fashionologie

Cathy Horyn Posits: Is Fashion Turning to Sex to Amp Up an Otherwise Creatively "Dull Moment"?

fashionologie — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:05:33 PST

>> There's been a lot of talk recently about how boring red carpet fashion has gotten, but in the mind of Cathy Horyn, fashion in general is experiencing a lull in creativity. "For now, fashion has nothing significant to say," she writes. And Pascal Dangin, who retouches images for Patrick Demarchelier, Steven Meisel, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, as well as the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, agrees: “We live in a rather dull moment in fashion.”

It seems that in the time of "timid magazine editors" and "mediocre" content, as Horyn puts it, many - designers, stylists, photographers, editors - are turning to sex to make up the difference. Dangin points out: “We still have some big taboos about sex.” And Horyn writes: "It is easy to see why sexuality is such a hot button. Things are a bit frozen. Many of the designers who could truly communicate ideas - Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang, Alexander McQueen - are gone from the scene."

Thus, Horyn writes, we have the likes of Riccardo Tisci casting transgender model Lea T in his Givenchy campaigns. But even "the focus on sexuality reflects the fairly narrow thinking of designers and photographers (or, possibly, of editors and advertising agency art directors)" currently going on, she notes. Case in point: photographer Daniel Sannwald was told by a British magazine editor that his futuristic-like images were too extreme. "He quickly countered by producing some very old issues of Vogue," Horyn reports, "But those pictures were deemed too risky to use today." "It was unbelievable," Sannwald said. "Everybody is concerned about pleasing the advertisers, and it’s not just the big magazines.”

Fashion Magazines With Less Retouching: The Future or a Current Fad?

fashionologie — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:38:02 PDT

>> In the March 2008 issue of Vogue, premier retoucher of fashion photographs, Pascal Dangin, tweaked a total of 144 images, from ads to editorial spreads, and in The September Issue, which focuses on the making of Vogue's September 2007 issue, Anna Wintour definitely displays a reliance on retouching, asking Mario Testino to superimpose cover girl Sienna Miller's head from one shot onto her body in another shot, and requesting that a cameraman's gut from an editorial shot be diminished, to Grace Coddington's dismay: "Everybody isn't perfect in this world. It's enough that the models are perfect."

When digital manipulation programs first came into use in the early '90s, reports Eric Wilson for The New York Times, art directors originally used them to create a heightened sense of reality like images achieved through movie special effects - "hyper real" style, as former The Face art director and current Love creative director Lee Swillingham coined it - as a reaction against the images of supermodels that looked too perfect. Editors weren't suggesting the resulting look be attainable, Swillingham explains: “We were trying to create a future fashion. You could do something that looked gritty and real or something that looked like plastic.”

Now, some major photographers are pushing for less plastic, more real »

fashionologie — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:37:31 PDT

>> INSIDER WIRE —Fashion irony at its best. The go-to man for editorial, advertisement, and anything else that needs a little retouch, Pascal Dangin, has just been named one of Fortune's "Image Makers," and he comes off looking like a new-age Albert Einstein. At least the appearance implies genius . . . [Fortune]

fashionologie — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:12:51 PST

>> ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL -Lanvin's past ad campaigns have involved a lot of digital retouching - Olga Sherer floating in a baroque painting or set in repeat against a stark black background - the Fall 2008 campaign even making it into a New Yorker profile about fashion's retoucher Pascal Dangin. For Spring 2009, however, the brand has gone soft - literally. Soft lighting frames Iselin Steiro in Steven Meisel's lens, as she plays mirror-mirror in the first shot and this second addition. [Women Management Blog]