Author: Arnold, Rebecca

Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 3, Number 4, November 1999 , pp. 487-501(15)

Publisher: Berg Publishers

Abstract:

During the 1990s, fashion photographers such as Sean Ellis and Juergen Teller increasingly focussed their work on dark themes, which spoke of the underside of consumer capitalism. In common with fashion designers, in particular Alexander McQueen, they sought to challenge images of perfect models, and instead display the female body as bruised and decaying. This article tracks themes of violence and abuse - the depiction of the brutalized body - through the second half of the twentieth century. It analyses imagery by Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton and Bob Richardson in the 1960s, and connects these photographers' pursuit of photographs that would show eroticism, desire and anxiety to the work of 1990s practitioners. It draws on a range of ideas from Simone de Beauvoir to Jean Baudrillard to interpret the significance of the often gothic and fetishistic fashion imagery of the 1990s.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/136270499779476072

Publication date: 1999-11-01

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