Collaboration, competition and conflict: The collective labour of fashion photography at US Vogue (1940–42)

While the figure of the fashion photographer has been widely discussed, little has been written on image-making as a collective endeavour. Fashion photography indeed results from technical innovations, publishing strategies, editorial policies, behind-the-scenes negotiations and, ultimately, decision-making. This article analyses ‘The Condé Nast Papers’ – a series of internal documents held at the Condé Nast archives in New York – together with US Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar’s editorials and covers to explore how fashion photographs resulted from the collective labour of photographers, editors, artistic directors and many others in the early 1940s. Through these unique historical sources, this article gives a voice to the workers involved in the making of fashion images and shows how decision-making and creativity were distributed across occupations. It also unpacks the negotiations, arbitrations and power relations that underpinned work relations at US Vogue, showing the collaboration, competition and conflict between the different actors. Drawing on art sociologist Howard Becker’s concept of ‘art worlds’ while combining methods from fashion history and visual and material culture, I question the respective status of the multiple authors involved in this activity and the conventions of fashion image-making. In doing so, I argue that fashion photographs are the product of the interactions of a multitude of workers who are embedded in the power structures of the fashion media industry, and whose collective labour is made invisible. My goal is to rethink the ways in which collective labour has been evidenced and produced in the fashion industry.

‘My favourite meme page’: Balenciaga’s Instagram account and audience fashion labour online

As fashion ‘goes viral’, adapting to digital popular cultural flows, streams, image aggregations and memes, there is a need for better grasping how these platforms feed into the aesthetics of mediations of fashion. Contemporary digitally mediated fashion is conditioned by what van Dijck and Poell refer to as a new media logic, one that permeates the ‘strategies, mechanisms, and economics underpinning these platforms’ dynamics’. This logic includes audience labour. This article focuses on how the audience is put to work and how such work becomes integral to the mediational aesthetic by using the Instagram account of Paris-based fashion brand Balenciaga as a heuristic device. In connecting perspectives from fashion and media studies, this article discusses how fashion mediation is entangled in processes that harness audience labour on Instagram. Balenciaga takes on communication strategies that expose the aesthetics of user engagement. On Instagram, the brand presents its take on fashion photography in the digital age as part of its visual identity on this platform. Furthermore, in feeding the comments section, users participate in ‘boundary maintenance’, separating Balenciaga insiders from outsiders who lack knowledge of the perpetually changing aesthetic codes of fashion imagery. Online audiences thus find themselves at the crossroads of consumption, production and gatekeeping.

Queer insurgency: Slava Mogutin and the politics of camp

The subject of this article is Russo-American artist Slava Mogutin. A close associate of Gosha Rubchinskiy and Lotta Volkova, Mogutin has been based in New York since 1995. While he originally shot to fame as a poet and novelist, Mogutin is today better known as a performance artist, filmmaker and photographer. The aim of my article is to locate Mogutin, and in particular his fashion photography, within current debates around the representation of masculinity and the construction of masculine subjectivity/-ies. More specifically, using a visual analysis methodology, I analyse the camp aesthetics of Mogutin’s fashion imagery. In a number of ways, Mogutin’s camp aesthetic raises questions about displacement and identity, the clash between individual desires and social norms and – as he puts it – ‘what it means to be a young man in the modern world’. It also constitutes an avowedly political challenge, not just to the state-sponsored homophobia and heteronormativity of Mogutin’s native Russia but also to the identity politics underpinning today’s fashion industry. I conclude by suggesting that Mogutin’s openly political form of camp might pose a challenge to the traditional Sontagian view of camp as apolitical.

Arrogantly looked at: The status of the recipient in high fashion photography

Postures, that appear arrogant, are typical for fashion photography in high-gloss magazines and within the scene of model photography. It is in trend to either look down upon the recipient, to show a sloppy posture, as if one would not care about the way one will be perceived by the recipient, or even to look angry as if one is annoyed to be photographed – three ways to communicate an arrogant attitude. But who would enjoy looking at such pictures? The article focuses on the recipient and traces various reasons why it can be gratifying to consume such photos, from a masochistic tendency to the search for authenticity and to connoisseurship articulated by it.

The provocative aesthetic of Guy Bourdin

Fashion and photography are inter-related subjects within a pedagogical discourse incorporating sociological and psychoanalytical approaches. This article will focus on the radical work of Guy Bourdin, firstly considering the technical themes within his work. The article will then progress to reflect on gender and the fetish elements in the photography by thinking through Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. Elaborating on the concept of the fetish, I will then discuss modernity and analyse Bourdin’s images as a product of, and comment on modernity applying Walter Benjamin’s ideas on fashion to open wider considerations of Guy Bourdin within the disciplines of fashion, photography and beyond.

Voyeurism and erotic stereotypes in fashion photography: Modernity and postmodernity from the Countess of Castiglione to Helmut Newton

Voyeurism and desire are drives linked ontologically to the identity of the photographic and fashion system. Photographing someone is always an act of voyeuristic possession of something that belongs to another, or at least to the surrounding reality that one seeks to – fetishistically – appropriate. But the voyeuristic exercise of photography lives and is nourished by stimulating the exhibitionism of what is in front of the machine’s lens, thus completing and giving meaning to each other. When the context being photographed is fashion, the conditions of insistent voyeurism and intense desire (of emulation, projection, appropriation) become one with the very meaning of the image. In fact, moving from behaviour to the object, most of fashion’s photographic tradition can be traced back to an atmosphere of soft winking and erotic fantasy of the look. In this article, we take into consideration two well-known events that are generically associated with voyeurism and eroticism of the photographic image and fashion, reading them as a parable of the history of the male gaze of women’s bodies: from the triumph of the stereotype in the modern age to its sudden upheaval in the postmodern age. The first case is that of the Countess of Castiglione, who from the mid-nineteenth century was already able to demonstrate how photography could solidify male erotic imagery and, in so doing, present fashion as the style and attitude of an era. In contrast, we find Helmut Newton, famous and acclaimed fashion photographer and exceptional interpreter of the excesses of the eighties, able to bring that male erotic imagery to such exaggerations in the use of codes to make it almost harmless, cooling it.

St. Petersburg’s ballet in fashion photography

The subject of this research is the St. Petersburg’s ballet in interpretation of the masters of fashion photography. The goal of this article consists in the analysis of specificity of modern fashion photography, and examination of the phenomenon of reference to the theme of ballet on the example of works of the prominent fashion photographers, such as Richard Avedon, Patrick Demarchelier, Deborah Turbeville, as well as certain Russian photographers. Special attention is given to examination of fashion photography not so much as the genre of photographic art, but as an important advertising tool. The relevance of fashion photography is associated with the increasing importance of visualization in life of a modern person; it plays a significant role in the social, cultural, and mythological life of the society. The article outlines the aspects of reference of fashion photographers to the theme of ballet; analyzes the peculiarities of using ballet images in photography; determines their role as a visual component of advertising campaigns in fashion industry; describes the advantages and effectiveness of their use in advertising and presentation of products. The author notes the frequency of referring to the theme of ballet in fashion photography, which leads to the increase of its artistic and cultural significance.