Body and Fashion Photography - Essay Example

 Body and Fashion Photography INTRODUCTION “Art itself (and with it sartorial art) is a compromise between imagination and reality; it deals with real media but implies an inability to find complete satisfaction with reality and creates a new world” nearer to the heart’s desire.” (Flügel 1933: 237) Hilary in ‘Embodying the Single Girl in the 1960s’ argues that the model is shot outside, often walking, or running; she is ‘active’. This activity is not, however, without its contradictions. The body as an object constructed through consumerism also becomes an important element in feminine culture that is transformed and sold.’ The salient point in fashion photography remains that the images produced by practitioners working at the cutting edge of what is possible with photographic manipulation—digital or otherwise—we are encouraged to think about the ontology of fashion through the body of the model. In this paper I will discuss the ‘contradictions’ that surround the representation of the female body in fashion photography especially the conventions in fashion photography. Crucially, this body contains the possibility, inherent to fashion, of reinventing itself in a constantly changing form. A process of transubstantiation transforms the fleshy, organic substance of the body into the artificial, synthetic substance of the fashion garment. The separate ontological states of what is possibly “clothing” and what is possibly “body” no longer signify and in the new entity that emerges from this alchemical process, the boundary between self and non-self is dissolved. The female model then can be seen as the embodiment of fashion’s imaginary. As the avatar of fashion, it is where artifice, change and imagination coalesce on the body of the model to create a new, previously only imaginable, form. The Image Body Central to my argument is the different relationship that exists between the model’s body and fashion photography in the lived world and the body and clothing in fashion representation. In the lived world, this relationship has been characterized as one of co-dependency and equivalence, to the point where “dress cannot be understood without reference to the body and . . . the body has always and everywhere to be dressed” (Entwistle 2000: 324). But in fashion representation, Roland Barthes has suggested that a hier- archy exists, with fashion at the apex. Of particular relevance to this article is his explanation of how, in fashion representation, all that is natural is dissolved into the artifice of fashion. This is a fundamentally important point as it enables the relationship between clothing and the body in the manipulated image to be viewed as an exaggeration of something that is already present in the conventional fashion image. In the lived world, this relationship has been characterized as one of co-dependency and equivalence, to the point where “dress cannot be understood without reference to the body and . . . the body has always and everywhere to be dressed” (Entwistle 2000: 324). But in fashion representation, Roland Barthes has suggested that a hier- archy exists, with fashion at the apex. Of particular relevance to this article is his explanation of how, in fashion representation, all that is natural is dissolved into the artifice of fashion. This is a fundamentally important point as it enables the relationship between clothing and the body in the manipulated image to be viewed as an exaggeration of something that is already present in the conventional fashion image. In The Fashion System, Barthes identified the distinction between the garment that is manufactured and/or worn and the garment that exists only as representation and meaning. Put simply, a picture of a dress is not a dress. What this means is that represented (or, in his terminology,“image”) clothing does not have the other potential modalities contained in those garments that circulate in the lived world (“real” and “used” clothing). Represented clothing cannot serve the functions of protection, modesty or adornment. At best, it can only signify these practical consider- ations. Representation then allows fashion to appear in a more undiluted form, filtering out the practical functions that threaten fashion with becoming a material (as opposed to modelized) mode of being. A similar process of modelization occurs with the body of the fashion model, which is drained of any biological realities. As Elizabeth Wilson puts it, “this is the body as an idea rather than as an organism” (Wilson 1995: 58). Contrary to what one might expect, the essential function of the body of the fashion model is not aesthetic. Barthes writes, “it is not a question of delivering a ‘beautiful body’, subject to the canonic rules of plastic success, but a ‘deformed’ body with a view to achieving a certain formal generality” (Cheddie 2002: 259). Thus the model, incarnate body of the fashion model is “no one’s body;” rather, “it is a pure form” (1993: 259). Collapsed into the sign system of fashion, it cannot signify as itself. As Barthes puts it, “by a sort of tautology” it refers only to the garment(1993: 259). The body then does not introduce anything new into the image; it is a reiteration of what is already present, that is, fashion. Once the body, the clothing, etc. have been transformed into image, no gesture, no look, no decoration is accidental; everything in the image—including all scenic elements—articulates the garment. The model appears in this framework, this setting, but does not belong to it; her reality is only in reference to fashion (Antick, 2002: 362). For despite having, over centuries, successfully altered, restricted and manipulated the natural form and surface of the human body, in lived