English-style photography?
Text by Penny Martin
Additional Information
In May 1997, the Editor In Chief of American Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour, gave a presentation to the Women In Journalism meeting in London. Wintour, who had been Editor In Chief of British Vogue from 1986-7, had been asked to discuss the difference between magazines production in the United States and the United Kingdom. She suggested that 'market considerations on each side of the Atlantic have led to different systems', where English and American fashion editors approach the production of fashion images in different ways. Whereas in England, she said, fashion editors 'did everything except press the button on the camera', in the States, 'the opportunity for a creative or personal approach is relatively limited' (Wintour 1997: 7).
What is interesting about Wintour's comparison of the British and American versions of Vogue is that she identified the production of fashion imagery, and particularly the role of the fashion editor, as key to unpacking the style and national identity of each magazine. Given her audience of journalists, it is understandable that she discussed the construction of fashion stories at American and English Vogue in terms of the working cultures at each publishing institution, the fashion journalists responsible for co-ordinating the shoots and the market viability of their contrasting strategies. 'The British fashion journalist often sees herself as an artist or a craftsman. Her work is very hands-on, she cares a lot about originality and less about readers or advertisersŠthe New York editor, on the other handŠworks in a tightly co-ordinated and organized system which leaves less scope for her individuality' (Wintour 1997: 7). The difference between English and American fashion photography, Wintour implied, lies in the level of autonomy delegated by magazine publishers to stylists to construct the content of the shoot. 'This somewhat corporate manner of fashion editing isn't due to any lack of creativity on the part of American editors', she said, 'rather, it's dictated by the enormous size of the American market' (Wintour 1997: 7).
From this notion that the bigger the magazine market and associated advertising revenue, the less room there is for experimental photography, it follows that editors at English magazines, with much smaller circulation and readership figures, permit greater levels of autonomy and creativity to fashion photographers. Yet, at no point during Wintour's presentation was it clarified exactly what was meant by creativity and experimentation in English magazines and how this ostensible freedom was manifested in the images they publish. By omitting any discussion of the images produced, Wintour failed to mention the crucial factor that separates the two national magazine systems: how the appearance of their product reflects the creative system that produces it.
One of the most influential conceptions of nationhood is Benedict Anderson's notion of the 'imagined community'. In his 1983 book Imagined Communities, Anderson argues that nations are bound together by shared mental images rather than actual experiences of nationhood and that the difference between each national community therefore lies in the way it is imagined. Whether representations of Englishness are accurate or genuine is therefore immaterial. Of crucial importance is the way these images are used discursively to inform our conception of ourselves and sense of national belonging.
According to Stuart Hall, 'we only know what it is to be 'English' because of the way 'Englishness' has come to be represented, as a set of meanings, by English national culture' (Hall 1992: 292). However, as Anna Wintour's comparison of American and English approaches to fashion photography suggests, the nation as a system of cultural representation competes with other discourses. In her analogy, Englishness competes against fashion photography and capitalism: both of which use their own representational strategies to win identification among target audiences, ultimately, to guarantee sales. In this sense, consumers of fashion imagery are equally an imagined community.
In this chapter, I will examine two specific moments during the second half of the twentieth century when the competing discourses of Englishness and fashion photography impacted upon each other: the 1950s and early 1960s and the 1990s; both periods when England was regarded as important in the production of fashion imagery. In recognition of the fact that London continues to dominate the production of British fashion imagery, and of the paucity of practitioners originating from Scotland, Wales, northern Ireland and even northern England, I will focus on English practitioners and centres of practice. Using Hall's question 'what are the representations ofŠ'England' which win the identifications and define the identities of 'English' people?' (Hall 1992: 293), I shall demonstrate how English fashion imagery has developed away from explicit references to recognizable symbols of England it its representation of Englishness. Nationalism in fashion photography, I will argue, exists not in the images themselves, but in the discursive ways they are used by the fashion publishing industry.
