Cindy Sherman’s Fashion Pictures

Cindy Sherman’s Fashion pictures are not imitations of fashion photographs in the same way that other groups of work by her have mimicked or alluded to a pictorial or representational genre, such as the earlier Cover Girls or later History Portraits. I make this point because the images, presented as 14 large-scale artworks in an exhibition at Metro Pictures late in 1983, were commissioned and first seen as fashion advertising in Interview magazine in March, April and June of that year.¹

In any case, the notion of making fake or phony fashion photographs at this time would seem futile if one considers that in 1980s mainstream fashion imagery, fantasy, illusion, masquerade, performance and pretense are an entirely permissible, possibly an indispensable element of picture-making.

If one accepts this, a case could be made that while Sherman’s Fashion pictures do not look like fashion photographs of the ’80s, they do, however, operate comfortably within, indeed revel in, broad conventions of artifice and arrangement typical of studio fashion photography.

If Sherman’s pictures do not directly challenge the underlying mode of fashion photography, they do introduce a distinctly alternate typology of woman to that seen in 1980s fashion photography. Fashion advertising and editorial at that time was almost always made by men. While the representation of women existed on a spectrum of ideals – depending on the designer, the photographer, or where and how an image was to be used – one could describe prevalent physical qualities of the period such as: active, athletic, seductive, feminine, confident, vibrant, sleek and physically commanding.² The women of Sherman’s fashion pictures wear expensive designer garments but they conjure other descriptors: angry, dishevelled, strange, awkward, masculine, manic, uncomfortable, ridiculous, bored and disturbed. The disjuncture is most evident looking through the magazine itself and viewing Sherman’s photographs on a single or double page, formatted like any other advertisement³ and in proximity to mainstream fashion.

Presumably, that is precisely the point of Dianne Benson asking Sherman and other artists to make images; Benson not knowing exactly what she would get but knowing it would be a ‘Cindy Sherman’⁴ and a point of difference. Yet, depending on who it is coming across these images, this point of difference might be understood in various ways – critical, avant-garde, ugly, amusing or perhaps even just bad fashion photography.

Although reader response to the images may vary and the commissioned fashion context was new for Sherman, the method is, of course, premeditated with potential meaning, activated using strategies and tools in keeping with the artist’s preoccupations, themes and techniques up to this point. Most obviously, as in all her work, it is Sherman herself who acts as the model in each photograph. The use of make-up and wigs remains transformative, manifesting a range of subversive beauty ‘no-no’s’ such as stringy and tangled hair, deep set eyes with dark rings, smudged lipstick, dirty skin and pallor. Physical pose and gesture also continue as integral parts of picture-making. Here, Sherman’s attempts to replicate the codified physical shapes, poses and expressions of the fashion elite are pathetic and weird, made more so by the obliviousness of each model to their falling short of any kind of standard of desirability or beauty.

Whether the designers, whose clothes Sherman features, including Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, were themselves radical or offering a provocation is not accounted for. Any complicity or common ground with Sherman in her pictures is negated. ‘I cannot escape the fashionability of these clothes’, she wrote in June 1983. For example, in Untitled #131 Sherman is wearing an early jumpsuit version of Jean-Paul Gaultier’s conical bra and corset. The piece exaggerates and externalises women’s breasts, displaying and reclaiming for women what was conventionally hidden and reserved for the pleasure of others (men). Sherman poses hands clasped at her genitals in a red curly wig, more mumsy than Marilyn, in front of a cheap floral sheet clumsily approximating the backdrop of the fashion photographer’s studio. A decade later a similar design by Gaultier was made famous by Madonna as an emblem of her ‘Blond Ambition’ tour, reconciling sex, glamour and feminism in popular culture. Looking back from that defining moment of the ’90s, the ironic brilliance of Sherman poking in the nipple ends of the cone bra for the camera is both hilarious and anticipatory – Madonna wore the cone bra performing ‘Like a Virgin’ on the tour, sporting a blonde tousled ringlet bob (more Marilyn than Marilyn) and simulating sex on a bed onstage.

While I have described Sherman’s fashion pictures as both complicit and at odds with fashion photography of the ’80s, I would also suggest it is possible to locate them in proximity to punk subculture. Not that the particular motifs or lexicon of punk appear in the photographs, but rather through a kind of genetic link to the ethos of the movement. Sherman prompts herself to ‘attack clothes’ in her diary of January 1983; ‘Boys in clothes/Ugly girls’, she notes. Punks rejected the demands and definitions of establishment norms in appearance and demeanour. Through make-up, hairstyles and dress they challenged gender stereotypes and notions of beauty often by reference to confrontational sartorial gestures.⁵ Further, Sherman’s process of making her pictures alone, experimenting with hair and make-up and creating ways to wear garments not related to the intention of the designer is well outside the normal requirements of the fashion system and akin to a DIY punk practice.

Over subsequent decades, fashion editors and designers globally have continued to seek out Sherman for commissioned projects and Sherman has continued to accept them. Perhaps, as they saying goes, ‘they deserve each other’. Why this seemingly unlikely, possibly dysfunctional rapport has persisted is a good question. However, just like the question of what any particular photograph by Sherman may ultimately mean, it is not one I can answer.

Originally published in Cindy Sherman (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2019).