You can look at fashion as art, industry or a form of entertainment. You can even look at it as clothing. I prefer to look at it through the eyes of photographer, Richard Avedon.
Avedon's work for Harper's Bazaar magazine in the late Forties and early Fifties is uniquely elegant and sophisticated because the people in it express a certain maturity. They smoke and drink and stay out late with authority. They wear evening clothes in a way that says, "What else would you wear in the evening?" Scenes in casinos, nightclubs and fine restaurants suggest that whatever happened to these people (and by implication, an awful lot did) wouldn't be wasted on them. There's nothing tentative or naive about them and they certainly don't worship a Youth Culture. These people enjoy their adult privileges. In fact, they enjoy a lot of privileges because they are unself-consciously elite. They aren't monsters of entitlement, they are gods and goddesses of it. Look at them. Suzy Parker and Dorian Leigh don't live "next door" and they are, most emphatically, not "girls." Dovima is not trying to convince you that she's sixteen. Young as they are, they're women of the world.
Another strong element in Avedon's fashion photography is movement. He either catches his people in mid-action or in the moment just before or after. Even when they're posing or sitting or leaning, there's a tension to his photographs - the tension of a dancer balancing on one foot. More than a ballerina, in fact, the dancer his pictures suggest is Martha Graham. Partly, it's the grandly sweeping fashions of the time. To mark a sharp change from wartime austerity, Christian Dior's "New Look" employed extravagant amounts of fabric. To wear these clothes - and not look like you're wearing a costume - requires equally sweeping gestures and a strong degree of conviction expressed in a detached, almost abstract, way. Since Avedon, Graham and Dior were contemporaries, mutual influence is a possibility.
Avedon didn't work alone, of course. He collaborated with - indeed, owed his career to - some rather exceptional people. The fashion director of Harper's Bazaar, Diana Vreeland; Design director, Alexei Brodovitch and the magazine's editor, a woman with the appetizing name of Carmel Snow. Not only did they recognize Avedon's talent when he was twenty one, TWENTY ONE, they kept him busy and happy for the next twenty years. The fashions themselves are more than major contributors to these photographs, they are the raison d'etre. Yet, I don't want to go into detail. Any discussion of fashions then and now is bound to become a pissing match between fathers and sons, founders and heirs, mentors and students. Suffice it to say that Christian Dior, Balenciaga and their peers were at their peaks and produced exquisite work.
Then, there are the women. Take Dorian Leigh, considered by many to be the first supermodel. A 1949 photograph of her wearing a coat by Dior shows why. She is swaddled up to her neck in a coat with a fur collar and voluminous sleeves. Gloves and a small, fur hat complete the ensemble. A small dog sits patiently in her lap as she sits in the back of a convertible or open carriage, next to a large hatbox. All the movement is internal. She may be sitting, but her mind is racing. What is Dorian Leigh thinking as she gazes down pensively at the smoke curling up from the cigarette clasped in a long, elegant holder? Is she worried, bored or remembering something? Introspecting or waiting for someone? She's not smiling. Does that mean she's unhappy or just momentarily distracted? Is the way the smoke seeps out between her barely parted lips the hottest thing since nuclear fusion? If modeling objectifies women, then Dorian Leigh is a novel - by Colette.
Before we give in completely to the nostlgia induced by these pictures, we may want to consider the society that produced them. It isn't pretty. Not one of the socially progressive movements that we know today was even in existence back then. Racial segregation was legal, antisemitism widely and openly practiced and most of the women alive, Dorian Leigh included, were born without the right to vote. Not a single democratic or equalizing impulse had any influence - including the G.I. Bill of Rights. All the G.I. bill proves is that, in this country, you have to kill someone before the government will help the middle class. Of course, all that's really necessary to fall out of love with the era is to consider what they ate. There was no Italian food, only spaghetti. No Chinese, only chow mein and people smacked their lips over Chicken a la King. This is the kind of food that made Julia Child historically inevitable. Though we may admire the beauty that these ugly conditions produced, it's very hard to feel nostalgia for the real world of that time.
Not impossible, however. If life in 1949 was nasty and brutish if you fell short of the upper class, it was a much bigger world for everyone. Take Paris, the background for many of Avedon's most compelling fashion fantasties. There were far fewer ways to experience the French capital in 1949 than there are today. No television, computers, internet, cell phones, iPods, iPads or DVDs. Tourism, halted by World War II, was only beginning to revive. Commercial air travel was still in its adolescense, not its second delinquenthood like today. So, Richard Avedon didn't have to make Paris seem exotic - it truly was. There's a freshness to these photographs, a sparkle to the City of Light, that appeals to our jaded eyes. Not innocence exactly, more like an innocent view of experience that we can only see in retrospect.
Enough loitering in the past, where are the Avedons of today? The first place to look would be the Vogue and Harper's Bazaar magazines of today. (The former assuming pre-eminence after an exodus of stars - including Vreeland and Avedon - from the latter.) Look carefully, however, because you may not recognize them. With the exception of putting Blake Lively on the cover - something which, in my opinion, should be done all the time forever - they look rather, well, commercial. Lot of words, typefaces, colors and, occasionally, a banner across the entire affair called, appropriately, a "violator." It's easy for photograph to be overwhelmed, for fashion and style to get lost. Inside is the usual hash of demi-news and disguised marketing. (Thinly disguised, at best.) The fashions spreads show the usual twelve-year-old models, mugged by their hair and make-up stylists and left to strut against a colored backdrop. Clothes? Yes they're wearing clothes. One particularly edgy layout shows the backdrop itself. You can see that the models are in a photographer's studio. Edgy.
I realize that this comparison is unfair in several ways. We're taking the cream of twenty years work and comparing it with random issues of a magazine. I'm also aware, having worked in advertising, that pragmatic, marketing decisions must be made. And the pressures facing Vogue today are not the same as sixty years ago. Massive differences in style, though, overcome the differences in selection and presentation.
Style? What style? Thanks to Avedon and Harper's Bazaar, we know exactly what was considered stylish in the Forties and Fifties. We have a perfectly rendered set of fantasies that conveys it. What about now? What is stylish in 2010? Is urbanity still valued - even though our shrinking and interconnected world puts it, literally, at our fingertips. How about maturity? Has the Youth Culture, propped up by plastic surgeons and the cosmetics industry, slammed the door on adulthood - or are entitled Boomers trying to close the door on youth as they age? Do people still aspire to elegance and sophistication - or have fifty years of social advancement leveled the field until no one wants to play anymore? Have we been traveling in coach so long that all we can dream about is legroom? I hope not. Day-to-day life is not so rich that we can do without dreams. Life is not so full of good taste that "Jersey Shore" is a relief.
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