Because a fashion photo is more than a pretty picture…
Dissected by Fashion Editor, Nicole Clinton.*
The cover of British Vogue’s May 2003 issue presents supermodel Kate Moss channelling music icon David Bowie with his signature lightning bolt face-paint digitally printed over her face. This cover is an example of the magazine’s regular utilisation of Kate’s ‘British-ness’ for displays of patriotism. The Nick Knight photograph demonstrates how a picture does not have to exhibit clothes to be saturated with style.
The visual displays a morphing of two iconic faces in British pop-culture whose influence inhabits the past and present simultaneously. Kate Moss could be described as perhaps THE British fashion icon of the last 25years while David Bowie is one of the most definitive and significant British music stars of the 20th Century. Although Bowie does not physically appear on the cover, his presence is boldly plastered across the image in the form of his trademark make-up. The cover image perfectly personifies a sublime amalgamation of music and fashion, an intent that can be located in the accompanying captions ‘Fashion’, ‘Music’ and ‘Art’. So if Kate represents fashion and Bowie represents music, then the art is where both subjects collide. Stage personas rely on fashion to produce an influential and unique ‘image’ to convey a creative vision that audible music fails to do alone.
The colour scheme of the image illustrates a striking clash of the black and white photographic picture of Kate’s stunning visage and the vibrant red, blue and orange tones of the face-paint.
The way in which Kate’s hair is scraped back in a rather masculine style adds a spice of androgyny to the cover photo, a point that reminds the viewer of both Bowie and Moss’ reputations for meandering into the territory of the opposite sex. Bowie’s bisexual exploits and his penchant for decorating his feminine features with extravagant make-up permitted his musical persona to cross gender boundaries, while Kate’s ultra-slim frame embodied the grunge era’s rejection of traditional femininity and promotion of androgynous dressing.
The captions further emphasise the issue’s objective in exhibiting an intersection between music and style. The description of the Moss feature, ‘Kate Moss in Vintage Bowie’, exudes this but also the inclusion of the term ‘vintage’ evokes the post-Millennium obsession with the fashion of the second half of the 20th century. Perhaps this fascination with ‘vintage’ symbolises a sense of sentimentality about a lost world where fashion trends seemed more definitive, a lamentation about these distinctive styles that characterised the era during which they emerged. Both Kate and Bowie’s personas were born in that now mythical world, where grunge and punk reigned respectively. The rather paradoxical fact is that the only memorable trend of Noughties fashion remains this preoccupation with vintage. Unfortunately, the other trends that have surfaced over the last decade were (and still are) easily and unnoticeably interchanged with the next bland instalment of staleness. Once the early Millennium’s one-sleeved tops and low-rise jeans were over, it becomes near impossible to pinpoint a trend that defines the Noughties and its citizens, hence the acquired fixation with the past’s style. If we are to stay with the theme of how fashion, music and art are interconnected, I suppose one could comment that the artistic side of both fashion and music is managing to generate originality when almost everything has already been done…
*This article was originally published in The UCC Express in September 2014 during my time as fashion editor.
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