It is hard to imagine that when Kodak initially introduced the portable camera, it was designed for women. Considered a ‘low art’ long into the 20th century, photography was given menial importance and seen as the perfect “hobby” for women who simply did not have the supposed ‘capacity’ and ‘skills’ to train in proper fine art. These initial Kodak cameras were even converted into colourful chic purses called Kodak Ensembles, which came in a variety of colours and, as the name hints towards, could match your own ensemble.

Fast-forward a century and fashion photography has become a respected and sought-after art form, with certain images vowing up to 610,000 USD at auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Nevertheless, as famously argued by Griselda Pollock, the art world has managed to remain “a man’s world” despite photography’s supposed feminine nature. Names such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton and David Lindbergh remain the most prominent ones in the domain, leaving little space historically, and currently, for women fashion photographers. Let this therefore be a reminder of a few (of many) well-regarded female photographers who have contributed to fashion photography through technique, talent and vision.

Yva (1900-1944)

Also known as Else Neuländer-Simon, Yva was a German photographer who famously captured modern renderings of the female body in interwar Weimar Germany. In an artistic athmosphere shaped by Constructivism, Bauhaus and German Expressionism, her dramatic play on light and shadow as well as clean geometric shapes enabled her to create emotional and feminine works of art. Indeed, although men predominantly dominated the industry at the time, her feminine outlook was deemed refreshing for many. Nevertheless, her career was cut short during the Second World War as she was arrested by the Gestapo alongside her husband when trying to flee, and presumably killed in a camp in Majdanek, Poland. She is also remembered as the artist to have trained and shaped the young Helmut Newton, who would remain her faithful admirer for the rest of his life.

Lillian Bassman (1917-2012)

Working under the famous art director of Harper’s Bazaar Alexey Brodovitch, Lillian Bassman was known for her high-contrast black and white fashion images. Although she originally worked for Harper’s Bazaar in the 40s by promoting the works of Richard Avedon and Paul Himmel (her husband), she was then encouraged to take on the art form herself, thus developing incredible photographic skills that were unfortunately not fully recognised until the 70s. Focusing on lingerie, cosmetics and liquor, her incredible manipulation of images through cropping and bleaching are truly unique to her style, and leave a highly emotional impression on the viewer.

Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895-1989)

Although she was mostly known for her documentary work as a reportage photographer in the 1930s, she was also the first fashion photographer to truly embrace the use of colour in fashion photography. Having studied painting and colour theory at the San Francisco Institute of Art, her eye for subtle nuances and colour transparencies helped redefine American fashion photography and inspired many others such as Horst P. Horst and Irving Penn. Most importantly, she should be known for having contributed to the creation of the “New Woman” by for example incorporating art historical themes in her images when capturing femininity.

Deborah Turbeville (1932 – 2013)

Working in parallel to the feminist movement in the 70s, her stronger displays of femininity in fashion photography differed immensely from those of her peers Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin. Her hauntingly erotic images of the female body were joined by a theatricality that conveyed a hazy laziness. Despite her prominent reputation as a fashion photographer, the clothes in her images become secondary as her delicate feminine lens allows a completely different interpretation of women. She believed her position as a female photographer of women enabled her to capture another side of the models – a more vulnerable side, enhanced by her longing for the mystical which adds an element of nostalgia and dreaminess to her images.

Like many others quarantined at home, I find myself with an abundance of time to spend in front of the television. Passing from streaming service to streaming service, docu-series to foreign drama, digitized film to YouTube short, the days of the Coronavirus have increasingly been defined by what we’re watching. While a few choice programs, like Tiger King, are able to sweep the nation (the Nation of Netflix, for which we all stand), the decision of what to watch is left to one’s personal desires. So what does it mean if all I can watch are period pieces, set decades or even centuries before I was even born? 

It all started with a recommendation from Rebecca to watch Babylon Berlin, a German neo-noir TV-show set in 1929 Berlin. Needless to say, I was tantalized by the glittery fashions, clever plot twists, and mysterious, shadowy figures of the city’s criminal, political, and even medical underworld. For perhaps the entirety of the first season, I recommended the show to anyone who would listen, and waxed poetic about the incredible costumes, precise set decoration, and absolutely breathtaking world creation achieve by the production team.

