that uses already-made designer items. The story that might be told in a photo may or
may not be related directly to the costume represented. A fashionable photo does not
represent an item as such. It makes one to search for sense, consistently taking away
the opportunity for the viewer to acquire it in the item, action, in the contemplation of
beauty. The concept of representation is of dual meaning: on the one hand it is the
creation of an image of really existing objects, and on the other – the formation of
representations, based on a narrative. Specificity of representation of images in the
genre of fashion photography is connected with the nature of the visual and the
characteristic features of its reading as a text of culture. The technique of creating and
constructing images demonstrates the artist’s ability not only to capture the beauty and
uniqueness in an organic unity, sensuality in a certain angle and frame, but also the
ability to keep up with the times, applying the latest technology and the achievements
of photographic techniques.
Advertising by means of illustration and photo illustration has become a separate
sphere of designers’ creativity. In its development, it demonstrates separate periods of
communication of varying nature: interpersonal, group, and mass. Each form of
communication has its own dominant function, respectively: informing, regulation,
emotional and psychological game. The said functions determine the nature of the
images, namely: fixation, interpretation, art project. Accordingly, illustrators use
various artistic composition and graphic techniques: reflection, stylization,
interpretation, and association-concept.
In modern fashion illustration, transformations of human images in costume are
often used, outlining one of the leading tendencies: the transition from styling the
costume wearer to distorting his/her image in the anaesthetization of something
disgusting and ugly. The said tendency was manifested the most clearly in the art
photography of fashion. New technological opportunities related to computer and
digital technologies are of particular importance. The use of the expressive-advertising
style of functional and communicative stylistics and the principles of modelling of
fashionable images as texts – legends with the corresponding narratives and context –
determines the following typology of images: interpretive, personifying, and implicit.
At the beginning of the 21
st
century the presentation of a costume in art photo
illustration of fashion tends to the expression of the subject himself/herself – the wearer
through his/her costume; demonstration of “relations” between the wearer and his/her
costume, often in a dramatic form; the costume itself, as a marker that defines, and
submits the wearer; the context prevails in fashion stories, that is, the costume and the
wearer are the artefacts in interaction, their subject-object relations are reflected. A
costume, as a message, not only informs about its owner, but also about the time, for it
enters into a special emotional relationship with its wearer and with those who
perceive.
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