Fashions, like seasonal fruit, are best consumed fresh. The photographs which speed garments to the markets say less, these days, about the product than about imagined fates. They tell stories in which clothes will be tear-stained (or champagne or beer or blood-stained). They show how they will be stretched dancing or crushed on the grass - and how people who wear them might see out the day or see in the dawn. Or the clothes become the basis for abstractions, for images which extract the soul of the design and discard the character of the human prop. Although there are, still, ordinary fashion photographs, in which the frock or pair of jeans is mildly glamorised, pictures taken for the smartest fashion companies and the coolest magazines more often look, at first glance, like art or reportage. You have only a microsecond in which to make the reader's eye flicker, to stop her turning the page; the new kind of fashion picture's first job is to get your attention.

LRB 19 October 2000 | PDF Download