Fashion victims

ArtForum, May, 2004 by Peter Halley

I have always viewed the magazine fashion story as an important and innovative contemporary genre. If movies are akin to novels, then the fashion story is like a piece of short fiction. It is a modest improvised scenario, created by a quickly gathered team of talents: the photographer, the stylist, the models, the location scout, the makeup and hair stylists, and the art director from the magazine--with fashion acting as a catalyst for the whole production.

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As creative director and publisher of Index magazine for the past seven years, I have had the unique opportunity to work with and learn from extraordinary photographers. So when I first heard rumblings a few months ago about MOMA's fashion-photography show, I was elated that the institution that first recognized photography as a distinct medium had chosen to make an exhibition about the work of the photographers and independent magazines that revolutionized the culture of fashion in the '90s. But now that the party has started, it turns out that few of the people I had hoped to see are there. While all of the photographers in "Fashioning Fiction" are serious practitioners worthy of esteem, I am mystified by nearly all of the curatorial choices in this exhibition.

According to the catalogue, the exhibition is organized around the idea that "two of the dominant narrative modes" in fashion photography of the '90s are "the influence of cinema and the snapshot" and that these modes "are also central to contemporary art photography." This proposition appears sound, at least to an amateur observer such as myself. Yet it seems that curators Susan Kismaric and Eva Respini have used this simple premise to justify their highly subjective selections.

The curators omitted photographers such as Corinne Day, Nick Knight, Terry Richardson, Richard Kern, and Mark Borthwick, all of whom contributed to the leading independent magazines of the '90s during their most innovative years. They also excluded fashion stories from i-D, The Face, Purple, and Dutch, the pioneering fashion magazines of the decade. And none of the stories includes Kate Moss, the fashion model whose influence on the rise of the '90s aesthetic equaled that of any photographer.

Although the fashion culture of the '90s was inspired by street fashion, grunge, squatting, and the Internet boom--what Kismaric and Respini call the "concerns, desires, and realities of youth culture"--the curators have certainly managed to exclude these themes from their chosen fashion stories. Apart from one story by Mario Sorrenti, you won't find any hoodies, Nike high tops, androgynous hipsters, or heroin chic. In fact, the curators manage to include no less than five stories set in prototypical upperclass milieus: Tina Barney's photos depict powerful figures from the New York cultural establishment in their homes; Larry Sultan's Kate Spade campaign shows a moneyed family staying at the Carlyle on a visit to New York; Steven Meisel's story "The Good Life" for Vogue Italia depicts the family rituals of well-to-do suburban Americans; Ellen von Unwerth's ads for Alberta Ferretti show glamorous vamps in black cocktail dresses prowling the Upper East Side. And Juergen Teller's many shoots with the likes of Kate Moss and Sofia Coppola are excluded in favor of his portraits of wealthy haute couture clients for W.

Though they never mention it, the curators also seem to be taking a strong stand on the fashion they like. Prada, Ferretti, Comme des Garcons, as well as Kate Spade accessories, make their list. Versace, Gucci, McQueen, and Adidas do not. Even these fashion choices seem subsumed to representative art-world taste. More broadly, the major criterion behind all the choices in the exhibition seems to be a desire for proximity to power and influence, with special emphasis on power in the art world: "Art photographers" are emphasized over those whose practice is centered on fashion. Ad campaigns are represented disproportionately to magazine fashion editorials. MOMA's own power is reflected in the inclusion of Cindy Sherman, whose work seems to me to have had little import to fashion photography in the '90s. But the museum purchased her "Untitled Film Stills" to much fanfare a few years ago.

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Delving into the catalogue, my mystification only intensified. Kismaric and Respini start out diligently enough, attempting to chronicle the revolution in fashion culture of the '90s. They acknowledge the rise and influence of a host of small independent magazines, including i-D, The Face, and Dazed and Confused in the UK, as well as Purple, Dutch, and Self Service on the Continent. They emphasize that the editors of these magazines saw "fashion as a conveyor of cultural ideas" and "fostered an intersection for art, music, fashion, design, and youth culture." Yet Kismaric and Respini award little importance to the editorial personnel of these remarkable publications, who were crucial to the fashion-culture revolution that is their subject. They mention by name only Terry Jones and Nick Knight, founder and editor, respectively, of i-D, and Phil Bicker, art director at The Face. As for the staffs of all the other magazines, we are told only that they "bridged the worlds of art and fashion, in part, because, some of their designers and even editors were art-school graduates."