How We View Women in Fashion Imagery
In our lecture today we were looking at how women are viewed in fashion imagery, are they made to look powerful or are they being objectified?
We started by looking at Nathalie Croquet who is a French fashion stylist who re created 11 iconic fashion advertisements using real women the images were shot by Daniel Schweizer, she highlights the fact that in the advertising industry every flaw is hidden, so in her work she used little photoshop, she recreated people like Kate Moss and Edie Campbell and found that the positions and situations that the models were placed into were both iconic and amusing. The images are uncannily like the original image but instead of seeing 'perfection' you see flaws like crows feet and smile lines. These images are made to inspire us to think about things like why we view things like smile lines and wrinkles as flaws, rather than just a natural part of ageing.
We also looked at the differences in posing between males and females, some of the poses that are deemed normal, or even charming and characteristic when pulled by women, can seem funny or strange if they are pulled by a man. There has been a huge debate in Sweden about American Apparel over sexualising their models when advertising their clothes a Swedish blogger Emelie Erikkson made headlines by juxtaposing poses in unisex AA clothing with the R-rated images of women, when they are often wearing the same item of clothing. Men are often shown in innocuous poses, often looking directly into the camera or smoking a cigarette where as women are posed in sexually explicit poses.
Another Swedish clothing company decided to do a photoshoot where men would pose in the same way that the female models did.
The first image shows how American Apparel portrays men wearing their shirt, it is a casual nonchalant image, where he smokes a cigarette on the balcony, when comparing this to the image below, this is the image of how American Apparel depicts women in their advertising, she is shown wearing the same shirt as the man in the pervious picture, but she is depicted to be seen crawling along the floor naked apart from the shirt that is covering her. It is confusing to see how different the two images are, the woman in the photo looks submissive compared to the man in the first photo, and she is shown on the floor which is often seen as unclean, and associated with lesser beings for example animals.
This is one of the images that the Swedish clothing company made, where a man is wearing the same shirt and posing in the same way as the woman in the image before, but this is seen as silly or almost humourous.
The thing to keep in mind when looking at images like this is that the problem is not that it is wrong for a woman attractive or sexy or that admiring beauty is shallow or immoral, its that males have power over women and thinking about power and sexual relations in the long run that will cause us all trouble.
In my opinion, I do not believe that sexualised images of women in the media are a problem, I think it is a great thing for women to be sexual beings and express their sexuality through fashion, I believe that we live in a male orientated society, and until this changes we are going to see these images of women as submissive or wrong. Most of the images in fashion are based on a stereotype, that men are strong and independent and that women are more approachable and playful, fashion plays up on these stereotypes, I believe it is wrong to show a woman looking masculine to make her look powerful, women are equally powerful being playful or loving, they do not need to conform to a masculine stereotype to qualify to be powerful. I think that our society is so exposed to everything that these images are no longer shocking or spark debate, they are now just deemed as normal.
Posing Exercise
After looking at how women were viewed in fashion imagery we re created fashion photographs in class. We did it to highlight how surreal it is to pose in such an unusual way. We had to work in turns being the photographer, director and model.
When I was posing as the model this made me feel incredibly uncomfortable, anxious and almost sick, it was literally my worst nightmare to do this. It was so unusual the amount of positions you needed to get into in order to achieve the shot, to make myself feel a bit more comfortable I posed in the photo with someone else, to get as close as the shot required you practically had to sit on the persons lap.
I much preferred directing the model however I felt very picky as I was constantly moving how they were and it made me feel bossy. My partners really enjoyed this task and especially liked posing for the photographs, if I was to do this again I would strictly want to be photographer/ stylist only, I would want to do the makeup and hair to match the photo and see how close I could get to the original image.
After this task I genuinely felt pushed so far out of my comfort zone and felt sick, I would definitely not like to do this task again, however I would like to because it would help me get over how self conscious I am and to stop being so stubborn.
Stampler L. (2013). How it Would Look if Men Posed the Same Way Female American Apparel Models Do . Available: http://www.businessinsider.com/if-men-posed-like-female-american-apparel-models-2013-5?IR=T. Last accessed Nov 4th 2015.
Stampler L. (2013). American Apparels 'Unisex' Ads Portray Men and Women Very Differently. Available: http://www.businessinsider.com/american-apparels-unisex-ads-2013-5?IR=T. Last accessed 4th Nov 2015.
Wyasaki J. (2015). If an Average Woman Modled for High Fashion Ads. Available: http://www.pleated-jeans.com/2015/08/05/if-average-woman-modeled-for-high-fashion-ads/. Last accessed 4th Nov 2015.
