Fashion photography underwent a drastic and irrevocable change in the 90s. Unsettlement, disquiet and an electric creativity amongst a select set of innovators produced some of the most progressive imagery the world had ever seen, changing the way we now view fashion.
From Corinne Day’s first images of the fifteen-year-old Kate Moss, to Wolfgang Tillmans’ spreads for i-D, Jason Evans and Simon Foxton’s Strictly series and Juergen Teller’s iconic image of Kristen McMenamy, Frankfurt’s MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst presents the motley crew behind fashion’s shake up. The generation who celebrated corporeality, abandoned the polished glossy fashion image and identified themselves on the side of the raw, real and unadulterated. Thriving on music, rebellion and subcultures, magazines like i-D and The Face along with the aforementioned photographers, plus Collier Schorr, Mark Borthwick, Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, Maria Cornejo and many more, made a big old dent on high fashion and established a new era of style, identity, individualism, and the culture of counter-culture.
The exhibition features legendary works from the usual suspects, as well as original copies of magazines, reproductions of photo-spreads, radical ad campaigns from Jil Sander and Yohji Yamamoto, and works by influential artists such as Larry Clark, Jock Sturges, Beat Streuli, Nobuyoshi Araki and Thomas Ruff. Curator Sophie von Olfers comments, “I wanted to emphasise just how large the range of cultural works, forms of artistic expression and positions were, in order to trace the social, cultural and political sensitivities of that era”. Incorporating some of the biggest names in the industry, Not in Fashion pins down the zeitgeist of the 90s; the writhing spirit and collective consciousness that caused the re-birth of fashion, in the image of rebellion.
Not in Fashion; Fashion and Photography in the 90s runs until 9 January 2011
