The Younger Photographers Shaping a New Period of Fashion Imagery

Whatever the period, trend images holds a mirror as much as the cultural second, reflecting the desires, wishes and anxieties of the society that produced it. It’s greater than a window into our fantasies; it performs an energetic half in forming them. Which is why it’s essential to research this highly effective medium and mirror on the messages it relays to us. “Even for people without an interest in fashion, their lives are intangibly shaped by fashion images,” says Violet Conroy, curator of Rethinking Fashion Image (and deputy editor of AnOthermag.com). “They are an inescapable, ubiquitous part of everyday modern life, shaping beauty standards, fashion trends, and broader visual culture.” 

Held at Lower Stable Street Lightboxes, a stone’s throw from the Central Saint Martins’ Kings Cross campus, Rethinking Fashion Image brings collectively work by 9 progressive photographers striving to interrogate and evolve the style picture. “Fashion imagery is fascinating because it’s not just about clothes. It’s about what people want, who they are, and the whole system behind it,” says Rino Qui, one of many photographers featured. 

The contributing artists – Kaine Harrys Anamalu, Coco Wu, Carina Kehlet Schou, Xueling Chen, Rino Qiu, Camille Lemoine, Maya-Aska Arai, Olivia Chen and Kaiwei Duan, and Lorane Hochstätter – are CSM college students and alumnae, every of whom has been chosen for his or her distinctive engagement with the style picture. “All of these photographers have created their own personal and highly unique visual worlds – no two are the same. Fashion is not the focus here; instead, it is merely a catalyst for play and visual experimentation,” Conroy says. “Themes explored include humans’ connection to nature, diasporic identity and community, relationships, evolving notions of femininity, and the everyday, with projects captured across the world from Scotland to Shanghai, London to Milan, and beyond.” 

Geographically and thematically, the scope of the present is huge, however there are particular echoes within the guiding rules behind every artist’s differing observe and preoccupations. “These photographers are interested in real people and real places,” Conroy provides. “They have a very personal connection to their subjects, which feels at odds with much of the aspirational and highly staged fashion imagery we see today.” 

Taking inspiration from the documentary fashion that emerged within the Nineteen Eighties within the work of Corinne Day, Wolfgang Tillmans and different photographers pioneering a brand new anti-glamorous strategy to the medium, Coco Wu is a casting agent and photographer who street-casts her topics, choosing them for his or her unconventional, awkward magnificence. Meanwhile, Rino Qui’s “meticulously framed, epic tableaux” resist the parable of easy, pristine magnificence that so many trend pictures aspire to conjure. Instead, his work depicts the off-camera elements of a photograph shoot, revealing the hidden mechanisms and invisible labour that go into producing the polished imagery we’re used to seeing. 

“Fashion imagery is fascinating because it’s not just about clothes. It’s about what people want, who they are, and the whole system behind it” – Rino Qui

“I’m interested in moving beyond fashion’s fantastical elements by turning my focus to fashion’s margins: the workers, the downtime, and the infrastructures that support it. I’m drawn to the in-between moments,” Qui tells AnOther. “My images push back against the notion that fashion imagery must be a flawless fantasy or impose inappropriate glorification on people without their own voice, thus reducing them to spectacles.”

Olivia Chen additionally shoots actual individuals in her staged pictures of second-generation Chinese youth from Wenzhounese households in Prato, Italy. Moving away from the pristine trend picture with skilled fashions, Chen’s portraits recreate a extra documentary-like aesthetic, with a sense of authenticity. 

Authenticity is a tenet within the work of Scottish-based photographer Camille Lemoine (though there’s a contact of the magical about her realism). “Her work feels deeply spiritual and has more in common with the land art genre, and with Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, than with fashion photography as we understand it. It’s about the body, nature, and creating a soulful connection with the earth,” says Conroy. 

Lemoine shoots her trend pictures within the bleakly lovely rural landscapes of her house – usually utilizing family and friends to mannequin clothes comprised of heather, eggshells, feathers and different mystical-seeming supplies gathered from the land, all set towards a backdrop of what she describes because the “fluctuant weather, the behaviour of light, the repetitiveness of scenery, the subtle changes of season”. “I’m interested in telling personal stories and working with objects and locations I already have a relationship with,” she explains. “Clothes are rarely the main focus of my images. I am more interested in telling a personal story and using this to contribute to wider conversations within visual culture.”

Elsewhere within the present, photographer Maya-Aska Arai additionally appears to the British countryside, exploring perceptions of place and identification and redressing the absence of portraits of individuals of color in rural British landscapes. Kaine Harrys Anamalu, an Italian-Nigerian photographer, is forging a brand new imaginative and prescient for representations of the Black physique throughout the Italian cultural and aesthetic creativeness.

Reflecting on his hopes for the way forward for the business, Qui says, “I hope fashion photography can move beyond relying solely on one definition of beauty and aspiration. I envision a future where such imagery embraces greater pluralism, stays more connected to real contexts, and places far less emphasis on perfection and hype.” 

As a physique of labor, Rethinking Fashion Image is an invite to contemplate these concepts, and to ponder the expanded prospects of the medium: what can a trend picture be? What can it include? And who can it painting? Situated in a non-gallery house the place guests to the realm can encounter the present as they go, Conroy hopes it’s going to attain a broader, non-fashion viewers and spark an curiosity on this “rich visual world”. She says, “Fashion photography is often dismissed as frivolous or commercial, but it is where some of the most interesting artistic innovation and experimentation is happening in the visual arts. It cannot be underestimated.” 

Rethinking Fashion Image is on present at Lower Stable Street Lightboxes, Kings Cross, in London till 5 January 2026.