In the first section of the chapter, I will examine how the work of English fashion photographers, including Norman Parkinson and John Cowan, was used to sustain a sense of belonging and security by English centres of production including British Vogue and The Queen. In the latter section, I shall consider how a group of 'oppositional' practitioners, born out of new centres of production such as The Face and i-D magazines of the 1980s, subverted the traditional tropes of fashion photography and used a revised conception of reality to communicate themes of isolation and dislocation in their images of English life. Concentrating on the imagery of the English photographer Jason Evans (Travis) and the publication i-D, I will explore the impact of globalism on their practice, and how Englishness has been superseded by other imagined communities in recent British fashion publishing.
There is continuity in the English fashion photography reproduced over the past fifty years, created in part by the strict parameters of the commissioning brief. The key objective of publishing detailed images of models wearing fashionable garments has remained central to the economic health of women's fashion magazines since they were first able to reproduce photographs using the halftone printing process introduced in the 1890s. As the magazine historian Brian Braithwaite and sociologist Ellen McCracken have observed, few magazines make a profit from their cover prices alone and therefore rely heavily on advertising revenue (Braithwaite 1988: 30; McCracken 1992: 14). The sale of advertising space is based on tacit, reciprocal agreements that, in addition to publishing a company's explicit adverts, editors will include covert advertisements -recognizable representations of the company's merchandise- in their editorial photography (McCracken 1992: 38-9). Not only does this requirement restrict the fashion photographer's choice of garments, accessories and cosmetics, in most cases this expectation shapes the narrative of advertising and editorial photography by pressurising photographers to represent merchandise in an unequivocally positive light, free from ambiguity or social comment. However, as I will argue, fashion photography's engagement with issue-based aesthetics in the 1990s revisited opportunities for provocative and expressive work suggested in British photography of the late 1950s, both in recent editorial work and also in strictly controlled advertising campaigns such as those for Calvin Klein. In a highly circular system of production, ostensibly ‘anti-fashion’ photography was used by the fashion industry as a currency to promote the very fashion industry photographers sought to critique in these fashion images. As Anna Wintour's account of the industry suggests, innovations in fashion photography must be therefore read in relation to the narrow space permitted for interpretation and individuality by commercial determinants outside the magazines themselves.
This sense of continuity and repetition in fashion photography has parity with the representation of Englishness, which Stuart Hall asserts, is 'told and retold in national histories, literatures, the media and popular culture. These provide a set of stories, images, landscapes, scenarios, historical events, national symbols and rituals which stand for, or represent, the shared experiencesŠwhich give meaning to the nation' (Hall 1992: 293). Photography has an especially powerful role in this discourse because it creates the mental images that are held in England's collective imagination. As the photohistorian John Taylor argues, continuity in the representation of Englishness 'centres on the idea of a stable England, despite all the evidence pointing towards the idea that the nation is fractured and potentially unstable. At the same time, even the imagined stability of the country cannot be taken for granted, and has to be remade constantly' (Taylor 1994: 5).
Figure 1
Figure 1, an image by Norman Parkinson from the ‘Quality and England’ fashion story by Raymond Mortimer in the February 1951 issue of British Vogue, illustrates the tension created when the discourses of fashion photography and Englishness meet (Mortimer: 54). Entitled "Well-Mannered Quality"; the image features Parkinson's wife, the model Wenda Parkinson, sitting in a pub near where the couple lived in Little Washbourne, Worcestershire. The narrative is constructed using a standard trope of the picturesque tradition: modernity juxtaposed with history, here symbolized by signifiers of rural England. The evidence of a simple, English, country life surrounds the model, from the hunting scene above her, the shove ha'penny game on the oak trestle table, the local 'rustic' in flat cap and boots, with whom she sits, to the pewter mug from which he drinks.
She too is styled to represent Englishness, dressed in the archetypal English leisurewear of the period; a twin-set designed by Women's Home Industries and a string of pearls. Yet her crisply set hair, her elegant pose, the smooth texture of her clothing and the whiteness of her skin are intended to set her apart from the man next to her, in terms of the class, period and the urban background from which she originates. Although the shove ha'penny game appears to be in play, there is no interaction between their bodies. The frontal composition of the image sets the figures in shallow space behind the table, accentuating the rigidity of her body. As the man raises his pint in a gesture of rural hospitality, she defiantly stares at the camera, as if to proclaim her urban sophistication. Possibly assigned by a copywriter or by Mortimer, the title of the image, "Well Mannered Quality", enforced this appearance of class difference, which was underscored by the caption text: ‘The scene: a village pub. The theme: poise, dignity, the respect of person for person and class for class’ (Mortimer: 54). A gentle, ‘respectable’ portrayal of two different visions of Englishness, the image conflates nostalgia for the past with a knowing appreciation of contemporary fashionability.
