In the midst of a world where popular trend dictates visual policy, fabrics and image have ultimately become the decisive judgment and stereotypical link to a person’s soul and how it’s sold.  Fashion literal has replaced fashion in the broader metaphorical scope of how it relates to the sociological evolution from person to person and, ironically, when the pendulum of one swings, the other follows.  Beyond fashion’s ability to define gender, social status, and a figure within clothes, it’s lost its ability to be a catalyst for change.  Fashion isn’t just the fabric we wear, it’s the fabric we use to evolve – to open the door to new ideas, to persuade a closed mind to try on something different to open up and find a new way with which to cloth life.  Fashion needs to regain its ability to emote, and I’m not talking about clothes.  I’m talking about cultivating a culture which today’s Avedon, tommorow’s Balenciaga – the undiscovered Yves St. Laurent dreaming design, may flourish and nurture a new bond and for fine art, fashion and commerce.

Miraim-Webster defines “Fashion” as such:

1 a: the make or form of something barchaic : kind, sort

2 a: a distinctive or peculiar and often habitual manner or way < SPAN sour his after will,>fashion, tell you — Shakespeare> b: mode of action or operation < SPAN orderly an in>fashion>

3 a: a prevailing custom, usage, or style b (1): the prevailing style (as in dress) during a particular time (2): a garment in such a style < the SPAN latest wears>fashions> c: social standing or prominence especially as signalized by dress or conduct < SPAN of women and>fashion>

It’s odd that the above eerily echoes my internal mission statement for my work (see blog Visual Mission), but that is the idea, a continuous comment on a listless fashion: Fashion – using the definition of the word: fashion.  Am I trying to sell some Gucci floss? Some D&Gesus? Maybe some Ver-silly-uninspired-sace-shit?  Am I displaying haute-couture dresses made out of bread ala Jean Paul Gautier? Nah…just metaphorically finding life within a commercial realm that literally and figuratively have become a clusterfuck of morose, surrealistic images where models have become mannequin’s, fashion has been reduced to entitled fabric – where the photograph seems to only compliment the hair and make-up and countless hours of post-production; where artistry has dissolved into suds of repetitive creation, vapid facial expressions and backgrounds, snobby gestures of resource and little of substance.

(Now a repose from the overly-serious tone this artist’s statement has maintained up to this point).

The Make or Form of Something

The idea quite simply was to fashion something new…fine art can be as asinine and dramatic as contemporary fashion, so why not re-introduce the two, high-maintenance, drama queens to each other in an attempt to re-certify each’s creative license.  The added layer which is meant to be evoked are the formal qualities of expression and posture, the details which tell a story beyond the wardrobe or lack there of.  The idea is to persuade through art and to form social if not commercial change.  Can fashion be about anything other than the exterior elements on the model?

In my opinion, fashion was never about the clothes, it was about the attitude that wore them.

A Distinctive or Peculiar and often Habitual Manner or Way

Fashion implements social and cultural change because analogous to the mode of human evolution, what survives, stands out.  The fashion to survive is often the fashion which endures little opposition after its ascension.  Yet throughout history, fashion has faced some form of mutiny within itself for the nature of trend requires change…if even just for what we wear and far below how we conduct that code of creation.  Yet the habit contemporary trend has lead us to is one in which the changes in fashion are relegated to primitive substance (clothes) – the art that presents this substance (photography) seems to have flat lined.  When fashion photography’s guidelines became rules, when that medium dedicated itself to maintaining the standards of one another, the fashion underneath ceased to have a vessel for true change.  Every year commercial imagery seems to absorb into one lineage or status quo, similar to the corporate structure overarching the “safe” creative decisions passed down to the photographer.  True creation is shelved in favor of being “sellable”, which passes down to the aspiring fashion photographer, who stunts and desensitizes his or her aesthetic growth because Photoshop can create the perfect lie and enhance inexperience through technical wizardry – making her shoot look like the pros do.

Many photographers would argue with me…that the new realms of technology and the “inspired” leadership of many haute-couture and high end labels love the push the envelope of chic expression.  As costs go up the marketing demographic becomes smaller catering only to those who can afford – oft the aesthetically acute, but thematically retarded.  Who has the will to change the course?  The revolution has started with rash of start up “Indie” avant garde magazines aiming to bring back the original aesthetic of the medium.  I’m on board and/am want/willing to take the wheel.  Anything is marketable, it requires critical thought to sell change from the ground up through social and visual influence and fashion is the closest commercial photographic relative to fine art.  Most of all, it requires the time to roll up the sleeves and dig, to break ground…to find life…

A Prevailing Custom, Usage, or Style

Hidden beneath the visual context, wardrobe choices, even the models throughout the body of work, is a satire of custom and the attempt to assert style.  I want the viewers to feel obligated to relate, if nothing else to a composition of rejection, through the rocks, trees, pavement, graffiti, sea, forest and urban realities that access both our universal subconscious visual penchants.  By no means do I think I will inspire the current fashion hierarchy to accept my view, but I want it to be one voice in the process that can embalm the standard – allowing for the birth of an overall acceptance to a broader range of imagery and not an advertising structure solely adherent to marketing principles set forth, void of allowance for more than one monochromatic hue within a vast spectrum of visual potential.

To prevail, the fashion community must allow for a new style to reduce the medium to the taken photograph, free from constraint, and not the oppressed, produced expression…to emphasize the everyday beauty – flaw in skin, human emotion, reverie and desire.

In all honesty this body of work might as well blow…but regardless of what the verdict may be, it’s an attempt to try out a new light – a blind date with un-expectation.  It was spawned, if nothing else, so a future generation of innovators can continually know it’s okay to experiment with the persuasion of pop culture, to allow and emphasize photographs in a portfolio that don’t strike you like the bite of a cobra, but rather overwhelm you as the venom of depth informs and satisfies your soul over time.  We can create a prevailing custom sheltered from the contemporary laziness and desensitized critical minds beyond their attention’s deficit, and away from eyes equipped only to react to what they know looks like an Armani campaign.  I took a violent stab into the ground with my shovel in an attempt to rediscover the wealth of the never-ending treasure of originality.

It may be wholly ineffective as a gesture, but again, at least I took a stab.