NOTHING SACRED
Michael Vollbracht
Rizzoli, 156 pages, $85
FASHION TODAY
By Colin McDowell
Phaidon, 512 pages, $69.95
SEEING FASHION
By Melvin Sokolsky
Arena Editions, 191 pages, $65
RUNWAY: Photographs by Larry Fink
powerHouse Books, 128 pages, $60
FASHION IN MOTION
By Esther Haase
Edition Stemmle, 128 pages, $65
J.D. ‘OKHAI OJEIKERE:
Photographs
Scalo, 158 pages, $42.50
Books about fashion and style are rarely reviewed by the serious book journals. There is a prejudice against such titles, a feeling that they lack critical distance from their subjects and that, like the fashion magazines, they are little more than unabashed beaux gestes to the industry they cover. And then there is the notion that fashion is a trivial subject, not worthy of consideration by the serious-minded. That is a mistake. Fashion–the way people choose to dress and to display themselves to others at a specific moment in time–offers insights into social change, the relationship between men and women, economics and the politics of status and consumerism.
A book about fashion falls invariably into one of several genres.
The most obvious type is the icon book devoted to the biography or vision of a single designer, usually authorized by, and sometimes even written and subsidized by, the designer. (The series of books about Gianni Versace, published by Abbeville, comes to mind.) Occasionally there are icon books about famous models. (Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer and Laetitia Casta have all had their books.)
The concept book pursues not an individual person but a particular theme: the history of the black dress, the golden age of Hollywood style, the 1960s, and so on.
Service-oriented how-to books tell readers how to be beautiful, how to master Cindy Crawford’s makeup tips, how to develop Jackie Kennedy’s style, how to dress like a Parisian, how to be like Audrey Hepburn, or whatever.
Photographer books either celebrate the career of an individual fashion photographer or gather in anthologies the work of several contemporaries.
Finally, the so-called serious books offer intellectual and analytical perspectives on the history and meaning of fashion.
In recent years there have been more fashion books than ever–a symptom of the democratization of taste and style for the masses. The books are tokens of affinity and aspiration, passports at an entry-level price to an exclusive and fashionable world, purchased for the same reason that one buys a designer-label perfume, bath towel or pair of sunglasses. Possession of the object is a calling card that announces to others that you are a member of the club. That is why these are coffee-table books: They serve as visible, horizontal signposts that call attention to your unique taste. Several new titles stand out as examples of their kind, and as conversation pieces on the state of contemporary fashion.
In “Fashion Today” (due out in September), Colin McDowell, fashion correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, explains how it came to be that “(f)or the first time in history, fashion is now perceived as central to existence by vast numbers of people of all ages and social backgrounds” and is now “at the heart of a global culture.”
It is a story of the last half-century, and McDowell boils it down to a few essential chapters: the rise of youth culture after the end of World War II; the influence of middle-class American tastes and aspirations; the triumph of simplicity over formality; the metamorphosis of the designer from tradesman into pop-culture star; the evolution of once-anonymous models into household icons of beauty and style; the unique power of photography to capture the zeitgeist and visualize its dreams; and the colossal power of the fashion press and media to spread the gospel of good taste and consumerism to the masses worldwide.
“So the century which began with fashion as an elitist pleasure ends with decorative dress as . . . a central prop of life,” he writes.
McDowell explains why designer Claire McCardell, whose name is hardly remembered today, “can rightly be called the founder of modern postwar fashion,” and he describes how she and her colleagues liberated American style with simplicity, comfort and sportswear. The youth culture, which McDowell says had its most profound influence in the 1950s, not the 1960s, infused fashion with the sex appeal of film stars like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Brigitte Bardot. The immediacy and excitement of photography toppled illustration as the preferred mode of depicting fashion, and Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and other magazines made celebrities of photographers, designers and then models.
McDowell blames this cult of personality on a subservient press: “(W)ith a press willing to accept at face value everything it is told–as most of the fashion press has been, for the major part of this century–designer bon mots can, and do, litter our newspapers and magazines to such an extent that they annex not just the press but also the reader as part of the personality-making machine.”
McDowell deconstructs fashion with insight, humor, verve and the aid of several hundred photographs. “Fashion Today” is one of the best books on the subject in recent years, and McDowell’s nuanced understanding of style, taste and mood in the late 1990s and the turn of the century is especially rewarding. He argues that fashion is now part of the entertainment industry, and that “(f)or the twenty-first century we will admire only those designers who, like McQueen and Galliano, appear to stand outside the system and show us that fact not only by the extravagance of their personal worlds and fashion presentations but also by their ability to use both to say something new.” Indeed, regarding Galliano, McDowell notes, “it is neither the clothes nor his appearance which have made him the fashion superstar of the late Nineties. It is the extravagance of his fashion shows.”
It is the milieu of the fashion shows that photographer Larry Fink seeks to capture in “Runway.” But he is not interested in making the catwalk photos of supermodels that one sees in the fashion magazines. Instead, in 99 black-and-white photos from 1993 to 1999 he takes us backstage and behind the scenes to expose the subtext of these events.
