The Furor Over Fashions

Who is that girl prancing on the hood of a Rolls, strutting along a beach on ice skates, fording a stream on a water buffalo, serving tea in a space suit, climbing a tree in a cocktail dress?

Who else but that rag-bone-and-hank-of-hair known as a High-Fashion Model. She is supposed to be showing off the new clothes for the readers of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and fashion pages of general magazines. Is she succeeding? No, scream a growing gaggle of fashion designers, who claim their clothes are being downgraded to mere props for far-out photography. Nonsense, answer annoyed photographers and editors.

The cat fight came within spitting distance of breaking into the open at a lunch at Manhattan's Four Seasons restaurant, where the creative geniuses from "S.A." (Seventh Avenue to nonreaders of Women's Wear Daily) sat down with creative geniuses from the fashion magazines and the photographic studios to air their differences. The truth was, said one designer afterward, "we were afraid to say anything. We're so grateful to get even a little photograph in Vogue and Harper's that we're scared of getting them down on us."

Reaction Sets In. Not everyone is that grateful. America's top dress designer, Norman Norell, insists that "fashion photographers have really gotten out of hand. In the old days, Vogue and Harper's had beautiful photographs of beautiful dresses presented the way designers intended. Now the photographers distort a suit or dress beyond recognition. I know one designer who looked through an issue of Vogue 14 times and didn't recognize his own dress. He had to go through the credits on each page to figure out which one was his."

Soft-spoken James Galanos, who accurately describes his forte as "elegant fashions for rich ladies," agrees with Norell. "I am all for new developments," he says, "but not when they cause the photographer to lose sight of the object at hand. The important point of fashion is too often lost because the photographer gets involved in the model or the scene he is shooting--everything but the dress."

Magazines, Galanos feels, are running wild with accessories. "When Vogue shows chandelier earrings with a sports coat, which is what they are doing most of the time, rules are being broken--without a sense of beauty--all for the sake of the picture. But a reaction is beginning to set in. Magazines are getting letters from people saying they are tired of seeing models undressed and sitting on Johns."

Fashion editors seem disinclined to take such sniping seriously. "The whole argument is absurd," shrugs Harper's Bazaar Fashion Director Gwen Randolph. "Sure, we get lots of complaints from designers, but we get lots of compliments too. Some complaints come from designers who are older and not with it. Actually, fashion photography today, insofar as photographers take clothes and try to exaggerate, enhance and dramatize, is no different than it was 25 years ago. The whole to-do is a lot of baloney."

Sniffs Vogue Editorial Director Alexander Liberman: "An artificial issue. I think most designers are happy to be part of an avant-garde development--though some undoubtedly prefer the more static, conventional photograph." Says Vogue's Editor in Chief Diana Vreeland: "I've never heard of any criticism and never heard of any argument."

A Painted Mess. Walking somewhere between the embattled geniuses, Sportswear Designer John Weitz has no doubt that he is in a scrap. There are, he admits, two good fashion photographers: Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. "Most of the others want to be photography's Andy Warhol. They exult in taking photographs with clothes that can't be seen, and a beautiful girl ends up looking like a painted mess."

"Actually," says Weitz, "it's the reader who suffers, but then maybe she really wants to see clothes in awkward poses in bizarre settings. On the other hand, it's my selfish purpose to see my clothes looking beautiful; it's the photographer's selfish purpose to be famous; it's the art director's selfish purpose to have a striking, stylish page; it's the magazine's selfish purpose to sell ads and issues. With all these selfishnesses, you just come up with one big crumbier."

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