exclusive, and some would argue higher quality, product.

A recent podcast by the fragrance website Basenotes, ‘The Art Perfumes Formerly Known as Niche’³, highlights the rise of niche perfumes in the fragrance market. In the discussion perfume marketer Callum Langston-Bolt states: ‘Niche is a place where you are able to do more unusual things. You’ve got more room so the perfumer is able to make this kind of fragrance, they can make something new or bizarre’. To which Lizzie Ostrom, founder of the olfactorial events company Odette Toilette, adds, ‘It’s the marketing, it’s a craving for the way that niche perfume markets itself and is much more sophisticated about telling a story that people find compelling and that offers them another way into the fragrance.’

Like fashion, scent is symbolic, offering a way of communicating ourselves as individuals and social beings. As such, choosing and purchasing a fragrance is a highly selective process, since a signature scent can be seen as the ultimate accessory and form of identification. Applying fashion theorist Carol Tulloch’s concept of style narratives, that ‘the process of self-telling, that is, to expound an aspect of autobiography of oneself through the clothing choices an individual makes,’⁴ one could refer to scent narratives. This creation of identity plays an essential part in the actions of the fragrance consumer: a mass market perfume is unlikely to satisfy a customer wanting to identify themselves as unique or fashion-forward. Just as in fashion, no one wants to be caught wearing the same thing as those around us, and it is this consumer desire to be different that niche fragrance companies capitalise on. Harkin’s thesis furthers this notion, outlining ‘a world in which no size fits all, and in which anyone who tries to be all things to everyone ends up as nothing to anyone.’⁵

Claiming a stake in the world of niche fragrances means offering a customer authenticity over availability. Whether a company draws on their heritage, like London’s Penhaligon’s, offers highly artistic campaigns, like those of Byredo, gives perfumers carte blanche, like Editions de Parfum Frédéric Malle, or simply goes for an unconventional concoction smelling of blood, sweat, saliva and sperm à la État Libre d’Orange, the notion of rarity and exoticism is crucial. These niche fragrance companies craft their fragrances to appeal to a consumer desire for individuality.

In contrast to fashion, concerns of wearability and overexposure are less significant for fragrance. If a perfume bought from your local drugstore is akin to fast fashion, then niche fragrances are the haute couture of scent. However, the higher price point, limited availability and complex product narratives of niche fragrances do not distance or exempt them from fragrance trends or commercial profit. As a result, niche fragrances can be inspired by anything from blood types (Blood Concept) to New York City districts (Bond No. 9). The rise in niche fragrance into larger-scale businesses, of which Le Labo is a good example, challenges the authenticity of the market. As the fragrance industry continues to grow, do these brands run the risk of becoming mainstream?

One could argue that simply because a niche fragrance brand gains mainstream attention does not mean it has ‘sold out’. For if we define niche by a perfume brand’s production methods, boutique retail positioning and focus on craftsmanship; as long as they retain these values, the product arguably still retains its credibility. Even if rising sales figures threaten brand overexposure, as long as consumers are in search of an individually crafted and highly authentic product, niche fragrance companies will continue to thrive and offer scents that reside in the realms of the extraordinary.

Carla Seipp is a freelance fashion, arts and fragrance journalist.

1. Harkin, James. 2011. Niche: Why the Market No Longer Favours the Mainstream. London: Little, Brown. p. 5-6 ↩

2. ‘Le Labo Was Just Acquired by Beauty Giant Estee Lauder’, by Adele Chapin, October 15, 2014. http://racked.com/archives/2014/10/15/estee-lauder-le-labo.php ↩

3. Tulloch, Carol 2010. “Style-Fashion-Dress: From Black to Post-Black”. Fashion Theory 14(3). p 361-86. In: Fashion and Cultural Studies. 2012. Kaiser, Susan. London and New York: Berg. p. 6-7 ↩

4. Tulloch, Carol 2010. “Style-Fashion-Dress: From Black to Post-Black”. Fashion Theory 14(3). p 361-86. In: Fashion and Cultural Studies. 2012. Kaiser, Susan. London and New York: Berg. p. 6-7 ↩

5. Harkin, James. 2011. Niche: Why the Market No Longer Favours the Mainstream. London: Little, Brown. p. 4 ↩

6. État Libre d’Orange website: http://www.etatlibredorange.com. ↩

One basic modern need is to escape the feeling that desire has gone stale. Fashion therefore depends on managing the maintenance of desire, which must be satisfied, but never for too long.

Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits, 1994¹

FASHION, SEX AND FRAGRANCE. All are, whether in a tactile, carnal or olfactorial sense, desires to be fulfilled but also generators of desire in themselves. A large motivating factor in dressing and scenting ourselves is in the hope of attracting a sexual partner; we dress to be undressed, and scent ourselves to invite someone to take a step closer. Both sight and scent work on a highly aphrodisiacal level and, more importantly, are marketed as such. When Napoleon wrote to his wife Josephine asking her not to bathe for two weeks prior to his arrival so that he could fully enjoy her natural scent, he highlighted the sexual potency of scent. The power of scent to connect with a carnal desire for sex is a concept that is crucial to fragrance advertising, which markets itself through gendered sexual stereotypes. The age-old adage of ‘sex sells’ is as important to fragrance marketing as it is to fashion. Cultural and social critic Susan Kaiser describes a ‘gendered system of looking’ in which ‘sex sells, and it is usually women’s bodies that are represented and “consumed”.’² For example, Gucci’s fragrances Envy and Guilty are illustrated with images that adhere to the notion of the heteronormative male gaze. Although one might hope that Guilty’s his and hers advertisements would at least offer equal exploitation of the sexes, even in the female fragrance version, the models’ body language points to a passive woman, who is to one extent (physically) restrained by her lover, and to the other (in the Gucci Guilty Pour Homme advertisement), literally clinging to him. The world of Guilty is one where not only lust wins over love, but a white, thin, young, female body is passive object within it.

In fragrance, as in fashion, the male gaze is also directed at the male figure. In the Versace Eros campaign, model Brian Shimansky, with his highly-defined torso and chiseled facial bone structure, embodies the hyper-masculine Adonis. While the house of Versace may practically be built on sex, it also makes an abundance of references to Greek mythology, a theme that, in this context, conjures imagery laced with homosexual narratives in figures such as Homer and Sappho. The model’s tanned body, oil-slicked and clad in bright pink briefs, presents more a metrosexual, or even homosexual – as opposed to a heteronormative – archetype. Shimansky’s body may exude strength, but can one not also see him, perched atop a pedestal, as a passive object of desire?

According to Kaiser, ’clothes like bodies or appearance styles in general, can be turned into symbols that are desired or fetishised’³, Burberry continues this notion by draping its trademark trench coat on an otherwise naked model for an advertisement for its fragrance, Body. Here the trench coat, a defining symbol of Burberry embedded in traditional British style, is transformed into a sensual, seductive garment. The advertisement rebrands the iconic trench highlighting the sexual potential for the garment, and for the Burberry brand. Since sexuality is an engendered concept, aesthetics in fragrance advertising are targeted to the relevant gender. As typographer and historian Charles Bigelow states, ‘Perfume is marketed as an agent of communication of social messages and, par excellence, of sexual messages – romance, aphrodisia, seduction – and it is not surprising, therefore to find that gender is strongly marked in perfume typography.’⁴ This is clear in the campaigns of Vera Wang’s Lovestruck or Dolce & Gabbana’s Dolce fragrance. Both employ a rounded, handwritten style font, which reinforces a softer, more feminine, aesthetic.

Aiming to capitalise on the primal desire that scents represent, fashion brands produce images that speak to our consumer desires in a way that only reinforces stereotypes surrounding gender and sexuality. While this sexualisation in fragrance seems inevitable, it still reinforces unrealistically and problematic ideals of beauty. Whether in matters of style, sex or scent, consume with care.   

Carla Seipp is a freelance fashion, arts and fragrance journalist.

1. Hollander, Anne. 1994. Sex and Suits. New York: Knopf. p. 49. ↩

2. Kaiser, Susan. 2012. Fashion and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Bloomsbury. p. 128-129. ↩

3. Kaiser, Susan. 2012. Fashion and Cultural Studies. London and New York: Bloomsbury. p. 149. ↩

4. Bigelow, Charles. The Typography of Perfume Advertising In: Fragrance: The Psychology and Biology of Perfume. Edited by Charles S. Van Toller and George H. Dodd.  London and New York: Elsevier Science Publishers Ltd. p. 255 ↩

A man I know once sat next to Yves Saint Laurent at a Paris dinner party. He asked, “What portion of Yves Saint Laurent revenues are accounted for by perfume?” Saint Laurent replied, “Eighty-three point five.”

