FEATURE: REDIRECTING THE MALE GAZE: FASHION'S OBSESSION WITH CINDY SHERMAN
Towards the end of 1977 Cindy Sherman began shooting a body of work that would go on to define her career and set her on a trajectory to become one of the most important artists of her generation. Untitled Film Stills is comprised of 70 black and white photographs that depict Sherman as an array of female cinematic tropes. These women, embodied by Sherman in each image, were inspired by the female characters from 1950’s B-movies, European art-house cinema and ‘women’s weepies’ from Hollywood’s golden age. Each image suggests a narrative with Sherman portraying a character caught in a freeze frame from the film’s denouement. We as the viewer bring our own unique narratives to each image, based on our own experiences of cinema. The readings are limitless and highly personal; perhaps this is the key to Untitled Film Stills enduring legacy. More than 40 years after their inception the work continues to inspire visual artists from every discipline, fashion being no exception.
Jun Takahashi’s fascination with cinema has become a central part of Undercover’s aesthetic. Recent collections have riffed endlessly on the work of Stanley Kubrick and for Autumn Winter 2019 the women’s collection featured several images taken from Luca Guadagnino’s lacklustre remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 masterpiece Suspiria. For Undercover’s Spring Summer 2020 menswear collection Takahashi presented sleek tailoring looks emblazoned with some of Sherman’s most iconic film stills. Takahashi has used Sherman’s photography before; Undercover’s Spring Summer 2018 women’s collection featured Sherman’s work on everything from biker jackets to sweatshirts. But why has Takahashi revisited Sherman’s work again and why for menswear?
Undercover SS18
Sherman’s relationship with fashion is a complicated one. While the world of fashion has long fawned over Sherman that love hasn’t always been reciprocated. Before she began work on Untitled Film Stills Sherman produced a body of work entitled Cover Girl. In this series of 5 triptychs she mocked fashion magazines, in each triptych she slowly merges her face into the face of the magazine’s cover star, mocking their vacant or overtly sexualised expressions. Fashion magazines are a fertile source of female visual representation so it’s no surprise that Sherman found plenty of tropes here to dissect with her camera lens. Cover Girl is an early manifestation of Sherman’s love of appropriating of mass-media imagery and her first commentary on the world of fashion.
Cover Girl
Cover Girl was completed in 1975, the same year that feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey published her landmark essay Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, a psychoanalytical theory that demonstrated the way patriarchal society has structured narrative film form. Mulvey asserted that the cinematic gaze is by definition male. Female characters on the screen are seen through the male gaze, objectified by a masculine spectator. Cinema offers as its main pleasure scopophilia, the cinema audience are by definition voyeurs, as are the people in an art gallery or at a fashion show. Untitled Film Stills derails the male gaze by dissecting this voyeurism. Sherman, time and time again pulls the carpet out from under the female tropes of cinema. While each character is precisely crafted and exhibited it is Sherman’s presence in each image, which reveals the pretense of these tropes whilst simultaneously highlighting how these women are subjugated by the male gaze.
Untitled #122
In 1983 Sherman, for the first time, created work commissioned by the world of fashion. The first piece was for boutique owner and retail guru, Dianne Benson. Benson is famous for transforming the retail landscape of New York in the 1980’s by bringing avant-garde design to SoHo, eventually revitalising the entire area. A long-time Comme des Garçons devotee, Benson opened the first freestanding Comme des Garçons boutique in America, one which was designed by Rei Kawakubo herself. She once stated that Rei Kawakubo’s designs would “never go out of style, because they were never in style”. By the 1990’s Sherman and Kawakubo would be working together directly on a Comme des Garçons project entitled Post Card Series.
Benson employed local artists to shoot promotional materials for her store, ‘Dianne B’. Cindy Sherman’s now famous 1983 fashion series was originally conceived as an advertising project for Benson, who had previously been working with legendary portrait photographer Peter Hujar. The imagery Sherman shot ran in Interview magazine as an ad for Benson’s newly opened boutique. While Benson usually paid her artist friends $500 for their work she recalls Sherman waived the fee, opting instead to take clothes from the boutique as payment. It’s unclear if these clothes found their way into Sherman’s own wardrobe or were used for her art but Benson remembers her as a good customer at her boutique, evidence that Sherman was in fact interested in fashion, at least in a personal sense.
High art and fashion advertising are frequent bedfellows. In the mid 2000’s Marc Jacobs commissioned both Cindy Sherman and Juergen Teller to collaborate on a series of pictures for a Marc Jacobs advertising campaign. Here the pair dressed as awkward couples in clothes designed by Jacobs. The body of work was later published as a book, Ohne Titel, and marks Sherman’s first collaboration with another photographer. The images recall Sherman’s film stills in so far as her portrayal of female stereotypes and similarly dissects the notion of fashion advertising itself. Teller and Sherman make the clothes look as unappealing as possible. The images subvert what we usually see in fashion advertising by swapping young sexy models with Sherman and Teller in ill-fitting wigs staged in deliberately awkward poses. The entire project is a parody of fashion advertising, an exercise in subversion.
Ohne Titel
