The sharpest critique of fashion photography ever mounted was made with fashion photography's own equipment: between 1983 and 1984 Cindy Sherman shot two commissions for Interview magazine in which she styled herself in expensive designer clothes of the season — and then, through over-lighting, dated poses and exhausted expressions, let every artificial mechanic of the fashion image show its wiring. A second cycle in 1993 and 1994, made for publications including the British magazine Harper's and Queen, pushed the method further into the grotesque. Both cycles are documented in the Museum of Modern Art's 2012 retrospective of her work, where they read as dispatches from inside the machine.
Why would a fashion magazine hire its own critic?
Because the critique arrived in the shape of a job. In 1983 Interview — the magazine founded by Andy Warhol, whose pages lived on celebrity and style — commissioned Sherman, then known chiefly for the Untitled Film Stills, the sixty-nine photographs made between 1977 and 1980 in which she posed as heroines of imagined movies, to shoot fashion spreads. The arrangement worked precisely because Sherman refused to make the pictures flattering. Where the genre promises that clothes create the woman, her spreads showed the promise failing: models and the artist herself appeared in couture that fit the frame and not the fantasy, photographed with the flat, over-lit finish of a mail-order catalogue. The pictures ran as fashion pages, which is the irony that powers them — the critique was published by the industry it examined, with the industry's blessing.
What did Sherman actually change about the fashion picture?
Not the clothes — the confidence. Fashion photography rests on a contract: the camera persuades you that styling produces identity, that the right coat makes the person. Sherman spent her career demonstrating that identity is a costume anyway, assembled from clichés, and the fashion commissions simply applied her thesis to the source. In the 1983–84 Interview pictures, she plays types — the bored socialite, the unemployed actress, the woman in a power suit caught mid-thought — so that the expensive garment reads as evidence in a larger act of impersonation rather than as the point of the photograph. Critics discussing the series, including in the MoMA retrospective's materials, note the deliberate reliance on bad conventions: hard flash, awkward framing, the styling of a slightly out-of-date advertisement. The pictures neither celebrate nor condemn fashion; they simply remove its anesthesia.
How did the 1993–94 cycle differ?
Toward horror, and toward couture's own logic of decay. The second fashion cycle, shot for Harper's and Queen and other European titles, took the designer wardrobe into stranger territory: clowns, divas and eccentric aristocrats whose elaborate clothes sit on bodies that seem to be decomposing — bruised skin, smeared makeup, prosthetic imbalance. Where the first cycle parodied the page, the second parodied the aspiration itself, asking what a couture fantasy looks like when mortality is allowed into the frame. In her adjacent History Portraits of 1989–90, Sherman had already posed as old-master subjects with visible prostheses and false breasts; the 1993–94 fashion work applied the same logic to the genre's present tense. The result alienated some fashion editors and confirmed for the art world that Sherman's subject was never clothing but the manufactured self — the fashion photograph functioning, in her hands, as its own exhibit.
Did fashion learn anything from her?
What it could absorb, it absorbed into style. The deliberate awkwardness Sherman deployed — flat light, anti-glamour posture, the visible seams of artifice — surfaced through the 1990s and 2000s as a legitimate editorial look, a fashion of looking unfashionable, though the debt is diffuse and no single designer or photographer has been credibly identified as her direct follower in the way the magazines themselves sometimes imply. What could not be absorbed is the structural point: her pictures withhold the promise on which the genre trades, and a genre cannot publish its own withholding for long. The commissions therefore remain a category of one — fashion photography that the fashion system paid for and can never quite cite without losing the argument.
A practical note on method closes the file: Sherman shot the commissions with the industry's own production values — professional studios, stylists, the seasonal samples pulled from the same showrooms other photographers used — which is why the pictures read as pages rather than protest. She did not satirize fashion from the outside; she accepted every term of the commission and then, through expression alone, withheld the belief that makes the format work. That refusal, staged inside full compliance, is what keeps the cycles in the textbooks, and what separates them from every parody that has borrowed the gesture without paying for the season's samples.
Why do the commissions still matter?
Because they settled, at least within the photograph, a question fashion keeps re-asking: whether the image can be honest about its own manufacture. Sherman showed that it can — that a viewer can desire a garment and see the desire being constructed at the same time, the way a theatregoer enjoys the play knowing the sets are flat. The 2012 MoMA retrospective placed the fashion cycles in the direct line between the Film Stills and the society portraits of her later work, and the placement makes the claim visible: fashion, for Sherman, was never a subject to be escaped but the clearest available laboratory of the constructed self.
For more context, read The Potter Who Dresses the Country: Grayson Perry, Claire and the Argument of a Garment.
For more context, read keith haring pop shop.
For more context, read william morris patterns.