Parkinson took this image at the end of a decade of working for British Vogue, for which he created a body of work concerned with rural England. In 1949, he first visited New York and he would continue to make annual visits there throughout the 1950s, when the city was at the centre of the production of fashion photography. The photohistorian Martin Harrison locates a profound shift in Parkinson's treatment of Englishness during this period. Whereas during the 1940s, the photographer 'identified a specifically English pastoral, the offshoot of 1930s neo-romanticism, a yearning for the rural idyll that the war had increased', Harrison contends that 'the American experienceŠ entailed the sacrifice of specifically English qualities which had informed his most individual work' (Harrison 1991: 197). Yet, in the catalogue that accompanied his retrospective exhibition Lifework (1983), Parkinson described how working in color in 1947 introduced an exciting new visual vocabulary whose appearance he associated with American fashion photography. 'I scanned the plush pages of American Vogue and Harper's; beautifully lit and reproduced full pagesŠin ‘glorious color' - such a lift to be enjoyed by contrast to drab London in the full grip of rationing' (Parkinson 1983: 54). Viewed from this perspective, rather than stripping his images of English sentimentality, Norman Parkinson's work in New York for Alexander Liberman, produced between 1949 and1952, demonstrated the photographer willingly distancing himself from his explicitly English, black and white imagery. In contrast, the vivid, often abstract, Modernist fashion photographs he produced for American Vogue celebrated the new color medium and the overtly commercial world in which he worked.
However, national identity was often an important feature of an international fashion photographer's professional reputation and Norman Parkinson exploited his Englishness to obtain commissions. Described as a 'mustachioed British dandy' by Michael Gross in his blockbuster exposé on modelling, Parkinson played to the stereotype of the eccentric, even colonial, English gentleman. 'At six feet five inches, topped by a Kashmiri bridal cap on a balding head', Gross stated that 'Parkinson dressed for excess in caftans and gold jewellery or a decades-old vanilla be-spoke suit made for him by the British tailor Tommy Nutter' (Gross 1995: 188).
In 1991, the photohistorian Martin Harrison wrote that in Britain, 'before 1960 there were only two fashion photographers of more than moderate significance': Parkinson and Cecil Beaton (Harrison 1991: 198). This is an over-simplification. English practitioners such as Madame Yevonde, John French and Richard Dormer were also highly influential producers of fashion imagery during this period. Yet, as Harrison states, Bill Brandt was the only English photographer with an international profile (Harrison 1991: 198). This apparent lack of gifted English practitioners owed mainly to the scale of London's fashion publishing system, which was tiny in comparison with those in Paris and New York. Throughout the 1950s, the French and American systems provided the models and photographers for the majority of English shoots. London had only a few model agencies for photographers to choose from, none of which rivalled major firms such as Ford in New York or Dorian Leigh in Paris. British Vogue continued to supplement its images by English photographers with those imported from American and French Vogue throughout the 1950s, resistant to the new talent emerging in Britain.
In his 1998 book Young Meteors, Harrison modified his view on pre-1960s fashion photographers in his re-evaluation of the work of a group of young, British photographers working between 1957 and 1965, whom, in a reference to Jonathan Aitken’s 1967 book of the same title, Harrison calls the 'Young Meteors’. Grouping together practitioners including Don McCullin, Phillip Jones Griffiths, John Bulmer, Roger Mayne, Terence Donovan and David Bailey, Harrison re-contextualized a body of innovative work linked less by a common pictorial style or political agenda than the types of publications for which they were produced. 'The Meteors were interconnected' he contends, 'as colleagues seeking assignments within a specific sector of magazine culture' (Harrison 1998: 7).
