The Fashion photograph is not just any photograph.

Texto en español, aqui

"[...] The Fashion photograph is not just any photograph, it bears little relation
to the news photograph or to the snapshot, for example: it has its own units
and rules: within photographic communication, it forms a specific language
which no doubt has its own lexicon and syntax, its own banned or approved
“turns of phrase”

— Roland Barthes —

During the latest fashion weeks, I have found in Twitter, with little surprise and relative frequency that fashion bloggers, press members and specialized magazines are publishing in their accounts low-resolution images that inform the world of what was happening during their fashion shows.

To be on the spot, some might say, and they are right. In these times in which people want information at the exact moment when it is happening, it is essential for the media and the success of their social networking sites to be able to comply with such a simple requirement. 

Still, what is going on with the quality of the images? Especially if we take into consideration that these are magazines, which not only provide information to their consumers but also shape their tastes and, given more so, magazines have had a fundamental role in the development of fashion photograph as a contemporary type of language.

A quick message is being delivered, yes, however, by using bad-quality images, the people that watch over the proper way of dressing and its design, those who approve of certain style patterns and, in some cases, are regarded as the guardians of good taste, are undermining the basis of one of the means that they use to communicate fashion themselves.

It is clear that the reason-d’être of fashion magazines is not solely to provide information of the latest trends and the diverse products by designers. Their role, in head of their different editors, is also one of form: of forms orthographic and grammatical, of forms of graphic design, and, even though sometimes it does not look like it, of the ways in which we use photograph to communicate fashion.

Therefore Barthes’ quote; we need to differentiate fashion photograph from its journalistic and runaway versions; the latter also owns fashion magazines its contemporary stylistic value. It is magazines and fashion houses the ones who have taught us which images are good and which ones are not good. This is why we can say that those who are part of the group who has taught us what good fashion images are now giving undoing with one hand what took them years to do with the other.

And yet, there is nothing sacred in fashion. Maybe this is the beginning of a new tendency of blurred images with the focus on the background.

After all, in the fashion world, anything is possible.