Coming into Fashion: A Century of Fashion Photography at Conde Nast

Edward Steichen, Lee Miller, 1928

By Nathalie Herschdorfer, Munich: Prestel, 2013

I spent an enjoyable summer afternoon reading this book on my couch escaping from the oppressive heat.  Its instructive to read a survey of the nude in contemporary art  before an overview of 20th and 21st century fashion photography.  One can clearly see how representations of the ideal body migrated from elite to popular culture.  Herschdorfer offers a competent survey of photographic trends from 1911 to 2011, but I was struck by the fleeting, superficial impact these images had on me.  Fashion photography is extremely pleasing and utterly forgettable.

Fashion photography offers up an entire lifestyle, an alternative world where aesthetics and a commodified, consumerist notion of beauty reign supreme.  These representations are ultimately unsatisfying because they never get anywhere--there's not a trajectory of a medium like in art history--and they eschew genuine ambiguity.  Fashion photography is imprisoned by elegance.  Glamour and sexiness are endlessly defined in these images, but at the cost of greater artistic meaning.  As Herschdorfer notes, "If we study a century's worth of fashion photographs, what we notice is that the genre is forever reinventing itself from the same staring point."