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Abstract
Despite the many transformations in aesthetics and technologies that fashion photography has undergone since its spread as an influential cultural form in the early twentieth century, one constant has always held fast: that the imagery depicts a fashionable ideal. The look of the fashionable ideal is, of course, ever subject to change. However, there are qualities that are always present: the body is subject to the authority of fashion, limitations to the autonomy of the body such as gravity or ageing are absent, and the figure is imbued with possibility and mutability, even as it freezes a momentary state of perfection.
These qualities become particularly marked in the present era, in which digital influencers simultaneously assume the roles of cultural producer, model and consumer while implicitly embodying the fashionable ideal. At the moment of their publication, the labor of producing these images seems to evaporate, as bodies with no material limitation are presented with immediacy, and figure, commodity and surrounds collapse into one.
This article interrogates how we can conceive of the labor of appearance and being in the fashion image, and considers how this style of fashion imagery draws on visual rhetoric of prior eras of fashion photography and is structured by the existing power relations of capitalism and the human and non-human actors of media technologies. In so doing, the concept of the fashionable ideal is explored in one of its contemporary iterations as fluid, aspirational, global, simultaneously embodied and disembodied.
Notes
Notes
1 These categorizations are by no means an industry standard: for example, niche influencers are another influencer demographic not here represented, which other sites situate between macro and micro influencers (see Morin Citation2016); whereas TINT, a branding company, defines micro influencers as anyone with less than 10k followers (Gallegos Citation2018). However, given the breadth of Launchmetrics’ report and the number of high profile fashion clients the company works with, including Karla Otto PR, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, ASOS, Topshop and L’Oreal, their categorizations have been adopted for our purposes here.
2 Interestingly, the relationship between the image and the caption in this instance reverses Barthes’ conceptualization of the hierarchy between written and image clothing where the caption works to pin down the “slipperiness” of the fashion image. In other ways, the coding features of Instagram, such as the hashtag function, perform the work of the caption in print media by connecting users and brands in a model of consumption that replicates the overt commercial relation between fashion photograph and commodity in advertisements or editorial spreads (see de Perthuis Citation2016).
3 Some examples include: in 1966, Donyale Luna was the first black model to appear on the cover of British Vogue; Issey Miyake used “old and beautiful” (Quick Citation1997, 167) models for his Fall/Winter 1995 collection; at the turn of the millennium, Alexander McQueen and Nick Knight worked with model Aimee Mullins, a double amputee; and for his Spring/Summer 2007 Ready-to-Wear collection, Jean Paul Gaultier sent the voluptuous burlesque star, Velvet d’Amour down the catwalk in lingerie.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Karen de Perthuis
Karen de Perthuis teaches design and media at Western Sydney University and University of Technology Sydney. Her research interests include fashion photography, the fashionable ideal, and material culture. Her work has been published in Fashion Theory, Cultural Studies Review, Film, Fashion & Consumption, and About Performance, and in several edited volumes. She is currently working on a monograph, The Fashionable Ideal: Bodies and images in Fashion.[email protected]
Rosie Findlay
Rosie Findlay is Course Leader of MA Fashion Cultures at London College of Fashion. Her research interests include digital fashion media and the intersection between dress and embodied self. Her work has been published in Fashion Theory, Cultural Studies Review, and About Performance, and her monograph, Personal Style Blogs: Appearances that Fascinate, was published in 2017.[email protected]