Introduction
The fashion magazine and the fashion photograph tend to be regarded by many historians and critics as ephemeral and exiguous forms of cultural production. Hence, in 1979 Nancy Hall-Duncan commented that, ‘Fashion photographs are ostensibly as transitory as last year's style or this month's magazine issue.’ 1 While in 1991 Eamonn Mc Cabe, picture editor of The Guardian, declared in somewhat parallel terms: ‘Fashion photography is like its models, nobody wants it for very long.’ 2 However, such statements tend to sound overly reductive, and although we all wear clothing or fashion on our bodies, as Roland Barthes has also argued, there are significant differences between how actual garments and representations of them are both produced and consumed. Indeed, the magazine is a prime motivator in helping us to assess the meaning of clothing, of determining what is in fashion and what is out. But more often than not, it does so by persuading us to overlook the mundane materiality and utility of the garments portrayed, and to ruminate instead on the symbolism of fashion: The study of the garment ‘represented’ (by image and text), i.e. the garment dealt with by the Fashion magazine, affords an immediate methodological advantage over the analysis of real clothing … ‘Real’ clothing is burdened with practical considerations (protection, modesty, adornment); these finalities disappear from ‘represented’ clothing, which no longer serves to protect, to cover, or to adorn, but at most to signify protection, modesty or adornment. 3

The role of fashion publishing can be seen to be an instrumental factor, therefore, in promoting seasonal changes in styles of clothing. Yet at the same time, it seeks to authorise certain looks and body shapes, predominantly a svelte, ectomorphic ideal for women and a muscle-bound, mesomorphic one for men, and in this way it can appear to be more conservative and predictable. As Grace Mirabella, the former editor of American Voguemaintains: ‘fi-nally, fi-nally the magazines dictate what's at the top. We don't design clothes, but we can be very selective in our reporting. The insistence by us on a certain ease and modernity has been decisive, and we try to resist moving away from that.’ 4

In short, it can be argued that fashion photography is not necessarily for people who want to know what clothes really look like, for example the fashion buyers of large stores and their customers. The catwalk, designer's studio and changing room perform this function, affording the opportunity for scrutinising garments on bodies in movement, or for trying them on, while simultaneously enhancing their appeal with atmospheric music and lighting. Certainly the fashion spread can be seen to share similar concerns to the display of garments in arenas such as these in so far as it also trades on ideas of fantasy and masquerade. But the representation of clothing does not offer exactly the same point of identification as clothing demonstrated on the catwalk, or displayed on a mannequin or model in the studio. Rather, much fashion photography beckons us into a world of unbridled fantasies by placing fashion and the body in any number of discursive contexts. Thus it would be myopic to argue that such imagery is innocent or without deeper ideological signification. Indeed, on many occasions fashion photography has either little or nothing to do with clothing, or else clothing itself seems to become an alibi for the representation of other contemporaneous issues and ideas. The shift to a neo-realist style of representation in 1993 by photographers like Corinne Day and Davide Sorrenti and the concomitant debate concerning their imputed celebration of heroin chic is an illuminating case in point. For such photographers the most important thing has been to portray the streetwise attitude of young people and the contempt many of them have for high fashion ( Figure 13 ). Sorrenti, for example, preferred to work with his own friends rather than with professional models, to represent

them in their own milieux rather than in the studio, and to leave every blemish they may have had untouched. In 1996 an image of his girlfriend James King, taken in her apartment and showing her cutting holes into her tights, caused a furore, earning him a reputation as the champion of drug addiction and sleaze. Although there are no real signs in the picture that King had been doing drugs, the battle lines nonetheless had been drawn. Following the untimely death of Sorrenti of a heroin overdose in February 1997, for example, President Clinton threw his weight behind those who claimed a correlation between recent developments in fashion photography and the incidence of drug abuse, expatiating: ‘Glorifying death is not good for any society.’ 5

Clearly, the expression of an attitude such as this bears witness to the fact that fashion photography can both make a profound impact on the social and cultural scene, and have the potential to make a lasting rather than fleeting impression on the consciousness of any individual. Moreover, as the arguments surrounding heroin chic demonstrate, nor does it always offer up an idealised or a desirable ‘image’ of who we want to be, or even of who we are. If we look beneath the surface of the fashion magazine, therefore, a whole cluster of more complex and serious issues emerge concerning the objectification of sex, gender, race and class, as well as the politics of consumption and pleasure. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way bodies are represented in various narrative contexts and situations. We need to ask, therefore, who are these images for? To what extent do they either offer self-contained, sexual or identificatory fantasies or are they symptomatic of the wider cultural issues of the society and time for which and in which they are produced? These points will be unpacked in more detail in the course of this study. But for the moment it is worth sketching in how they are crystallised in a pivotal spread called ‘Guys N Dolls’, photographed by Mark Lewis and styled by Finbar for the July/August (1988) issue of The Face. As we turn the pages we encounter an elaborate masquerade, based on an eclectic range of cinematic reference points and in which various typologies of femininity and masculinity unfold...