Chandler Burr, The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York, 2007¹

FRAGRANCE PLAYS A PIVOTAL supporting role for fashion companies by offering a democratic way for consumers to buy into an otherwise unattainable luxury brand. Fashion houses thrive, even depend, on something as seemingly transient as a bottle of perfume, and Yves Saint Laurent’s words remind us just how acutely aware designers are of this potential. Indeed for an industry that has annual worldwide revenue of $27.5 billion (a figure that is set to increase to $45.6 billion in five years time), it comes as no surprise to the CEOs either.

Garnering the potential for revenue, advertising budgets for fragrance are as substantial as those of the fashion products. Baz Luhrmann’s three-minute long production for Chanel starring Nicole Kidman, ‘No. 5 The Film’, set a precedent in 2004 with its $42 million budget. Meanwhile Dior enlisted actress Natalie Portman to front their Miss Dior advertising campaigns, a partnership that is reflective of the proliferation of celebrities and fragrance.

As a marketing strategy, film offers fragrance products an immersive tactility, that is unavailable in traditional print advertising. Film creates a ‘feel’ of a fragrance and expands on the olfactory narrative by combining sight, sound and visual texture. In Sofia Coppola’s ‘La Vie en Rose’ for the Miss Dior perfume, the sight of Portman (dressed in Dior haute couture) laying back onto a lush bed of roses presents a multi-sensory evocation; the creamy feel of the petals against the skin, their delicately wafting floral scent, suggests romance. Brands therefore activate not only the consumer’s desire for a new fragrance, but a desire for a meaningful fragrance. Through their sustained concept of narrative, fragrance films offer the opportunity to engage with the values of a brand like Chanel or Dior, without buying the clothes. Furthermore, the potential to release films on the internet allows a more prolonged and widespread exposure to the product than seasonal print advertising.

As part of the fashion system, fragrance, like clothing, is subject to trends and commoditisation. For example, the rising popularity of Arabic-inspired fragrances like Armani Privé’s ‘Oud Royal’ or Tom Ford’s ‘Oud Wood’ is linked, as Saeed Kamali Dehghan argues in his article for The Guardian, with the growing Middle Eastern luxury consumer market, a trend that ultimately reinforces the consumer’s desire for the rare and exotic.² Though the pace of the fragrance industry may be slower than fashion, scents follow a clear trend cycle. The structure of the trend cycle, as sociologist Everett Rogers proposed, group consumers as either early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards and non-adopters. While one can identify these themes readily in fashion, the lack of visibility for fragrance makes it more difficult to define such categories. Fragrance does not carry the overt visual status symbolism on the body that clothing allows and therefore is not driven by the same urge as sartorial purchases. We also engage with fragrance in a more physical and intimate way, making our desire to consume them, at least for the most part, a more carefully deliberated purchase. Thus, trends in fragrance develop and last for a longer period of time, resulting in a delayed trend curve.

While fragrance on a consumer level is slower paced than fashion, it offers a higher source of revenue. As ‘fragrance expert’ Michael Edward notes in his book, Fragrances of the World 2013, within ten years the number of yearly fragrance releases increased from 132 to 1,432. The fragrance industry, it seems, is speeding up.

Professor Barbara Vinken notes that, ‘the time of fashion is not eternity, but the moment’. If fashion is about the moment, the whiff of a fragrance qualifies as a fragment of this moment in time. Scent manages to be more fleeting and ephemeral than fashion, its impression only lasting a few seconds at a time to the beholder of the wearer. To counteract this, fragrance advertising often presents an eternal identifier of a period’s zeitgeist, much like fashion. A keen example of this is Calvin Klein’s CK One campaign shot by Steven Meisel starring a young Kate Moss in 1994. We see minimalist fashion, a grungy setting and the general ambivalence that defined Nineties fashion. Olfactorily, the citrus aromatic fragrance with notes of lemon, jasmine and musk similarly reflects the era, and its transparent scent and unisex appeal perfectly coincides with the decade’s waif aesthetic.

According to professors Marie-Pierre Fourquet-Courbet and Didier Courbet, ’perfume is an “olfactory identity card” that becomes an inherent component in the individual’s social and narcissistic identity.’³ As long as identity is in a perpetually transitional state, so too will trends in fashion and fragrance progress. Trends are therefore an essential component of identity formations.