Following the closure of Picture Post in 1957 and prior to the launch of The Sunday Times color section in 1962, the Meteors sought commissions from newspapers including the Daily Express, Daily Mail and The Observer and fashion magazines such as The Queen, Town and British Vogue (Harrison 1998: 52). Newspapers and Jocelyn Stevens's revamped Queen magazine were a more natural setting for the Meteors' issue-based work than traditional fashion magazines such as Vogue (Harrison 1998: 52-6). The writer describes how Vogue required direction from these photographers when attempting to document youth trends and quotes the photographer Roger Mayne explaining how in 1959, he dissuaded the magazine from covering outmoded fashions. 'They had originally suggested an essay on Teddy Boys, but it was explained to them that Teenagers were the latest thing' (Harrison 1998: 37). In this sense, it was the Meteors' access to and connection with youth culture, rather than the visual appearance of their imagery, that made them valuable to mainstream fashion publishing.
The launch of the Observer Magazine and Weekend Telegraph Magazine in 1964 marked these newspapers' attempt to capitalize on the potential profits offered by full-color advertising printed in fashion magazines. This created a debate about the increasing similarity and physical proximity of advertising and editorial photography which forced a chasm between photographers engaged in reportage or advertising. The former group of practitioners, to which most of the Meteors belonged, Harrison refers to as 'photojournalists'. The latter, specifically David Bailey and Terence Donovan who went on to specialize in fashion photography, he terms 'the style photographers' (Harrison 1998: 7).
Harrison claims that these distinctions were irrelevant to the photographers. However, by disassociating photojournalism from style and fashion, the Meteors crucial role in integrating youth culture and street fashions into mainstream fashion in the late 1950s and early 1960s has been denied, and the 'style photographers' David Bailey and Terence Donovan have consequently been credited with pioneering the entire transition (Harrison 1998: 7). The perpetuation of this distinction in photohistory has contested the continued use of the Meteors' often confrontational, issue-based subject matter: particularly in the work published in punk and subcultural magazines introduced at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s.
In addition, this categorisation has profoundly affected the historiography of this period of fashion photography, creating the belief that Britain produced no significant fashion photographers before Bailey and Donovan. Crucially, it has led to the narrow definition of fashion photography articulated by Nancy Newhall-Duncan in the first book devoted solely to the field, The History of Fashion Photography (1979).
The fashion photograph's primary concern with the style of dress rather than the sitter or the setting is what distinguishes it from other types of photographyŠthe success of a fashion photograph depends not only on the desirability of the clothing but on our willingness to believe in and identify with the subject. Once workaday reality intrudes, the potency of the idealization is lessened (Newhall-Duncan 1979: 9-10).
One of the photographers who successfully incorporated the ‘workaday’ sensibilities of reportage photography into normative fashion imagery was John Cowan. As Englishness became a fashionable system of idealisation during the first half of the 1960s, Cowan was able to depict everyday English settings and use ordinary London girls as models because they were recognizable elements of English national culture. Regarding photography as a social passport, Cowan taught himself to use a camera to gain entry into the world of society photography. He personified what Newhall-Duncan termed the 'photographer-hero' of the 1960s, quickly cultivating a reputation among fashion editors as a daredevil, with a penchant for exotic clothing, women and fast cars. Cowan incorporated these interests into the content and style of his imagery, which centred on the portrayal of ‘daring’ young women in urban England.
Figure 2
In his first substantial magazine feature for The Queen in 1962, titled "Monumental ideas about dressing", Cowan used statues and monuments, the symbols that Stuart Hall argues give meaning to nationhood, to create a self-consciously English narrative (Hall 1992: 293). Not only did England provide the setting, in this image of his girlfriend Jill Kennington posing next to a statue of a dragon and a shield bearing the St. George's cross in a London street (Figure 2), Englishness was enlisted in what was fashionable. Combining Parkinson's juxtaposition of history with modernity and the Meteors' graphic compositions and vigorous use of space, Cowan injected the standard conventions of fashion photography with a level of dynamism that almost detracted from the garments rendered. Though Cowan's charm and passion endeared him to The Queen's editor Beatrix Miller, she said she 'wouldn't call him a fashion photographer, though he photographed clothes and girls. Fashion was secondary' (Garner 1999: 12).
The belief that photographic experimentation was damaging the representation of fashion was voiced by an article published in Time magazine in 1964 that claimed fashion design was 'being downgraded to mere props for far-out fashion photography' (Newhall-Duncan 1979: 180). Cowan's interest in capturing arresting shots of the body in motion at the expense of close-up details of clothing meant that he earned few magazine commissions. Like the Meteors, the majority of Cowan's images were published in newspapers, whose editors appreciated the graphic, dramatic qualities of his work. However, his inability to develop beyond this approach caused the demise of his own career. As the sensibilities of English fashion design shifted from the crisp, linear shapes, towards a softer appearance with a focus on exotic fabrics after 1966, Cowan's images of dynamic girls in motion no longer looked contemporary. In spite of attempts to crossover into the American market with a series of commissions for Diana Vreeland at American Vogue, his literal interpretation of nationhood and what might be regarded as a specifically English approach, tied him to a specific period when the discourses of Englishness and fashion photography overlapped but had now shifted apart.
To return to Stuart Hall's question, what were the strategies of representing nationhood that won the identifications of English people in the fashion imagery produced between the publication of "Well Mannered Quality" in 1951 and "Monumental Ideas About Dressing" in 1962? As the representation of Englishness became increasingly literal, London's place at the centre of fashion design and photography was galvanized by the self-reflexive imagery it produced. Englishness became enlisted in what was fashionable and, conversely, fashion photography was enlisted in what England meant. This was successful in sustaining a sense of belonging among the imagined community who consumed fashion imagery for this brief moment. However, as I have argued, the identity of all imagined communities is in a constant state of revision. In the late 1960s, the competing discourse of fashion dictated that England was no longer part of its system of cultural representation and its identification with the discourse of Englishness was temporarily lost.
Fashion photography abandoned Englishness as a visual style, composed of graphic symbols of specific English places or particular English women. When the two discourses did impact upon each other again in the early 1980s, Englishness was not represented as an inclusive community but a political ideology; an socio-economic disaster against which new models of fashionability could be constructed. In the final section of this chapter, I shall look at the different models of fashionability created when this break in the continuity of Englishness became a prominent subject of British fashion photography.
Newhall-Duncan suggests that fashion's shift away from London caused the death of English fashion photography. 'Ironically Britain, which had given birth to and nurtured the whole illusion (of the photographer-hero), produced no further fashion photographers of note' (Newhall-Duncan 1979: 183). Certainly, in the 1970s, fashion's focus fixed on a new group of European practitioners including Guy Bourdin, Hans Feurer and Helmut Newton, whose highly sexualized and provocative images were published in the editorial and advertising pages of magazines including Vogue and Harper's & Queen. The key fashion publication of this period was Paris Vogue. However, this conception of fashionability shifting from one city to another oversimplifies the dynamic between practitioners and publications and belies the fact that several British photographers made equally innovative imagery for British publications.
A few English practitioners continued to work for British Vogue during the 1970s, and in collaboration with the magazine's Art Director Terry Jones, David Bailey in particular produced some of the most vibrant and vigorously constructed images of his career. Vogue thrived under Jones's creative direction, but the designer began to feel constrained by the repetitive nature of mainstream fashion magazine production (Jones 2000). Not only did the photographic image need to fulfil the strict brief to depict fashionable clothes in a positive and identifiable manner, there were also apparently arbitrary industry rules governing the presentation of the text and images.
In his final two years at Vogue, Jones tried to publish two cover images that apparently contradicted the received view on the colors that would guarantee high cover sales. The first was an image of a mouth biting into green jelly by Willie Christie that Jones published on the cover of the February 1977 issue, despite protestations from Vogue's European Marketing Director, Daniel Salem, that a green cover would not sell well. Jones wrote in his retrospective book Catching The Moment (1997) that although 'it's sales folklore that green doesn't sell', when the publishers finally published the issue, it 'confounded the sceptics: the issue was a great commercial success!' (Jones 1997: 10).
