An Inside Look at the Seductive and Unsettling Backstage of Fashion Week
How I learned to love photographing the fashion industry's glittering event.
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Fashion Week presents a photographic conundrum. On the one hand, this ultimate sartorial pageant is bursting with visual opportunities, as it brings together some of the world’s most beautiful people, wearing some of the most interesting clothes, in some of the most extravagant spaces in New York, London, Paris and Milan. It’s the Aurora Borealis of the fashion industry — dazzling, exclusive and peak-picturesque. In reality, though, it’s one of the hardest events to photograph (if the intention is to do something outside the usual mold of a coffee-table book fashion image). People who have seen Aurora Borealis in photos and then witness it in person report being disappointed — it is never as bright or colorful to the naked eye as it is on long-exposure, Photoshop-tweaked images. When I was covering the maddening atmosphere backstage at my first runway show, I realized, much like those Northern Lights stargazers, that the seductive aesthetic of Fashion Week is a glossy illusion.
When New York magazine commissioned me to photograph Fashion Week in NYC and London in 2012, I was just starting out in the industry. I was giddy and nervous and spent a lot of time preparing (I wrote about that in Part 1). I knew next to nothing about fashion so l put myself through a mini-bootcamp, studying the world's top designers and models to catch up on the basics. You don't need to be an industry insider to photograph this event, but it does help to know who Anna Wintour is. Armed with bravado and my first issue of Vogue, I was ready to tackle the exclusive world of high fashion. And yet, despite all my preparation, the reality of Fashion Week was nothing like I expected.
Here's what a fashion show looks like prior to its polished moment on the runway. The backstage areas are more cramped than the main stage at Coachella, with models, makeup and hair artists, stylists, videographers, photographers and PR people all elbowing their way through narrow passages. Everyone's individual job is impeded by this Hajj-like flow of bodies and the atmosphere varies from hurried to hostile. The overworked, sleep-deprived models are grumpy with everyone but especially with the image-hungry photographers (me included) who flash them in the face with enough frequency to trigger an epileptic seizure. PR people are uniformly stressed, trying to impose a semblance of order upon the ongoing pandemonium by constantly chasing away the photo mob (me included once again) — who sneak back the moment the flacks turn their backs.
To navigate the craziness backstage, I used an off-camera flash that can highlight the subject by throwing everything else into deep shadow. That creates a dramatic, theatrical effect while taming a messy environment. But it doesn't win you any friends. My stretched-out hand holding the flash has gotten in the way of countless other photographers who rewarded me with dirty looks and occasional curses. And I don't blame them. Photographers don't love one another to begin with, as each one literally stands in the other’s way, ruining what could have been that great image. Backstage fashion week is a cutthroat, claustrophobic high-fashion battle for survival.
The front-row area of Fashion Week presents another kind of mayhem. The dressed-to-the-nines attendees arrive in a reverse order of the seating hierarchy: The back-row guests rush in the moment doors are open, while the front-row royalty drifts in so late as to hold up the show itself. Photographers surround these latecomers like a swarm of locusts, until they are forcefully pulled back by the relentless PR. Being in the middle of that swarm is the closest I've ever come to experiencing a mosh pit.
It may sound like I am complaining, but I loved photographing inside the kaleidoscopic environment of Fashion Week. I am a photographer who thrives on chaos, getting an adrenalin rush whenever I get to dissect and organize such disorder into neat visual layers. The hardest part of it all is to make a unique image while being surrounded by dozens of other photographers with a similar setup photographing exactly the same thing. I had to articulate to myself what kind of story I wanted to tell and intentionally reduce the environment into precisely chosen moments. I focused on the spectacle of it all. The hectic, anxious preparations of the backstage. The pageantry of the front-row that rivals the air-brushed glamor of the show itself. The surveillance-style cameras and Instagramming that feed the audience's bottomless appetite to see and be seen. I wanted to include all the brute details that are usually omitted without turning the series into an exposé of the industry; I wanted the images to teeter between seduction and discomfort.
I ended up photographing Fashion Week for the next few years and it developed into a long-time personal project, Fashion Lust. It also became my big break in both the magazine and the art world. It became the basis of my first solo show at the Anastasia Gallery in NYC, and the series eventually won several awards and went on to be exhibited internationally. This proved to me that editorial work doesn't have to be separate from one's personal vision; they can feed one another and propel each other forward. I have since turned several assignments into long-time personal projects, like Where the Amish Vacation, which started out as a shoot for the New Yorker.
Photographing at Fashion Week has been excruciating at times but it's also been exhilarating, challenging and really, really fun. I came out of it a better photographer, and, after learning to sneak past the ruthless PR, a more fearless one. On top of it all, whereas before I didn't know who Mark Jacobs was, I can now tell his designs apart from Alex Wang’s or Jason Wu’s, which feels like a superpower. Mostly useless, of course, but satisfying, nevertheless.
Fashion Lust portfolio
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