reality fashion’s authority is tempered by the raw materials of a human physiology that continues to put up a degree of resistance to its aesthetic whims. But since the earliest fashion photo- graphy, the faults of nature have been modified by retouching and air- brushing, techniques that have brought the body more into line with the fashionable model than that ever achieved by, for example, corsetry and cosmetics. This has produced the common charge against fashion imagery that it imposes unrealistic aesthetic standards upon women and then encourages acts of imitation. However, in the era of the “lunch-time facelift,” it could be argued that, as the “real” body gets closer to the model of airbrushed humanity, the influence works in the opposite direction, giving fashion representation the impetus to push the limits of preservation in order to maintain an unattainable level of perfection. Accordingly, the intensified artifice of the synthetic model could be seen as a determination to maintain an aesthetic that is beyond the reach of the corporeal world. It contrasts, for instance, with the way digital manipulation of the image is practiced in the mainstream fashion (and general) press where its use has become so standard that it is no longer particularly obvious. This potential is of course already inherent to fashion. As we have seen, long before the invention of Photoshop, Focillon describes fashion as not passively decorating the formal environment but as being that environment; the body is not only adorned, it is the adornment. In Focillon’s formulation of an artificial humanity, the creative control lies with fashion —but with strictures. With the synthetic model, any limitations imposed by the body’s physiology are removed. As discussed here, this is made possible by employing techniques of photographic manipulation. However, on a metaphysical level, the genesis of the synthetic model can be traced to the nineteenth century where the new material conditions of industrial capitalism oversaw a shift in the relationship between the body and clothing from the eighteenth-century principle of “body as mannequin”— where dress worn in public was unrelated to the body or the character of the person wearing it—to one of an intermeshing of self and clothing. TAKING OFF THE BODY A fashion editorial by the photographer Phil Poynter, originally published in Dazed and Confused in 1998, revisits the theme suggested by Grand- ville’s polite gathering of accoutrements a century and a half before. “I Didn’t Recognize You With Your Clothes On” is a literal interpretation of the proposition posed by Susan Buck-Morss in her book, The Dialectics of Seeing. Referring to Grandville’s illustration, she asks, “. . . what is it that is desired? No longer the human being: Sex appeal emanates from the clothes that one wears” (Buck-Morss 1999: 100). In the late twentieth century version, the representation of bodiless clothing has progressed from casual conversation to casual sex: fellatio on a train; sex in an anonymous bathroom; a male client in a bespoke suit, bowler hat and monocle observing a dominatrix and her female submissive in a hotel room; and a post-coital cigarette amid the weeds on the edge of a housing estate (Figure 2). In each scenario, the characters are dressed according to easily identifiable codes that place them in a social tribe or milieu. A fatigue perhaps brought on by the breaking down of any taboos associated with sex, or perhaps by saturation with images of the human figure. This could particularly apply to fashion photography that, with its limited codes and repertoire, is so familiar a genre that the body is no longer needed in order to display clothes, ostensibly rendering the model obsolete. How- ever, it is precisely because the body is so familiar that it is never really absent from the frame; if it cannot actually be seen, it exists at least as a memory. In most of the shots an invisible human form moulds the clothes and when this disappears, as in the last shot, the clothes lose their identity (rather than bestowing it), becoming indistinguishable from half-finished garments on a clothing factory floor. Because of this, despite its explicit sexual nature, the modern version of “Fashionable people represented in public by their accoutrements” is less radical than the original, evincing a dependence upon the body that the consumer items drawn by Grandville do not betray. BODY AS GARMENT In the preface to their book Fashioning the Frame, Alexander Warwick and Dani Cavallaro ask: “Should dress be regarded as part of the body, or merely as an extension of, or supplement to it?”(Cavallaro and War- wick 1998: iv). There is, they suggest, no definitive answer to this question; rather the boundaries between the “self and other, subject and object, inside and outside” are permeable and unfixed, always under a relentless process of review. Body and clothing are not separated or sealed off by some inviolable barrier but are “regions to be playfully traversed,” so that each “is continually in the process of becoming otherwise” (Cavallaro and Warwick 1998: xviii). However, in the synthetic model, the process of playful interaction between clothing and body described by Warwick and Cavallaro is arrested and the uncertainty over the demarcation of a constantly fluctuating border is removed. In its place the (provisional) boundary, ostensibly dividing body and clothing, is permanently dissolved and the fusion of self and other, subject and object, inside and outside, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic becomes complete. In another collaboration with Alexander McQueen, this time for the Spring/Summer 1997 collection, “La Poupée,” Nick Knight created an image for Visionnaire magazine using a