In some instances, Jones was forced to revise the appearance of his covers. Explaining why he chose to leave Vogue, Jones wrote that a key motivation was his disappointment with the Diamond Jubilee issue of October 1976. 'I wanted to turn the cover into a window, so I asked for an engraving of the word Vogue to be made in glassŠunfortunately one of the head men at Condé Nast Europe had other ideasŠit is magazine folklore that if you have a red cover you get better sales' (Jones 1997: 9-10). Salem insisted that the cover was published in red and according to Jones, 'the subtlety of the idea was lost' (Jones 1997: 9-10).
It was this knowledge that working in mainstream fashion publishing caused him such creative frustration that inspired Jones to set up i-D, a revolutionary cross between a fanzine and a fashion magazine. Launched in August 1980, the same year as both The Face and Blitz, Jones admits i-D was a conscious attack on mainstream fashion publishing. 'I had joked about infiltrating the fashion industry's commercial image three years beforeŠsomehow over the years of publishing i-D, 'the school of i-D' has invaded the mainstream' (Jones 1997: 46). Jones's use of the term 'school' to describe the culture at i-D is significant, not only because it indicates the magazine's crucial role in nurturing young English photographers, designers, stylists, hair and make-up artists and fashion writers, but also because it implies his own role as pedagogue in this collective. Jones encouraged the photographers he worked with to challenge the fashion industry's reverence for the photographic print by inverting, cropping or covering it with illustrations or text. The fashion photographer Nick Knight described Jones's irreverent treatment of the fashion photograph as more of an ideology than a technique: 'Terry's attitude to photography was against everything I had learnt. He taught me not to be preciousŠphotographers look at the craft rather than the content of the picture, but he insists that human energy is the most important thing a picture can have, not the colour range, or the quality of the lighting' (Jones 1997: 46-50).
Together with the photographer Steve Johnson, Jones pioneered i-D's signature portrait technique that they called the 'straight up', for which people would be stopped in the street and photographed against a wall, wearing their own clothes. The absence of seductive production techniques in these snapshot images distanced them from the photographs of glamorous, smiling models produced for mainstream fashion magazines during the 1980s by the 'plein air' school of photographers, including Patrick Demarchelier and Peter Lindbergh (Harrison 1991: 266). However, the straight up was modified slightly to include elements of the subject's surrounding environment after the first few issues of i-D, after Jones's longstanding friend and collaborator, the photographer Frank Horvat, criticized the approach's confrontational, 'mug-shot' appearance and its disempowerment of the subject (Jones 2000).
The struggle to incorporate everyday street fashion into fashion lay at the heart of i-D's agenda. This evoked the style photography of the Young Meteors and set it apart form its competitors, The Face and Blitz magazines, which were slightly more concerned with portraying celebrity, rather than ordinary lifestyles. The attempt by i-D to position an engagement with contemporary English culture, as lived by its readers, at the centre of their photographic production stimulated a new group of young practitioners to incorporate 'reality', as they perceived it, into their imagery. Their distinctive, often politicized, interpretation of real life led to their international recognition as a 'new' force in English fashion photography at the end of the 1980s.
Figure 3
If "Well Mannered Quality" represented the early 1950s conception of Englishness as specifically rural and Cowan's "Monumental Ideas About Dressing" the 1960s’ urban, the photographer Jason Evans (Travis) and stylist Simon Foxton conflated these sensibilities and situated them in England's suburbs to explore the 1990s black experience of nationhood. For this image from the 1991 shoot "Strictly" (Figure 3), Foxton dressed the young, black male model Edward Enninful in a riding jacket and plus twos from the luxury tailors Swaine & Adeney and a monocle on a chain: an outfit associated with an upper-class, country gentleman. In an ironic reference to eighteenth century, English landscape painting, the model is pictured in front of what appears to be his 'estate'. However, the modern house with a harled wall and mock-Tudor detail at the gate behind him also alludes to the man's suburban context and situation at the periphery of both urban and rural existence. As I have argued, the ability to recognize and repeat the signs of national culture is fundamental to the process of identification and participation in an imagined community. In this image, the signs of the dominant ethnic and class identity are subverted by projecting them onto the body of a black man to critique the assimilationist concept that cultural harmony can be achieved by cloaking difference in the signs of normative national culture. Instead of the gentle juxtaposition of dissonant elements achieved in Parkinson's nostalgic view of England, Jason Evans' representation of Englishness in the early 1990s is characterized by dislocation and ambiguity.
