Forget Video: The Fashion Photograph Still Has Plenty To Say

Almost a year ago, Marc Jacobs showed what I then described as the first post-Instagram fashion show. It was a live dance performance at the Park Avenue Armory, choreographed by Karole Armitage into a vibrant chaos. Crucially, it was impossible to take in exclusively through the Instagram photographs and videos posted by the attendees. You really did have to be there. The resulting runway images, messy and unfocused, seemed alive and artful. After spending so long courting the entire world, fashion seemed ready to turn back in on itself, speaking instead to small groups of connoisseurs and diehards who were as fluent in McQueen’s work in Givenchy and Jacobs’s at Vuitton as they were in those houses’ current output.

The pandemic replaced that introspection with a much larger existential question: what are all these designers doing at all? The runway is on pause, and in its stead a whole new medium has allegedly taken its place: video. Fashion designers have become content creators. Still, it’s been a year, and have we seen any truly great fashion films? Maybe Martine Rose’s digital high-rise in January featuring Drake hanging at the studio and Big Youth jamming out, or Marine Serre’s Amor Fati in the fall. But most films don’t quite resonate. I asked Steff Yotka, Vogue Runway’s fashion news editor, what she thought, and she told me, “Nick Knight has talked about how we’re in the nascent stages of fashion film—and even the beginnings of fashion photography. And as usual, he's totally right! As an industry, fashion has a tendency to get way ahead of itself, constantly running at the future while ignoring the present.” In other words, we aren’t quite ready for Hollywood.

<cite class="credit">Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten</cite>
Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten
<cite class="credit">Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten</cite>
Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten

That means something else is the predominant mode of our moment: the fashion photograph. The Dries Van Noten show that debuted on Wednesday convinced me of it. He did make a video—and a really excellent one, actually. At just under than seven minutes, it featured dancers and models grooving to Massive Attack with weird naturalness, turning the acts of falling, posing, and even taking off and putting on clothes into disturbing trancelike movements. Several of the dancers were from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas dance company (including De Keersmaeker herself), which is known for turning vernacular gestures into choreography. This dancing was like an aggressive, grunge voguing, or maybe a gnarlier interpretation of the moments between the big poses that voguing has made iconic. It felt like a video about photography, or made for it.

The accompanying lookbook is one of the most visually striking of the season—which is perhaps unexpected. Van Noten is in an interesting place. That’s true in part because he was one of the few people to really question the fashion system over the last year, but also, simply, because of his clothes. He has always been the king of prints, and now he’s pulled back, over the past two seasons, to something almost stark. But this show demonstrated the dynamism of the clothes and a clarity about where Van Noten stands: his clients, who have always thought like collectors, already have prints and jacquards and paisley velvets galore. Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself pulling out my exuberant neon and purple Dries coach’s blouson, and my sparkly black cherry blossom jacket with a mandarin collar, as instant mood boosters to wear over sweatpants and tees. What I want now is the right gabardine suit pants to wear with them—which is exactly what he’s now delivering.

<cite class="credit">Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten</cite>
Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten

The lookbook images, especially those featuring several men’s looks collaged together on one page, reminded me of Robert Longo’s Men In the Cities drawings, of professionally-attired yuppies captured mid-motion. (Are these professional people feeling battered and drained, or feeling newly liberated, or are they just hypnotic dancers vibing out?) In one particularly stunning segment of the Dries film, a male dancer tangoes with a sequin dress cradled in his arms. He was moving, but somehow he stays in your mind like a snapshot—like Longo’s work, the motion creates an image to linger over. (Of course, this is something menswear designers have known since pre-Instagram dinosaur times. Supreme and Palace have never done a fashion show, and have trained customers to pore over their lookbooks; two of last year’s best fashion “events,” from Aime Leon Dore and Fear of God, were also lookbook-based.)

<cite class="credit">Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten</cite>
Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten

I think there’s a bigger revolution happening around the fashion photograph—or fashion image-making—than we may think. “When so much content is a front-facing camera video,” Yotka said, “it can feel like a nice release to just sit with a silent, peaceful image.” (Or an unpeaceful one: the fracas around Juergen Teller’s W covers also shows that photography is alive and well—or, well, at least that everyone is alive to photography.) It’s notable that over the past year, editorial stylists like Ib Kamara and Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, and red carpet stylists like Law Roach and Jason Bolden, have elevated the concept of image-making itself to new relevance. In part, awards shows featuring celebrities at home means we get a new, auteur-driven kind of red-carpet photo. No one had to be there. This is the keepsake you get instead.

Which brings us back to Marc Jacobs. Was that post-Instagram show a portal to an alternate non-pandemic reality? Or maybe saw something we’re all just getting now: that a video is passive, but a photograph can get you to really look.

<cite class="credit">Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten</cite>
Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten
<cite class="credit">Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten</cite>
Courtesy of Casper Sejersen for Dries van Noten

Originally Appeared on GQ