For the next few weeks, I craved the same sort of exhilaration I felt while watching that show and seeing a masterfully crafted work unfold before my eyes. After a lot of watching and even more scrolling, it has become clear that while the world creation I so adored was driven on its face by a need for beautiful visuals, it’s hiding a desire for escape in a moment characterized by a constant state of unpredictability and worry.

To be sure, my list of “Have Watched” and “Want to Watch” reads like a cinematic traipse through some of the most lavish and visually compelling periods in modern history. In the former column: Netflix’s Freud, another German mystery set in the early 20th century; Hulu’s A French Village, a drama about a small French town during German occupation; The Tudors, a royal drama from Showtime; the ever-enchanting Gilda, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette; Gosford Park; The Aviator…The latter column is populated with more of the same: The upcoming Mrs. America on Hulu, a show about the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s; Planetarium, a film starring Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp as a pair 1930’s psychics; Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York; Elizabeth and Elizabeth the Golden Age; Netflix’s Alias Grace; Howard’s End; A Single Man … the list goes on.

I was able to convince myself for quite some time that what was attractive was the idea of visually exploring these different fashion eras without the pressure of a time constraint. That was until a friend recommended a show on HBO, High Maintenance. Set in contemporary New York (or as contemporary as 2012 can feel right now), it’s a comedy about a bicycle-riding marijuana dealer who ventures to different clients’ apartments in Brooklyn and the peculiar people and situations he encounters along the way. It’s one of those shows that puts a specific facet of New York life on screen for everyone to see and enjoy, and warms the hearts of those lucky enough to live there.

Or that would be true if New York weren’t the global epicenter for an era-defining pandemic. I found myself unable to make it through a single episode of the show, and when my friend pressed me on why, I realized I couldn’t stand to watch normal 21st century people going about their normal 21st century lives. Not because the thought of anyone within 6 feet of each other suddenly made me squirm, but because it somehow felt as foreign and bygone as those other period pieces I’d been watching henceforth. Captive in my parents’ home and an ocean away from the city where I thought I would be spending this year, a return to normal—if even through a TV screen—seems as far-off a dream as wandering into the court of Louis XIV, manteau and all.

American television makes squaring the now with the very recent-past even more difficult due to the constancy of news, updates, and presidential pontificating. The crisis is inescapable from newspaper to news channel, and suffocates the mind, sending it spiraling in directions economic, political, medicinal, familial, and on and on and on. It seems the only respite from one’s own mind would be to erase the present altogether, and settle into a bygone era. An era either free from the complications of the present, or familiar enough that the mind can relish in the comfort of knowing exactly how it all plays out, and release the anxiety of uncertainty.

For us fashion lovers, film and television have always been an enjoyable part of our research. Allowing myself to escape into a period where beaded dresses were de rigeur at a nightclub or a corset was a social necessity or one was never to leave the house without at least a swipe of lipstick was always the best way to engage with the stories and societies that surround clothing—and it becomes especially enticing when I have no reason to wear anything but sweatpants for the foreseeable future. But in a moment where the fashion industry is faced with a reckoning the likes of which it has never encountered in its modern iteration, I fear to neglect an examination of the contemporary would be doing a disservice to the possibilities of the future. When every aspect of fashion production and its international scope is affected by changing buying habits and the global threat of infection; When multi-national luxury conglomerates have transformed their perfume manufacturers to hand sanitizer suppliers; When home-sewing has seen a resurgence to provide necessary equipment for our doctors and nurses; When all this and more is true at this very moment, it seems to me that the fashion of the near future and beyond will be forever changed. Decisions about what that change looks like relies on those of us who spend our days contemplating fashion’s constant importance through history and beyond.

Of course, I will never not recommend Babylon Berlin, as it’s certainly a masterpiece of the genre (CGI train notwithstanding). But in these next weeks of isolation, I think a valuable exercise may be one of actually allowing myself to come to terms with this moment and what’s to come: what’s to come for my studies and, more importantly, what’s to come for fashion.

A museum is a charged space that contains objects, tells histories and stories, and can function as a public service. But how should people respond to museums? For decades musicians have taken over museums (or in some cases made their own museum) to answer this question in critical and celebratory ways.

One of the most significant examples of this is Barbra Streisand’s 1966 television special Color Me Barbra. In the special Streisand belts out tracks from her album, Color Me Barbra, in the galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Surrounded by sculptures, tapestries, and paintings, Streisand makes the museum her personal playground. In the number “Yesterdays,” Streisand comes off as a curious visitor touching artworks and looking for the perfect painting to inspire her. In the number “Gotta Move,” Streisand struts and dances in a bright-colored geometric print dress that is reminiscent of the cubist works on the gallery walls.

