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This
morning we leafed through the pages of fashion photographs in Vogue
and Harper's Bazaar where there are now clothes from The
Gap right next to Lanvin (a concession to the times,
but also, finally, an admission, that fashion has always been an
art of juxtaposition, of assemblage, a magpie's game: an adorning
of the self from a motley collection of things). Lines are
blurred, blurring, and as with fashion so with the fashion
photograph.
And
currently at the ICP: Avedon Fashion (1944-2000) which
explores the work of Richard Avedon(1923-2004), whose
revolutionary photographs danced across the pages of Harper's
Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker. His work was imbued with
a sense of movement, of American energy, that modernized fashion
photography, mixed high and low art, advertising, pop
culture. He blurred the line (and all the dots) between
fashion and serious photography. Beyond fashion and models
we remember Avedon for his 1980s series In the American West
and his 1964 collaboration with James
Baldwin, Nothing Personal, a survey of the Civil Rights
Movement, the politics, the gestalt of the time (Baldwin was his
old Bronx high school classmate and his co-editor at The Magpie,
the school's literary magazine).
If
Avedon's fashion photographs are some hybrid creature of editorial
and his own aesthetics, stylized and energetic, then the 21st
century answer, a child of the internet really -- and our favorite
fashion blog is Scott Schuman's The
Sartorialist with
photographs (and occasional comments from the Sartorialist
himself) from the streets of New York, or wherever he happens to
be. And we admit to regularly peeking while riffing for eCognoscente.... What
the The Sartorialist possesses is a certain joie de vivre,
fashion as an extension of the self, style and the aesthete
celebrated. It isn't edgy, or hip, or trendy. Schuman
has said, "I'd been shooting on the street and I found that
the photographs I kept going back and looking at were stylish
older guys who were really cool and tailored and old school, I
thought they looked inspirational…." So if it
is classical in the sense that it is about a distinctive sense of
style it is also about real people who share a joyousness about dressing up -- old, young, fat, thin, the common thread is that
they are all clotheshorses with a certain član. Its about
Schuman and his camera and whatever strikes his fancy:
from-the-street, no editorial, celebrating the magpie approach
that has nothing whatsoever to do with head-to-toe anything but
instead celebrates confidence and the idea of dressing up for
oneself! The pixels have been blurred on what has always
been a magpie's game….
See:
Avedon
Fashion (1944-2000), ICP
Visit:
The
Sartorialist
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