Like fashion, the fragrance industry is anchored in the possibility to form identity, and as such, it is subject to a trend cycle. Within this structure, both mediums find themselves in a constant state of flux, pursuing the tastes and desires of a singular moment in time. While perfume may mimic fashion in terms of its industry structure, it engages more broadly with consumer psyche. This marketing potential, and accessibility, makes fragrance a crucial business component of the luxury fashion market; not every consumer can afford to have these brands’ garments hanging in their closet, but a larger majority is likely to have their perfume sitting in their bathrooms. The longevity of fragrance offers an opportunity for a long-standing customer connection. While the clothes season regenerates, the branded fragrance remains available at the beauty counter for years.

Carla Seipp is a freelance fashion, arts and fragrance journalist.

1. Burr, Chandler. 2007. The Perfect Scent: A Year Inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York. New York: Henry Holt and Company. p. xvi ↩

2. ‘Perfume brands get whiff of profit from Arabian scents’ by Saeed Kamali Dehghan, 8 June 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2012/jun/08/perfume-brands-profit-arabian-scents ↩

3. Courbet, Didier and Fourquet-Courbet, Marie-Pierre. Perfume Advertising and Marketing: Evolution and New Trends. Perfume: A Global History. edited by Marie-Christine grass. 2007. Paris: Somogy Art Publisher. p. 255 ↩

But what is remarkable about this image-system constituted with desire as its goal […] is that its substance is essentially intelligible. It is not the object but the name that creates desire; it is not the dream but the meaning that sells.

From Roland Barthes, The Fashion System. ((R. Barthes, ‘The Fashion System’, Hill and Wang, USA, 1983, p. xii))

THE MAIN SIMILARITY BETWEEN fashion and fragrance seems simple enough: we wear both on our bodies. However, there are more complex coinciding structures within these decorative matters of the human flesh at second glance. Beginning with Coco Chanel’s eponymous ‘No. 5’ fragrance to the more recent trend of celebrity fragrances, the following series considers the correlations between the consumer industries and ideologies behind clothing and perfume.

Fashion, advertising and fragrance exist to sell us a vision, conjured up in the mind of a designer, creative director or perfumer in order to be translated, concocted and packaged into material form. ‘Chanel No. 5’, the creation of perfumer Ernest Beaux and the first scent to incorporate the synthetic ingredient aldehyde, perhaps stands out as a primordial collision in this world of fashion, marketing and fragrance. As Barthes notes, names matter, for would the same scent have had everlasting appeal if it were named Topshop No. 6? Probably not. In reality, the houses of Lucile and Poiret had been selling their own in-house fragrances and ‘Parfums de Rosine’ lines over ten years prior to No. 5’s release in 1921. Historical nitpicking aside, how can a brand that sells a physical product – like garments – incarnate itself into something as fleeting and immaterial as a scent?

The success of a fashion brand in fragrance requires a concise visual, olfactorial and tactile message. For example, by showing an abstract illustration of the perfume bottle (rather than a realistic depiction), the advertising campaign for ‘Wonderwood’ successfully conveys the scent’s smoky, woody and mysterious incense notes. This is suggested not only through its name, but also a grey colour palette, an abstract representation and a tree bark close-up. For ‘Wonderwood’ Comme des Garçons sticks to its unpredictable, tongue-in-cheek approach, utilising everything from the scents of flaming rock and nail polish in ‘Odeur 53’ to highly sculptural packaging. The Comme des Garçons campaigns tend to showcase the product and nothing but the product, whereas other more traditional fashion brands take a more direct approach. After all, what better extension of one’s brand than to scent the skin which you are dressing? Three fragrances to consider for this example are Donna Karan ‘Cashmere Mist Luxe’ (a woody, white floral scent with notes of ylang-ylang, jasmine, and suede), the bestseller Dolce & Gabbana ‘Light Blue’ (a citrus floral eau de toilette formula with lime and cedar accents) and ‘Tom Ford for Men’ (a tobacco leaf and ginger musk fragrance).

In the chapter ‘The Advertising Message’ from his book The Semiotic Challenge, Roland Barthes explains that the language of advertising operates on two linked levels: ‘the encounter of a level of expression (or signifier) and a level of content (of signified).’¹ So as a viewer we are confronted with an actual product (the perfume) and a visual representation of the product through the image, which is the powerful tool used to sell. ‘Hence we are here confronted with a veritable architecture of messages (and not a simple addition or succession) itself constituted by an encounter of signifiers and signifieds […]’² Although Barthes was referring to the written language of advertising, these theories can also be applied to its visual aspects, and used to help interpret the messages that fashion brands convey through their fragrance releases.

