Animals of Fashion (a concise history)

Edward Steichen. 1935



Richard Avedon. 1955



David Bailey. 1968



Richard Avedon. 1981

"The magical and funny picture is, above all, a great fashion photograph. What better way to sell a dress than to set its elegant sleekness of line and expensive smoothness of texture against the rough, wrinkled hides and ponderous shapes of elephants? It is instructive to compare this picture with what may have been its inspiration: Edward Steichen's celebrated Vogue photograph of 1935, for which he brought a white horse into a white-tiled lavatory and posed three models in white clothes around it-a notion that comes out looking as ridiculous as it sounds. Why Avedon's even more outrageous idea works when Steichen's doesn't could sustain a course in fashion photography".

from A Series of Proposals
Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography: Diana & Nikon
by Janet Malcolm (1980)

Avedon Fashion 1944-2000
International Center of Photography
May 15- September 6, 2009

Homage to Munkacsi. Richard Avedon

Roberta Smith reviews this show in today's New York Times...

Avedon’s fashion photographs from the late 1940s to the early ’60s are everything you want great art to be: exhilarating, startlingly new and rich enough with life and form to sustain repeated viewings. Their beauty is joy incarnate and contagious. The best of them are as perfect on their own terms as the best work of Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns from that era, and as profoundly representative of it.

I'm not sure I am ready to accept her comparison of Avedon to Pollock or Johns, but I do know that this the one show I am most looking forward to this summer.

Roberta Smith Review in NYT

Avedon Fashion @ ICP

The Power of Fashion...




In case you missed it, the above photo is from the Vogue fashion shoot in India, where unidentified poverty stricken citizens were used to model high priced clothing and accessories, causing quite a stir, and of course, great publicity for Vogue. Vogue India editor Priya Tanna’s message to critics of the August shoot: “Lighten up,” she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the “power of fashion” she said, and the shoot was saying that “fashion is no longer a rich man’s privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful,” she said.“You have to remember with fashion, you can’t take it that seriously,” Ms. Tanna said. “We weren’t trying to make a political statement or save the world,” she said.

My advice to anyone who would now even consider buying a $100 Fendi baby bib is to immediately seek really good psychiatric therapy. For all the rest of you, and especially those who, unlike Vogue India, actually would like to help save the world, why not start by helping save some of India's children? There are currently 5 million people displaced by the floods in the Indian state of Bihar, and $100 would go a long way in helping with food, clothing, and medicine.

Save The Children: India Flood Victims