On Standing Stylishly OR Standing for Style – Part 1

Posing for the camera as a way to express one’s fashionable taste is much more than getting on your feet in your Sunday best.

Models and celebrities have long had to master the practice of standing stylishly for the camera; however, this activity has more recently become a mainstay of fashion communication in the digital environment. A large proportion of fashion consuming public communicate their preferences by staging a performance of fashionableness for public consumption. This has become a daily activity for many who post #OOTD (Outfit Of The Day) on social media.

Image: Paul Weller & Pete Townshend, Soho, 1981

Courtesy of Janette Beckman (The Archive of Attitude, www.janettebeckman.com)

Images produced as #OOTD or #WIWTD (What I Wore Today) add to a chronology of photographic practice that documents the network of stuff involved in making individual moments of stylish standing. The most obvious connection to this form of image-making are the bloggers’ self-portraits and street-style photography, including the fabulous Japanese Fruits magazine that closed earlier this year. There are also links to the Straight Up photographs in i-D too, head-to-toe shots of stylish individuals that became a feature of the magazine (starting in 1980) and that continue today -
https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/topic/straight-ups .

The What We Wore online archive (http://what-we-wore.com/ ) beautifully illustrates how important images that capture our stylishly standing are to us – marking key moments in our personal odyssey of taste formation, before social media.

Paul Weller said of the image above - “You could say it’s a fashion statement, but I think it’s more than that.” As his comments infer, making this type of style statement is more complex than just standing there in fashionable attire. #OOTD images, for example, require planning and preparation; the garments and accessories, hair and make-up products and equipment, situations or locations, lighting and a camera before the stylish standing can take effect. The photo appears as a single moment, but the image is really a window into the interaction of lots of bits and pieces. A social and interacting network of stuff - “mediations, bodies, objects, situations and equipment” – that for a moment, are attached. The photograph captures this point of convergence, the complexity of which we rarely see. Images that document stylish standing contain multiple fragments of personal taste and a wealth of information on everyday taste-making practices.