In his introductory essay to the book, Village Voice writer Guy Trebay claims that Fink’s impromptu photos of designers, buyers, models, makeup artists, socialites, hangers-on and the other inhabitants of fashion’s zoo “upend beauty’s ideologies” and illustrate “the violence of looking” that characterizes fashion shows. Having attended shows in Paris and New York (including, apparently, some of the ones Fink shot for the book), I am not sure Trebay is right. Although Fink’s photos are attractive and well-printed, they are static, frozen moments that do not capture the emotional or visual extravagance of a fashion show. This is not Fink’s fault. Other, similar books have failed. Just as still photographs cannot evoke the sensory overload of grand opera (or a hockey game, for that matter), they seem unable to evoke the evanescence of fashion theater. The best photo in the book does speak volumes about the fashion business. A makeup artist stands over model Shalam Harlow, her face invisible to the viewer as the man clasps her head in his hand, like a sculptor feeling the raw clay that his hands will mold into art.
Two other photo books show what fashion photography once was, and what it has become today. “Seeing Fashion,” a collection of 140 color and black-and-white photos, by Melvin Sokolsky, a craftsman of uncommon skill and refinement for the last several decades, exhibits the precision, architectural composition, simplicity, elegance and restraint that were, once upon a time, the hallmarks of fashion photography. In Sokolsky’s work the clothes are recognizable, the models do not run riot and the nudes are classical portraits, not open invitations to a sensual bacchanal. His fantastic images of flawlessly dressed modern women floating through Paris protected (or confined?) in gigantic plastic bubbles remain iconic images of their time.
“Fashion in Motion,” a collection of images by the young German photographer Esther Haase, exemplifies the trends in contemporary fashion photography. Color predominates over black and white, and the image is often blurred to convey movement. The model and her mood, not the clothing and the details, are what are being sold. She is not bound to the studio. Instead, she appears in various locales: a party, the kitchen, someone’s bedroom, the shower. Others are often present in sensual, sometimes exotic, tableaux, as in Haase’s photo of a nude woman in a limousine being transported to . . . where? Modern photography offers up fantasies that fashion promises can come true. As McDowell writes in “Fashion Today”:
“Fashion photography has become increasingly an end product in itself. . . . (M)any photographers use clothes merely as props which show sexual personality by what is chosen and how it is worn.”
Simultaneously, contemporary fashion photography has adopted an unstudied look of realism, the street and daily life. These gritty, “anti-fashion” images, published mainly in the alternative style magazines, are a world and a lifetime away from the staid, proper, classic photographs of the 1950s and 1960s. According to McDowell “the photographs of style and fashion in the Nineties transcend mere image-making and present a visual checklist of much that has been found moving, exciting and compulsive in fashion and its attitudes over the last fifty years. . . . (T)hey show us the true fashion in which people lived by placing them and their clothes in their surroundings. Glossy pictures of expensive clothes on perfect model bodies taken on tropical beaches may well feed our dreams, but it is the kitchen in the neglected low rent apartment, with sauce bottles on the table and the woman painting her nails while the man combs his hair in a cracked mirror above the sink ready for a night out, which will tell future generations how fashion was actually lived by many in our time.”
Timelessness is the word that springs to mind when viewing the exquisite photographs of African hairstyles collected in “J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere,” published to mark the photographer’s 70th birthday and 50th year in the profession. One of Africa’s most important photographers, he began in 1968 to photograph the traditional and contemporary hairstyles of Nigerian women, and this book is the result of more than 1,000 images made over many years. Some of the styles are more than 2,000 years old, and some are modern. Some are tribal and ceremonial, others are generic and everyday. The photos are not portraits of people, but of popular art and cultural traditions. Ojeikere rarely photographs his models’ faces, concluding that the hairstyles were viewed best from behind. His deceptively simple text is a meditation on creativity, identity, art and the relationship between Europe and Africa. Western culture has ransacked the world for fashion ideas, often ripping out of context the signs, symbols and traditions of other cultures. Many people fail to realize that “minimalism” and “modernism” are not new; those forms have African and Asian origins. The inherent beauty of Ojeikere’s photographs, and his presentation of them in their authentic African context, make this one of the most compelling fashion books of the year.
Lest one think that the triumph of photography is complete and illustration is dead, at least one person, designer and artist Michael Vollbracht, stands against the tide. In “Nothing Sacred,” an oversize collection of his colorful portraits of movie, fashion and music icons, Vollbracht evokes the spirit of a decadent, celebrity-besotted era. Portraits of Elizabeth Taylor, Catherine Deneuve, Bette Davis, Andy Warhol, Tina Turner, Princess Diana, John F. Kennedy Jr. and director Ed Wood, of all people, plus dozens more, capture not only the stars they depict but the fashions and tastes of the time. The eccentric text adds to the fun of this whimsical, captivating book.