Streisand chose to shoot at the PMoA because she found the art there, “so extraordinary [and] so inspirational” that it made her “want to climb into the paintings” and “play in the period rooms.” Given the title of the album, album artwork, and her playful approach to art, Streisand makes the museum her own by upholding the idea that museums are a place for people to see themselves and make themselves into living works of art.

Almost twenty years later Run-D.M.C. had a different take on museums for their  “King of Rock” music video in 1985. In a fictional Rock n Roll museum (that predates the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame Museum by ten years), Rev-Run and D.M.C are told by a white security guard that they don’t belong in the museum because “[it] is a rock museum.” Dressed in black leather suits, black fedoras, and crisp white Adidas, Run-D.M.C.’s presence of black militancy, jazz fashion, and street style incite recognition in a place that denies them the right to exist.

In the museum, they engage with a variety of “cultural artifacts” including guitars, four white busts that wear Beatles wigs, and videos of rock greats. They mock a Buddy Holly performance, respectfully turn their heads to the viewer during a Little Richard performance, and shake their heads at a Jerry Lee Lewis performance. They even step on Michael Jackson’s famous white glove to reject the universally lauded artist who was on the more “acceptable” side of black popular music during the eighties. By the end of the video, they break artifacts, knock over the black velvet ropes that separate them from Rock culture, and spray paint “Run DMC King of Rock” on the museum wall.

The group’s actions represent the long-standing frustrations that black musicians have with being unable to engage with Rock music. Black musicians such as Little Richard played an integral role in developing Rock n Roll. But black musicians such as Run-D.M.C. were not given the same recognition for continuing Rock music in the same way, white “Rock” musicians were recognized. But more importantly, this idea is underscored through the security guard in the video, who acts as a gatekeeper for rock culture and surveillance’s the group’s presence in the museum.

Taking cues from Streisand and Run-D.M.C., The Carters (Jay Z and Beyoncé) both critique and celebrate museums in their video “Apeshit” (2018). Similar to Streisand, The Carters engage with the museum as a place to play and to be inspired: Dancers lift and rise on the steps leading to the Winged Victory of Samothrace; two women sit in front of David’s Madame Récamier and recreate Récamier; the sculptured texture of Beyoncé’s Stephane Rolland gown echoes the carefully carved drapery of the Winged Victory of Samothrace; and The Carters have an all-out dance-out in front of The Great Sphinx of Tanis.

Similar to Run-D.M.C., they critique the dominance of white narratives in museums and the lack of black bodies presented in museums. It’s well documented that this video calls out the whiteness of the Louvre in several ways: Black dancers dance in flesh-colored spandex in front of Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon, and Portrait D’Une Négresse is prominently featured towards the end of the video. As scholar James Smalls notes, Portrait D’Une Négresse is a significant artwork, “because it presents a black person as the sole aestheticized subject and object of a work of art.” The video even recognizes the presence of black people who work in museums behind the scenes, since it features a group of black men standing in front of draws in a space that wouldn’t be shown to the public. Similar to the security guard in “King of Rock,” these men become cultural gatekeepers for the possible object files that sit behind them.

Overall these musicians provide a complex understanding about how people should respond to art historical institutions but nevertheless encourage all visitors to be active participants instead of passive spectators in the museum space.

Sources:

Color Me Barbra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eq5rTX0Jd4

“King of Rock”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXzWlPL_TKw

“Apeshit”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbMqWXnpXcA

https://www.elle.com/culture/music/a21602201/beyonce-jay-z-the-carters-apeshit-everything-is-love-art-blackness/

https://www.vogue.com/article/beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-video-fashion-art-history

https://time.com/5315275/art-references-meaning-beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-louvre-music-video/

https://hyperallergic.com/449108/beyonce-jay-z-louvre-apeshit-museums/

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/beyonce-jay-z-louvre-apeshit-1304711

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/how-beyonce-and-jay-z-defy-western-art-tradition-in-apeshit-video-665915/

https://www.vogue.com/article/beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-video-fashion-art-history

https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/6/19/17476212/apeshit-video-beyonce-jay-z-carters-portrait-negresse-benoist