A recent conversation with a friend made me reflect on fashion photography today. The number of online magazines - here I mean magazines, not blogs - inviting submissions from fashion teams comprising photographers, models, MUAs, stylists and designers has grown exponentially. Submissions are not quite the same as commissions,which seem to be confined to fashion editorials in print magazines, whose number is dwindling. There are excellent analyses of such transitions in fashion today written by specialists in the field and I would refer you to their discussions. Professor of Fashion History and Theory Caroline Evans, for example, talks about the role of the image in fashion and comments that "it is often the faster moving digital versions of print magazines that are more integral to the industry"(1). Such digital versions also include the fashion film, by which fashion can be presented through the moving image, with
ShowStudio as the premier fashion film producer.
I am just concerned here about what this really means for models. Once upon a time publication in a print magazine was something to aspire to and if it carried with it being on a magazine cover, this was regarded as a great achievement for any fashion model.
Photographer: Steven Harrison Brown. Model: Myself. Published in RunwayMagazine Italy
But now that models' images are in online fashion magazines what does it all mean? The sheer number of submissions is bewildering. I believe this marks a major change in fashion modelling but I am not yet able to gauge the magnitude of such a shift. I'd welcome comments.
(1) "Yesterday's emblems and tomorrow's commodities. the return of the repressed in fashion imagery today" in
Fashion cultures revisited: theories, exploration and analysis, Routledge, 2013
.jpg)
What- I can't leave a comment?
ReplyDelete