Kate Moss and the Mavens of 1990s' Fashion Photography
written by dahli pestinger
At just 16, a then-undiscovered Kate Moss was photographed at a beach topless and makeup-free by Corrine Day for an editorial in The Face. As fate would have it, she became ‘the face’ of the 1990s.
Named the 3rd summer of love and taken in July 1991, Corrine Day illustrated her renowned style of unadorned rawness through the 8 photos. When compared to the previous decade, a mere 3 years ago, the photos compare extremely different- it was now apparent that faces like Cindy Crawford and Gia Carangi, once seen as the ideal beauty, were being replaced with a new look. The blown dried hair, extravagant make up and (arguably goudy) editorials of the 80’s we’re officially out.
Moss is seen wrinkling her face at the camera, her shoulders hunched and hair covering her face – the photos almost seem like something you’d take of your friends on a beach trip, and that’s precisely what Day wanted; ‘The best thing I did for fashion was bringing it down to earth, bringing a documentary quality to it.” Moss wears a mixture of high-end runway pieces and second-hand finds, including a cheesecloth top from the Portobello market.
The early 90s bought the fall of the Berlin wall, the recession and the introduction of the internet. In what could a coincidence or cultural alignment fashion took a turn to a more relatable, raw form as the world was becoming more unified. It was now evident that fashion wasn’t just for the extremely wealthy, curvy or perfect person – it was for everyone. Advertisements reflected this; speaking from a business mind, if someone were to see an ad for a piece of clothing, say a pair of jeans, and the model looked like them – only ever so slightly better, they would more be inclined to buy the jeans as they can imagine themselves in them.
Glen Luchford is a world famous British born photographer. He moved to London at the age of 15, working in hairdressing salon and taught himself photography. Luchford truly came to fame in the late 90s, working with high end labels such as Miu Miu and Prada in campaigns – however he maintained his gritty, street portraiture style seen in his earlier works with models like Moss. In the 1994 editorial City Slick for Harpers Bazaar, Kate moss is seen on the bustling streets of New York in glittery mini dresses and crop tops.
Luchford was in fact fired from Harpers Bazaar for this editorial as the editors deemed it “too inappropriate and tacky for the readers of HB”.
In contrast to the social media dominated world in which we live today, whereby most models are brought to fame by their successful or wealthy parents and kept afloat by their indispensable income funding their ever-changing facial features, most models of the 90’s were picked off the street no matter the background- as long as you had the charisma and pretty-enough face. The mismatched, scraggly, teenagers looking for a way to make money slowly evolved into the waif look – paired hand in hand time for the rise of grunge music in Seattle. Jurgen Teller, a usual suspect to the overly edited, traditional fashion editorials joined in this rising trend with his photo collection the Go-See’s. Go-sees, a term used regularly in the fashion world refers to the act of a model going out to meet with an agency, alike to an actor and their audition. Teller photographed the women at his agency door for over a year, illustrating their emotions and talents through the simple polaroids.
“The models in Go-Sees become much more than bearers of externally directed aesthetic values,” says Teller himself. Reflected in Day’s, Teller’s and Luchford’s photographs is the notion that models are not of perfection and are simply humans just like us, something we lack in most of the fashion world, especially in the current age with access to the highest forms of editing around.
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