Fashion and photography go hand in hand. Without photography, fashion would be fleeting, never captured for posterity. Without fashion, photography would be drab and mundane.
There’s a reason fashion photography is such a popular niche. What better subject is there?
The Beginning Of Fashion Photography
The earliest photograph including people was Louis Daguerre’s View of the Boulevard du Temple in 1838. But it was a long 18 years before true fashion photography strutted onto the scene.
The first instance of fashion photography — and fashion modelling — can be traced to 1856 when Adolphe Braun published a book of photography of a Tuscan noblewoman at the court of Napoleon III.
Unlike the more documentary form of photography, this new angle elevated real-life into something more; a higher concept purposely expressing the subject, their fashion, and what that all represented.
A new artform was born.
The Fashion Magazine
Fashion photography as we know it wasn’t truly unleashed until the early 1900s when printing technology evolved enough to allow fashion photographs to be used in magazines.
This sparked a creative war for this burgeoning new artform in the pages of American and French magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, La Mode Pratique, and Art et Decoration.
Fashion photography flourished in-house from this competition. Staff photographers like Edward Steichen, George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst and Cecil Beaton elevated fashion photography into the realm of fine art.
Fashion On The Screen
As the printed page transitioned to the screen, so did the medium and structure of fashion photography.
Now, more than ever, there’s a need for high quality and high quantity fashion photography for e-commerce stores, social media campaigns, and new perspectives.
Social media has also increased the speed of photography’s evolution. An immediate feedback loop, endless inspiration, and competition from around the globe. Not to mention everyone has a phone in their pocket, so everyone’s an aspiring photographer or at least a practiced critic.
Fashion has always straddled the cutting edge of visual mediums, driven by and driving innovation. The future of photography, fashion, and technology will be no exception.
What Fashion Photography Will Always Be About
On the surface, fashion photography is about documenting the clothing, but when two creative artforms collide, you get something much deeper.
It’s about evoking the emotional soul of the designer. Highlighting the interplay between human form and fabric. Letting the fashion speak for itself.
Just like fashion has a wide range of styles, fashion photography runs the gamut from highly polished to almost accidental. High-concept studio setups to stripped-down polaroids.
But one thing always remains at the core: the fashion.