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Snap decisions: How photography has shaped the history of fashion – and its future

Designers are often credited with fashion innovation, but image makers are equally influential. Danielle Meder offers an abridged history of the shifting dynamic between garments and those who capture them

Danielle Meder
Special to The Globe and Mail

This article was published more than 8 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

It might seem like fashion is designed by designers, but the history of fashion is told as much through images – illustration, photography and film – as the actual items of clothing themselves. "Fashion is quite a small community of people making aesthetic decisions," says photographer and 3D-innovator Alexander Porter, who also runs workshops on experimental portraiture at New York University. "They need to distinguish themselves from one another, so they are radically hungry for new aesthetics."

Fashion's main narrative during the first half of the 20th century was the changing silhouette. It's not a coincidence that, at the time, the primary sources of fashion news were newspapers like Le Monde and The New York Times. On black-and-white newsprint, a focus on the silhouette creates the highest-impact images. Christian Dior's great success wasn't so much based on making fashion as it was on making news; the dramatic "New Look" shape – minimized shoulders, slim waist, full skirt – from his groundbreaking 1947 collection played perfectly in print and was a public relations coup.

Developments in photography and printing in the 1960s sparked new possibilities on the page. Faster shutters and colour-saturated film encouraged more dynamic poses and a riot of patterns and prints. Models were styled in clothing they could move in and they were posed leaping out of magazines.

Cable TV and the popularity of shows like Fashion Television, Fashion File and CNN's Style with Elsa Klensch in the 1980s transformed the fashion image again. With lights and cameras focused on it, fashion maxed out on glamour. Models became super, hair bigger and clothes sexier. Exaggerated movements at the end of the catwalk courted MTV-style jump-cuts.

As digital cameras and Adobe Photoshop became industry standards, fashion's first truly digital aesthetic became defined by the pursuit for perfectionism. Glossy magazines like Vogue became even glossier to distinguish themselves from the low-resolution threat of the Internet. The result was a style of hyper-realism that quickly became sinister. The eye slides off these too-slick images and even casual observers started questioning their authenticity.

Runway hub Style.com, launched in 2000, played a key role in the movement towards the standardization of images. Having a collection featured on the site conferred status on a brand, but the slideshow format present on the site for each look demanded consistency. Designers corralled the photographers at the end of the runway to control how fashion shows were viewed. Models were cast to conform to a narrow physical ideal rather than for their personalities. Walks stopped being expressive and became about optimizing a model's appearance for the cameras (with heads jutting forward and shoulders thrown back, models look odd from the side but lithe head-on).

Social media changed everything, with Instragram and Tumblr each ushering in a distinct look. On the former, the initial filter options that could be applied to smartphone snaps were simulacra of analog film, with scratches, shadows and overexposure creating a nostalgic feeling. On the latter, where aesthetics like Seapunk (a jumble of pastel hues, nautical references and naively collaged emojis) have thrived, the more manipulated a photo looks, the better. "These pixelated things are not produced by the limitations of the machine," says artist and theorist James Bridle, who coined the term "The New Aesthetic" to refer to this unabashedly inauthentic look. "Hyper-reality is possible. It's drawing attention to the underlying processes that created them."

The next big thing is movement. As social platforms begin to support GIFs and Instagram's Boomerang app (a program that loops seconds of video into an endless feed of shoulder shuffling and eye twitching) gains popularity, it's not surprising that clothing is suddenly accented with fringe, fur and anything else that makes for a dynamic half-second clip. Drones also foster a fascination with dimension. Garments today are optimized to be seen in 360 degrees; that is, until the next technological innovation invades our screens – and closets.