Several years ago, following a decade spent thinking and writing about fashion photography, I found myself unable to find satisfaction in looking at it any more. It’s not that fashion photographs themselves are boring. Indeed, the past ten years have witnessed a kind of Renaissance in the genre: conventional definitions of beauty have expanded to include a wider range of body shapes and racialised subjects; photographers regularly cross over with painting, sculpture, illustration and installation art. Beneath the diversity, though, all I could see was an endless procession of variations on the same narrow range of themes, the same minor transgressions of aesthetic norms: symmetrical faces, proportional limbs, unlined skin. How could there be so much sameness in such variety?

‘On Boredom and Contemporary Fashion Photography’, in Fashion and Feeling: the Affective Politics of Dress.
Roberto Filippello and Ilya Parkins, eds.
Palgrave Macmillan 2023
Hardcover/Softcover, 337pp
ISBN 978-3-031-19099-5