metal brace that manacled the arms and legs of the wearer firmly in place. (The same brace was worn in McQueen’s catwalk show by the black model Debra Shaw, with a vastly different effect to the one discussed here.) Titled “Laura de Palma” (a reference perhaps to the girl whose plastic-wrapped body was found dead at the beginning of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks), it is a picture of a naked, blonde, blue-eyed model who lies supine in a murky void, her legs held open by the metal frame and manacles, which also fix her arms in a welcoming gesture of embrace. Her eyes are open but lifeless, staring out from an expressionless face. Her skin has a yellowish tone and is plasticky with a waxy sheen. In keeping with her likeness to a combination of sex doll and shop mannequin, her pubic area is air-brushed into Barbie-doll impenetrability, effectively denying the carnal sexuality of this body. However, if her purpose as a sex object is thwarted, her purpose as a fashion object remains unquestioned. Although completely naked, she is” dressed” in a fashionably svelte frame that is strikingly accessorized by feet that taper down to form a ten-centimeter stiletto heel. The fashion object has now become an inseparable part of her body. Such a body no longer carries the characteristics or signs of the biological human; rather, its qualities have become indistinguishable from those of fashion. Once the fashion body is transformed into the same substance as that of the fashion garment, the human body can be treated like the material of clothing and henceforth cut, shaped, pasted and stitched in any imaginable way. In “Total and Fatal for You,” a 26-page, black and white editorial sequence that appeared in the September/October 2001 issue of Dutch magazine, Alexei Hay explores what fashion can do with the body once it possesses the intrinsic properties of the garment. FASHION’S IMAGINARY In the images described above, fashion turns this impulse back on a humanity that considered itself as homo faber—a maker of things. In the synthetic model it is “humanity” that is being made by the object. There can be no doubt as to the narcissism of fashion’s project. The synthetic model is an image of fashion incarnate; that is, fashion presumes a “bodily” form even as it rejects the material biological substance of that body as irrelevant. By replacing the characteristics that make the body belong to the sign system of the natural order with those of fashion, the synthetic model then is the apotheosis of fashion and from its deified position it creates an avatar of itself. That this occurs only within the realm of the image—an admittedly reduced “world” from the point of view of humanity—is not an admission of defeat (Featherstone, 1991: 265-9). The image could be considered as the epicenter of existence for fashion; not only does the publishing of fashion imagery rival the fashion industry itself, but the banks of photographers at each seasonal showing are the privileged audience for whom the models perform, their flashbulbs operating with a gravitational pull on the model as she proceeds in her orbit around the catwalk (David, 1995: 352). Without the image as validation, fashion’s launch risks being stillborn. But given that the synthetic model does not exist prior to the image, rather only coming into being inside the realm of the image, it can be construed as not just a product of human imagination but as an embodiment of imagination itself. This interplay of mortality and immortality is fashion’s metaphysical coinage, allowing it to perform an ontological sleight-of-hand—without any formal change the fashion object both “is” and “is not” fashion. In contrast to the fashion object, formal change (or, at least, the idea of formal change) is essential in the body of the model. In the synthetic model the body itself is moulded and transformed, drained of all that is natural or organic, its metamorphosis happening, in a sense, before our eyes. This tendency is an intensification of something that is present, but held in check in the conventional fashion image. CONCLUSION It is here, finally, that we can speculate beyond the immediate concern of this article to ask why fashion, apparently content to entertain a multitude of created forms in the body of the model, is so resistant to the multitude of actual bodily forms that exist beyond the parameters of its image world. Why does it not respond to those critics and observers who ask where are the non-slim, the non-young and those who are not able-bodied? Certainly, in part, the answer lies in fashion’s industrial base, the realities of the market-place and an economy of desire. But it is also the case that fashion cannot incorporate all body shapes in a gesture of politically correct egalitarianism. If fashion were to allow the body to take over, to be just anything, any shape, any age, it would have no power. The sign of its authority—artifice—would fade. The point here is that fashion does not supplant the natural body with an model body but with an imagined one, one nearer to it’s “heart’s desire.” In the synthetic model we witness, on the body of the fashion model, fashion’s metamorphosis, “a world made malleable by imagination.” If fashion were to forsake these transformations it would face the same fate as if it were to respond to those critics who ask that it arrest its interminable permutations and settle for one perfect form. By imposing its economy of perpetual alteration on the body of the model, it ensures that it will not suffer the fate of other despotic regimes that have allowed hubris to make an enemy of change; eternally changing, it will not atrophy, it will not fossilize, it will not die. 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