In many art circles, fashion photography doesn’t always get the respect it deserves. Plastered across billboards and printed in magazines, these images — of moisturized and windswept models, cradling $5,000 handbags on the beach, by the pool or atop a tenement building — are plainly commercial. Although they exist to sell you something, they can be insidious (and inescapable) reminders that a certain level of wealth or perfection will always be out of reach. “Fashion,” the American photographer Richard Avedon once said, “is about who you want to be, not who you are.” But despite their limitations, print editorials and brand campaigns are, for many, a portal into a new world, proposing fresh ideas about identity and beauty. They can also provoke: In 1992, a United Colors of Benetton ad featured a photo, originally published in a 1990 issue of Life magazine, of the AIDS activist David Kirby on his deathbed; in 2010, after Italian Vogue printed an oil-spill-themed fashion story shot by Steven Meisel, The Guardian would ask if the spread was “slick or crude.”
Choosing the 25 most influential fashion photographs of the past century is an impossible task. Partly, that’s because influence is hard to trace. Without knowing firsthand, one can’t really say whether Marc Jacobs’s 1993 grunge collection (the one that got him fired from Perry Ellis) was inspired by the work of Joseph Szabo, whose photographs in the 1970s captured the angst and glory of suburban adolescence; or whether today’s street-style photographers admire or even know about the midcentury American photographer Saul Leiter. There’s also the fact that some fine-art photographers have had a great deal of influence on fashion, even though they aren’t considered fashion photographers and wouldn’t refer to themselves as such. In general, fashion photography was defined broadly enough here to include the work of fine artists, street-style photographers, backstage and nightlife photographers and paparazzi. And it didn’t matter if an image was meant as a fashion photograph, so long as the picture later inspired a designer, collection or trend, or it changed how we might think about style.