Simply put, the layers making up each fragrance advertisement above are the product itself, its relation to the human body, the overall image itself, and its branding implications. The fluid packaging form of ‘Cashmere Mist’ is echoed by the soft posing and the garments of the model, the perfectly sculpted, bronzed bodies of the ‘Light Blue’ couple are placed next to the ‘his’ and ‘hers’ version of the fragrance, and in the ‘Tom Ford for Men’ advertisements, the perfume bottle stands in as a phallic representation of a male partner, cradled in between his lover’s thighs and breasts.

All of these images also incorporate texture into their message, for just as fashion historian and curator Maggie Murray notes in her book, Changing Styles in Fashion, ‘textiles are the springboard of fashion: the sibilant hiss of silk, the crisp, dry rustle of taffeta, the luxe of pure woollens with their soft, sometimes buttery, hand and the unbridled crump of our cottons and linens all speak to us’³, so too does a scent imply its own texture – be it the golden warmth of ‘Cashmere Mist’, the crisp lightweight feel of ‘Light Blue’ or the sweat-drenched sensuality of ‘Tom Ford for Men’. In a branding context, Donna Karan’s ‘Cashmere Mist’ wraps itself around the body in a cozy yet chic manner akin to her womenswear creations; Dolce & Gabbana ‘Light Blue’ gives us a glimpse into their lifestyle of dolce vita summers and Tom Ford appeals to our most primal instincts with a visual message of pure sex. Through their merchandising of scent, tactility and sight, fashion designers give us the allusion that our choice of feminine elegance, vacations in Italy or steamy encounters is seemingly only a purchase (and a spritz) away.

Carla Seipp is a freelance fashion, arts and fragrance journalist.

1. R. Barthes, ‘The Advertising Message’. In: The Semiotic Challenge, translated by Richard Howard, University of California Press, USA, 1994, p. 173 ↩

2. R. Barthes, ‘The Advertising Message’. In: The Semiotic Challenge, translated by Richard Howard, University of California Press, USA, 1994, p. 175 ↩

3. M. Murray, ‘Changing Styles in Fashion: Who, What, Why’, Fairchild Publications, London, 1990, p. 221 ↩

‘Nearly every show attendee, from the front row to the standing section, now arrives with phone in hand and Instagram account primed […]. This is fashion in the age of Instagram, a heady era in which digital media is changing the way clothes are presented and even the way they are designed. As shows are calibrated to be socially shared experiences, and fashion itself is rejiggered to catch eyes on a two-dimensional screen, some skeptics wonder what is being lost or sacrificed as fashion becomes grist for the digital mill.’

Matthew Schneider, ‘Fashion in the Age of Instagram’ for The New York Times, 2014.¹

THE DIGITAL SCREEN AND fashion form the cornerstones of modern day consumer culture. Now the two are increasingly fused, but back in 2009, Alexander McQueen was one of the first designers to capitalise on this. The designer brought his creations into the digital sphere by live-streaming the apocalyptic, sea creature-inspired spring/summer 2010 vision, ‘Plato’s Atlantis’, on SHOWstudio.com. Only three years later, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons proclaimed, ‘The future’s in two dimensions’²) and sent a collection of graphic, felt-pressed garments down the runway. Many saw the collection as a criticism of online media coverage of fashion, others saw it as embracing these technologies by literally making the designs flat. It begs the question: in a world of so-called ‘bi-dimensional fashion’³ and online oversharing, has creativity become the ultimate commodity?

Some would argue that the proliferation of mobile devices in the fashion industry has created a more open and participatory platform, evolving from a tradition of exclusivity. This echoes what theorist Martin Hand outlines in his essay ‘Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption’ in The Handbook of Visual Culture. He argues that ‘The image has simultaneously become the vehicle, context, content and commodity in consumer culture’. Hand goes on to explain that there is ‘an increasingly commodified yet participatory culture’⁴ evolving out of online social media sharing platforms such as Twitter, Vine and Instagram. Fashion shows may still be restricted to only a limited number of journalists, bloggers and photographers, however social media enables all aforementioned participants to share the event with a much wider audience. Cara Delevingne’s live runway video from the Giles autumn/winter 2014 ready-to-wear show garnered over 230,000 likes from her 5,828,643 followers,⁵ the result of combining celebrity status, brand power and the allure of the spectacle.

