Arts Admin Logo

Friday 26 September 2008

SHOWstudio: Fifteen Minutes of Fashion

Digital-fashion innovators SHOWstudio.com have produced a fascinating exploration of a side to London Fashion Week we don’t often see much of: the designers.

Portrait photographer Giles Price and curator Magda Keaney have collaborated with SHOWstudio, one of the world’s forerunners in new-media fashion, to exhibit a series of before-and-after portraits of British designers. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s famous citation that, in the future, everyone will have “fifteen minutes” of fame, Fifteen Minutes of Fashion enables us to see the designers’ faces five minutes before and after their catwalk show and consequently ponder the contrast so evident in them.

Unlike Warhol’s now cliché, however, these designer’s fifteen minutes of fame is a biannual occurrence, generally happening whilst the collective fashion-eye is wide open and scrutinising the catwalks of the world. Despite this scrutiny, the majority of people never get a chance to see the designer’s personal reactions to their show. Fortunately, these photographs give us that chance by shedding a private light on a relatively public moment. This is due to the implicit intimacy of the portraits, where Price has skilfully revealed a personal side to the designers, the overwhelming raw emotion such an event can bring about, without allowing us to forget they are in a room full of people.

The success of this project is evident in Keaney’s selected subjects, whose variety in age, gender and renown creates a perfect balance with Price’s superb spur-of-the-moment photography, providing viewers an alternate and intriguing aspect to the usual fashion week commentary.

It is this sort of project, where creatives put their talents into generating innovative ways of exploring and expanding our traditional media-models, which pushes fashion forward and challenges those who are reactive or ignorant to the exciting changes occurring in the industry.

To read about Giles Price, Magda Keaney, the Fifteen Minutes of Fashion project or SHOWstudio, visit http://showstudio.com/project/fifteenminutes

Photobucket

No comments: