Pop Art as the ultimate fashion campaign
“The emergence of a broader visual language has enabled a blurring of boundaries between editorial work, advertising and artistic expression within fashion photography.” Nathalie Herschdorfer, curator of The Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Beyond Fashion’ Exhibition. Showcasing more than 100 photographs by 48 photographers, ‘Beyond Fashion’ is an exhibit currently taking place at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The exhibition shows how fashion photography goes beyond being a mere selling tactic for the fashion industry and aims to tell the story of how fashion photography came to elevate itself into a form of contemporary art.
In an article published in Forbes Magazine on June 21st of this year by Nadja Sayej, titled ‘The Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Beyond Fashion’ Exhibition Proves To Be Pop Art’, she writes:
“This exhibit feels more of a contemporary snapshot of fashion photography, rather than clawing back to the roots of it, with photos by Horst P. Horst, let’s say, or American photographers Edward Steichen, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. Back in 2012, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Dundee location had an exhibition called Selling Dreams: 100 Years Of Fashion Photography, which showed how early fashion photographers paved the path for many of these photographers we see today. It truly was a revolutionary move a century ago.
This exhibition groups together the fashion photographers who have more of a pop art edge. All of their work is boldface in nature, attention-grabbing, and loud. It’s very 2024, and it’s very social media savvy. But, as we know, fashion photography can be quiet too, and Paolo Roversi is a great example of that.”
Pop art is engaging.
The post-war art movement referenced popular culture to create illustrations of the contemporary society, characterized by a rapid growth in consumerism.
Did the engaiging nature of pop-art accelerate this consumerism?
I would be the last to ‘credit’ pop-art in the rampant rise of capitalism, rather than factors such as globalization, economic prosperity, technological advances and mass media. Having said that, I would argue that pop-art is the ultimate genre for the modern fashion campaign. Campbell’s soup cans of the 60’s have given way to a new form of fashion advertising – a network of ever-changing and fragmented imagery of the social networks that forms the story of contemporary art in the modern fashion industry. Engaging art that is in the service of revenue, encouraging us to be engulfed by whatever it is it wants us to buy.