The Quiet Power of Corinne Day

On a summer day in 1990 at Camber Sands, a skinny girl laughed, running from the waves as she was caught between exhilaration and fear on black-and-white film. Too short, too skinny, too awkward. There was no promise of a modelling career. Yet, for future model Kate Moss and photographer Corinne Day, it marked the beginning of what was to come; they just didn't know it yet. Those images ended up landing in The Face and, with them, a new vision for the next century — spearheaded by Day’s own instinct to always trust the moment. If you ever needed proof of their relevance, take yourself down to the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition, opening this week, titled The Face Magazine: Culture Shift. You don't need more proof than that.

As the new millennium approached, anxiety and uncertainty loomed. The world was gripped by economic and moral decay — HIV and AIDS spread, civil wars raged in the Middle East, and ethnic tensions simmered in former colonial powers. The anxious elite placed bets and took risks, while rebellious young people found solace in protest music, underground scenes, and club culture, where social limits disappeared. This urge for release reflected a deeper fragility in the face of an uncertain future and a desire to dissolve into a world without boundaries — a desire that also drove Day to travel and explore after finishing school. She worked as a model mostly on catalogue shoots, and during her trip to Japan, she met Mark Szaszy, a self-taught, passionate filmmaker who introduced her to photography. Day began photographing her friends or models she met by chance on the street or in fast food chains, for the sake of fun and discovery. Every image emerged from an unfiltered, unplanned moment — an ethos synonymous with Day's now infamous aesthetic, characterised by her rejection of conventional glamour and no better illustrated than in the couple's Lo-Fi film for SHOWstudio, featuring both Day and Szaszy experimenting with music. A group of friends, a bottle of vodka, cigarettes, laughter, a camera rolling. There was no concept, no statement, no tomorrow, but something alive, messy and unafraid.

In 1993, Day captured Moss in lingerie from a sex shop in the model’s half-empty flat for the scandalous Underexposed shoot with British Vogue. Moss, with tired eyes after crying over a fight with her boyfriend, photographer Mario Sorrenti, is caught somewhere between hope and hopelessness, particularly in the portrait where she lies on the grey carpet, looking into the distance, weighted under sadness and longing to escape far beyond the white walls. As the photo revealed Moss’s vulnerability, the floor, once grey, seemed pearly, and her cheap underwear looked like delicate silk.

The Underexposed shoot sparked outrage. In the 1990s, fashion magazines were littered with floral perfume inserts, but these pages felt stained, like a beer-soaked carpet, heavy with cigarette smoke. The media accused Day of promoting child pornography, drug use, and anorexia, linking her to the 1990s heroin chic aesthetic — made distinctive for personifying 'pale, thin, and sleeplessness'. Journalist Laura Craik argued that while heroin chic would fade, drug problems would remain, while fashion theorist Rebecca Arnold saw the aesthetic as a reflection of the era’s body and identity anxieties. Day, however, wasn’t deliberately shaping a trend. She simply followed her instinct to capture the raw reality of these models' lives, away from what was 'hot' or not.

After three years in music and film, including backstage work on Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, (of which unseen footage has been compiled into a book which will be released this April) Day returned to fashion. Her subjects, once photographed in small flats, now drifted to abandoned houses filled with dusty antiques and worn parquet. Models who had once posed in shabby interiors now lounged on leather sofas and patterned carpets. They sprawled on the floor, sank into chairs, or lay on beds as if collapsing from dizziness, exhausted from movement. Others played with their dresses, turning expensive fabric into a trivial distraction.

Day’s focus on horizontal bodies challenged fashion’s traditional hierarchy, where models were expected to stand tall, engage the camera, and command attention. Instead, her models seemed immersed in their own worlds — eyes closed, drifting into sleep or daydreams, blissfully unaware of the camera's presence. This dreamlike atmosphere wasn’t just shaped by clothing and jewellery but by their detachment, their unfocused gazes rejecting the viewer’s expectations as they remained immersed in private reverie.

Instead of masking as an act of resistance against the 2000s onslaught of mass culture and consumerism, Day's near-melancholic aesthetic proposed a retreat into one's own world, and although many people refused to admit, it was the birth of something unequivocally new. It was a realisation of the model’s subjectivity, something only a female photographer could capture. Day’s vision revealed the essence of time in her era, a moment when new qualities emerged from a collective sorrow-filled pensiveness. To be unapologetically raw had always been seen as a weakness. Now it was considered beautiful - and beauty always meant power.

Day was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1996, and despite undergoing surgery somewhat successfully, the tumour returned in 2008. She died at the age of 45 in August 2010 after years of battling brain cancer. It would be cheap but true to say her influence lives on - lingering in the digital aesthetic popularised by today's youth. It would also be right and true to talk about Day's weight in the industry still, 16 years after her death. All you have to do is look at the unfiltered images of Michella Bredahl, whose work straddles documentary and fashion photography, including backstage imagery for Miu Miu S/S 25, a move that mirrors Day's A/W 94 campaign imagery for the brand. I can't say I remember it well, that was the year I was born; but It does feel like we’re back in a familiar time, only now everything moves faster, everything is charged with tension.

Information overwhelms — no longer uncontrollable, but weaponised. The world keeps cracking deeper with the European Union on the brink of collapse just as the U.S. and Russia are taking to deciding Ukraine’s fate, without the country so much as in the room. I look at the fragments of my own life, fractured by war, and realise it has never felt as fragile yet whole. I don’t just know Corinne Day’s photos — I’ve lived them. Flipping through Vogue, planning shoots with friends in dingy flats back home. Watching smoke coil in the first light of morning, knowing this time it was too much. Lying in a silk dress on a rough blanket, staring at the ceiling of my cramped London room. Holding onto fading memories of my past self, I keep coming back to her shoots for The Face. They don’t offer hope, but they capture something real — like the first pale sunlight after weeks of grey on a fresh and cold February morning. The shedding of old visions of a future that no longer holds, the quiet birth of something new. Disruption always breeds new forms, new aesthetics. But Day wasn't just your average disruptor. She was a pioneer who reinvented fashion by stripping it bare, encouraging the industry to start afresh.