Whilst some might see the use of mobile devices as scratching away at the fashion industry’s inaccessible and glossy exterior, it also provides an interesting model for Michel Foucault’s theory of simultaneous surveillance and self-surveillance as proposed through the Panopticon. The theorist outlines in his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, that those in a field of visibility assume the responsibility of being observed. Analysing this architectural structure, where a subject is under constant surveillance, Foucault concludes that ‘the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.’⁶ This emerges with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as its twenty-first century reincarnations, which have induced a sense of constant surveillance for activities within the fashion industry.

Continuing this notion, in her piece ‘How Instagram Can Make You Forget Why You Love Fashion’ for i-D magazine, fashion journalist Courtney Iseman states: ‘The entire industry has adapted to the fact that now it’s not just a few select journalists writing about shows in their columns, but the masses click-click-clicking away on their smart phones to share their take on the shows and the clothes with their thousands of followers’.⁷ This instantaneous documentation of the fashion show means that audience members experience the garments not in their three-dimensional state, but are instead transfixed by the two-dimensional vision of what they are looking at on their mobile screens. Furthermore, the social media coverage of the ‘circus’ surrounding fashion, which now includes celebrity sightings and street style, in some cases becomes more prioritised than the fashion being presented.

Beyond the catwalk, professional photographers and image-makers are also fully embracing the mobile medium. Nick Knight’s pioneering online platform, SHOWstudio, showcases projects such as the ‘#DIESELTRIBUTE’ campaign, ‘Pussycat, Pussycat’ (an Instagram photo shoot) and ‘The Elegant Universe’ (a couture photo shoot captured on an iPhone). The use of a smart-phone product as opposed to higher-quality photography equipment not only enmeshes the smartphone fashion image even more into the consumer culture cycle but further democratises the production method of the fashion images by professionals and members of the public alike.

Alongside Knight and Delevingne, many other fashion platforms and practitioners have embraced the popular medium of the smartphone as a press and marketing strategy. For instance, Centrefold, a biannual arts and fashion magazine, was hired by Nokia to create an issue that was shot entirely on one of the brand’s latest mobile devices. The designer Kenneth Cole, who staged his runway comeback after seven years absence, sent models down the runway with mobile phones taking pictures of the audience during the finale, an act that echoed Foucault by reversing the viewer/participant roles. For, according to Foucault, ‘the Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.’⁸

Although these image-making processes can be deemed as democratic and accessible, the ever-quickening pace of consumer commodities only gains momentum through the constant influx of different ‘It’ people, labels and objects being generated through online platforms. While fashion has always had an obsession with the new, these digital additions are sending the cycle into overdrive. Certain designers like Phoebe Philo have consequently banned photography at their shows as an attempt to keep a certain aspect of the fashion industry sacred in the age of overexposure.

The examples of Cara Delevingne and Nick Knight also raise issues on authority and status in fashion. It takes a photographer with Knight’s credibility to shoot an international campaign on an iPhone. Likewise, only someone with the following of Delevingne could post a runway selfie video that goes viral. The influx of smartphones and online social media may make the general public feel like the velvet rope to enter the fashion macrocosm has been set aside, however in reality the boundaries between insiders and outsiders are still very much in place.

Carla Seipp is a freelance fashion, arts and fragrance journalist.

1. ‘Fashion in the Age of Instagram’ by Matthew Schneider for The New York Times, April 9, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/fashion/fashion-in-the-age-of-instagram.html?_r=0 ↩

2. ‘Comme des Garçons Fall 2012 Ready-to-Wear Collection: Runway Review’ by Tim Blanks for style.com, March 2,2012. http://www.style.com/fashionshows/review/F2012RTW-CMMEGRNS ↩

3. ‘Fashion in the Age of Instagram’ by Matthew Schneier for NYTimes.com, April 9, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/fashion/fashion-in-the-age-of-instagram.html?_r=0 ↩

4. M. Hand, ‘Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption’ in The Handbook of Visual Culture, edited by I. Heywood and B. Sandywell, Berg, London & New York, 2012, p. 526 ↩

5. http://instagram.com/p/kh0kmODKBX/ ↩

6. M. Foucault, ‘Discipline and Punish, Panopticism.’ In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, edited by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, New York: Vintage Books, 1977, p. 197. ↩

7. ‘How Instagram Can Make You Forget Why You Love Fashion’ by Courtney Iseman for i-D Magazine, July 14, 2014. http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/read/think-pieces/3653/is-the-fashion-worlds-instagram-feed-getting-you-down ↩

8. M. Foucault, ‘Discipline and Punish, Panopticism.’ In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, edited by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, New York: Vintage Books, 1977, p. 201-202 ↩