Although mainstream British fashion titles such as Vogue, Harpers & Queen and even the more journalism-centred British Elle and Marie Claire had resisted the hard-edged, confrontational aesthetics of style photography throughout the 1980s, the industry perceived this approach as conducive to the representation of contemporary fashion in the early 1990s. At the height of the recession in 1992-3, fashionable young designers including Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis, Anna Sui and Martin Margeila used styling techniques to promote their layered and distressed garments that were most closely associated with photographers and stylists working for The Face and i-D. In January 1993, Nicola Jeal wrote in The Times that consequently, 'a new breed of fashion photographers and stylists' including the models Kate Moss, Cecilia Chancellor, stylists Melanie Ward and Anna Cockburn and photographers Nigel Shafran, Glen Luchford, David Sims and Corinne Day, had built up 'a cult following in New York’ (Jeal 1993: 13).
The working partnerships and commissions that ensued signified that English photographers had returned to the centre of mainstream fashion, although their representational strategies had changed beyond all recognition. Any traces of a nation depicted in these images imagined it as alienating, ambiguous and potentially threatening in comparison with John Cowan's dynamic portrayal of 1960s London. It is significant that of all the photographers working for the style press, the appearance of Day and Sims' imagery appealed most to major American magazines like Vogue. These practitioners' admiration for the classic studio imagery of Richard Avedon inspired them to include the least possible information in their shoots, making it difficult to ascertain the precise national identity of the images or of their authors. Photographers like Jason Evans, who engaged with Englishness explicitly, in order to attack normative British fashion photography, were less desirable to the mainstream international market. Englishness was, therefore, no longer a viable frame of reference for English fashion photographers, as the pressures of globalism forced them to seek alternative imagined communities with which to identify.
Terry Jones's notion of the fashion magazine as a collective offered one possible solution to this crisis of identity. In 1998, i-D Books published Family Future Positive, a book composed from invited visual interpretations of the concept of 'family' from i-D's regular contributors. The theme of the publication was based on the premise that i-D was a 'worldwi-De creative community' (i-D Books 1998: 5). This problematic use of the concept of family to bind a commercial community was reflected by the juxtaposition of biological ties (i-D Books 1998: 124-9), professional relationships (i-D Books 1998: 226-33) and philosophical statements about the 'family of man' (i-D Books 1998: 34). By implication, i-D's subscribers were included in the i-D family by purchasing the magazine. Like Englishness, in this global fashion context, family was suggested as an alternative imagined community, used discursively to sustain security and belonging among its consumers.
In conclusion, the essence of a national character of English fashion photography cannot be defined by a single visual style because the two main discourses upon which it depends are contingent on different forms of renewal. Whereas the culture of late capitalism makes it necessary for fashion to constantly attach itself to new discourses in order to inspire identification, Englishness relies upon its apparent continuity with its past for meaning. It is the way that fashion images are used in fashion publishing to inspire identification that determines the nature of the discourse of Englishness in fashion photography. In the 1950s and 1960s, fashion's emphasis on English design and London as a fashionable space created a desire for images that referenced Englishness explicitly, both in their content and style of construction. The notion of a harmonious England was alien to practitioners working for the style magazines in the mid 1980s to 1990s, who used the strategy of repeating familiar narratives, central to the representation of Englishness, to critique the discourse from within. However, their belief that their mundane locations and everyday recycled fashions meant that they reflected the 'reality' missing in mainstream fashion imagery belied the fact that their work was equally discursive. In this sense, one fashionable fabrication replaced another at the will of external, global forces. As national identity becomes eroded by cultural homogenisation, contemporary English fashion photographers seek out new communities, such as the 'family' constructed at i-D, to give meaning to their imagery.
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