Postmortem Couture: Autopsy of the Fashion Editorial

The industry seduced me at a young age. I kept going back to Galliano’s Dior, the Macbethian apocalypse of McQueen, and the way Grace Coddington’s genius married Annie Leibovitz’s lens more often than was healthy. I was in love with the heavy, glossy pages, the witty paragraphs, the interchanging topics and pictures. I never once thought of relating to the model; no, I wanted to be her. The girl tainting the cigarette with her mauve lipstick as she leaned against a crumbling Grecian column, dressed in Balmain.

Helmut Newton, Saddle I (Paris, 1976) 

I recall feeling anxious that I wasn’t educated enough to catch the references to mythology, noir cinema, and art that Helmut Newton, Nick Knight, or Steven Meisel demanded you knew. This blend of erotica, satire, and politics - the Caravaggio-inspired photoshoots, the scattered Oscar Wilde quotes, the women lounging on a rooftop in bespoke Valentino - all tied together into a corset tighter than your moral compass.

Now, opening a fashion magazine comes with a deep sigh of exasperation. I maintain the notion that a fashion editorial, especially from a revered publication, should be like great art: memorable and capable of invoking emotions that aren’t boredom. But these days? It’s like squinting at yet another nepo-baby’s painfully forced art “installation” at some NYC or LA gallery - anemic, spilled, and no different than the repetitive debris clogging my FYP. So, what caused this editorial anorexia, and is there any way to bounce back from this panacea of mediocrity that’s been keenly adopted?

Who died and said that fashion (especially high editorial fashion) should be relatable to us, the readers? Over time, the taste-makers of the industry, and the consumers respectively, forgot that fashion in print is the bastion of high fantasy. And while I find nothing wrong with democratizing it, inclusion vastly differs from dilution. The collective delusion that vision and creativity are somehow elitist completely misunderstands its purpose. Seeing Natalia Vodianova in Atelier Versace and Viktor & Rolf as she portrayed Alice in Wonderland (Vogue US, 2003) was never meant to mirror me; only to possess me and magnify my imagination.

Kate Moss as “Scarlet Woman” by Javier Vallhonrat (Vogue Uk October 2013)

Now what we get and call styling would once be considered merchandising, with pages filled with “what you must buy this season” advertisements in neutral, beige colors and clear glosses. This obsession with making everything relatable can be blamed on a few things. First and foremost, the rise of social media gave wide access to BTS scenes and the magic of it all is well lost. Supermodels are also a narrative forgone; designers used to create entire collections based on their muses (Yves Saint Laurent and Betty Catroux, anyone?). But now, influencers and nepo-babies grace magazines, securing engagement rather than artistic iconography. Under capitalism’s tight reins, appealing to mass consumers sells more. Duh.

I could look past this next thing if it wasn’t a recurring theme: this never-ending era of soft femininity. Occasionally, having less glamorous or softer looks is natural, but as time progresses, a permanent shift toward docility and simplicity seems to loom over how women are represented. The mood is a vaguely chic woman (albeit a well-known internet figure) in silks, natural lighting, and a chignon. Again. “Scarlet Woman”, aka Kate Moss photographed by Javier Vallhonrat (Vogue UK, 2013), was meant to visualize Kate as a cultural hallucination; she’s mysterious, alluring, erotic, and defiant, empowering in her own provocation. Respectively, “Saddle I” clicked by Helmut Newton (Vogue Paris, 1976) depicted female eroticism, a cinematic noir voyeurism where the woman was not submissive to the male gaze but weaponized it. Womanhood was dangerous, deranged, sultry, political, mysterious, and evoking. Models were ready to put fire to the camera with simply how they stared down; like a tigress ready for attack.

Today, things are far more agreeable. Soft, demure, vanilla, dewy, constantly in a state of post-yoga glow, inevitably afraid to fall out of line. How come every trend, styling, and garment is meant to soothe and comfort? Why is femininity stripped of its bite? The women I know and/or grew up looking up to were not so compliant, nor averse to protesting or parodying what happened around them, even if that came in the form of modeling and photography. Would the unthreatening, matcha-dipping, 3-dot-concealer “girlboss” be caught dead in Steven Meisel’s “State of Emergency” (Vogue Italia, 2006) photoshoot today? I don’t think so.

But of course, there’s this big digital guillotine everyone’s so afraid of: cancel culture. Editors, PR and social media managers, and writers are walking on eggshells. Everyone who is active on any internet platform lives in fear of misinterpretation. And it makes sense as people love to occasionally blow things out of proportion. Undeniably, there have been incidents in the past that deservedly needed a call-out; think of Marc Jacobs’ SS 2017 show with white models sashaying down the runway in colorful dreadlocks. That’s a clear example of cultural appropriation. But being provocative and creative doesn’t need to equate to being offensive. Risk and complexity are what made fashion editorials interesting. This beige virtue and overly sterile, cautious aesthetic belongs in a church pamphlet. Sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek commentary, for fear of being taken literally, are either not attempted at all or dumbed down.

State of Emergency (Vogue Italia September 2006) by Steven Meisel 

I miss when stylists, photographers, and designers did not care for anyone’s opinion but their own. How boring all this has become is most offensive.

It’s heartbreaking that, in the most image-saturated era, the art of the editorial has become so forgettable. The fact that I’ll scroll through a campaign and ponder whether it might be AI-generated is exhausting and a threat to the industry itself. But I don’t want to be unfair to international or indie publications; amidst this fog, I find myself immersed in international Vogues like those of Singapore, Arabia, China, and Portugal. The mere cover of Singapore’s July issue made me stop in my tracks; there was none of that Hollywood-oriented, simple covers (ahem, Vogue US, I’m looking at you). Smaller publications really try to encapsulate what it means to have innovative art direction and cultural depth uneclipsed by the majority. Photographers like Campbell Addy and Tim Walker, designers like Daniel Roseberry (for Schiaparelli) or Olivier Rousteing (for Balmain), or even some Instagram editorials from underground magazines really showcase that the true auteurs of the industry have not yet vanished.

Where does this leave us?

Yes, the aforementioned exist, but they remain moments and not movements. Perhaps it’s even unfair to compare the decadent excess of the nineties and the surrealist chaos before it to today’s political climate. But fashion and artistry are meant to evolve, and what we’re doing in this graveyard of flat covers and algorithm-filled banality is evolving backward. My nostalgia is not rooted in glorifying the past; it’s just a request that the present do better.

This era’s muse may not be two-meter-legged models but the person reading this, tired of scrolling or paging through the same recycled, unimaginative content. Should this be a wake-up call for the reader to be more… demanding?

Because the editorial is not dead. Yet. It’s hanging on life support, having overdosed on spoon-fed mediocrity.

And no one seems in a rush to pull the plug.