The Story

Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, August 2010

The fashion story is an unspoken institution. Pastoral scenes, city streets, hotels, private living rooms, all serve as backdrops to fantastic clothes on exceptional girls involved in unexplained events. Roland Barthes first suggested that the fashion photo is a calculated strategy. The photos create mystery without resolution. But that mystery is beauty itself and the photo is simply an enactment of real beauty. The places, clothes and girls in editorials and advertisements are real, as is their coming together.

Inez & Vinoodh, Fall 2010

The mystery in the fashion story, ("from where is this girl, and where is she going?") is what is most real. What is life but one unsolved mysterious event after another? This is the dictum of the postmodern era, when we are encouraged to have any view except the absolute or the linear. We live then just like editorials, in unexpected, disconnected but frequently beautiful events that seem to make no sense but somehow affirm life is worth living. And for those who retain unified meaning in this era, then the fashion story is a valid moment of truth. The photo, the very moment in which the photographer captures the light of truth, is a collision with beauty that affirms beauty as ceaseless.

Tom Ford Eyewear by Tom Ford