Fashion images reveal the unreal – they portray a perfection that fails to exist and which resists any hint of unpleasantness. So, do they have any value at all? Seemingly trivial details of fashion – the turn of a collar, the cut of a jacket – are perhaps more revealing of the cultural environment in which they were created than they might intend, and hiatuses in fashion consistently mirror periods of change and revolution – perhaps arising from an impetus for to change, or maybe another device fuelling the momentum for change itself?
The image crops I’ve been using largely dispense with clothing to focus on the face, but I feel this may be a flawed decision. Montaging faces across time does produce both points of disjuncture as well as harmony, but differences in clothing are perhaps even more telling and extreme in their effects.
Bibliography
Sharon Kivland, lecture at Wimbledon College of Art, 7th December 2012
