Photography in Fashion

Phillip Wong Photography

Fashion Photography

The Art and the Commerce

The Commerce and Art

of Fashion Photography

Bringing Fashion to Market

There are three areas of Fashion Photography:

Defining an Audience:

Finding an Audience is a vast world of 8 billion people, is finding ways to get attention, get reaction, and get connection. In a world of 8 billion, image cuts across all lines of language, culture, taste, style, and if done well, connects the name of the Brand.

Defining the Brand:

The most storied companies find a way to connect their Brand to their Audience to leave a lasting impression – the same kind of relationship as a marriage or an unforgettable experience – Apple, WWE, Taylor Swift all do this.

Displaying the Product:

This is where the deal is closed. Decisions are made, and money is put down. This is where fears are alleviated, questions are put to rest. Look at these photos from the perspective of the intent.

Crafting an Image – Crafting a Feeling

As a tool, photography tells a story that crosses language barriers, boundaries of time and culture. It is immediate and can be lasting. Understanding how the impact can work, gives it greater power.

Editorial photography, should be like film, telling a clear, decisive, story that, from the photographer’s place, captures the emotion and thought, and from the audience’s position, discovers feeling, and enlightenment.

Fashion Editorial, is not JUST about the designer, the clothing, but who and what and where and how and when of the story – and how the audience feels (and later thinks). It is about character, time, place, and forever. Good stories never end. Everything else, is forgotten.

Fashion in Commerce

Historically, photography has been entwined in fashion to show potential buyers all the visual qualities of garments designed through the years.

While fashion has been shown in magazines since the 1940s, the use of photography in fashion really expanded from the 1970s to the early 2000s. But as with many other industries, as the markets became global, the need for the markets to see what was being designed, created and produced in one part of the world, needed to be seen globally.

Consumers need to see the items they are considering. They need to feel and be both inspired and reassured. Can a photo do this? In the absence of a real object or idea?

A Brand Lasts Forever.

A Design is a Work in Progress.

To show a designer’s designs, we have to KNOW what the designer does, why they do it, what they intend, intuitively.

To show a Brand, there is an identity, what connects the brand, to the audience. But in the e-commerce world, there also has to be an understanding of the customer who needs to see, understand, something they are taking a chance on.

But photography as a tool, in anything, has to serve a function, in the most basic of situations. That does not mean it has to be done without thought, purpose, intent, and an awareness.

The Camera only Captures what the Eye Sees.

Photography may be an art form, or a tool, in itself. But unlike painting or writing, it creates only what actually exists. There are other art forms that can leave reality and deal with imagination. So when photography crosses into fashion, landscape, architecture, nudes, dance, portraits, it has to begin with what actually exists, and then look to the looker’s perception of that reality.

Fashion was a subject that I wasn’t raised with, but I had a sense of, from my father’s architectural calling, and his assimilation of the Bauhaus of Mies van der Rohe, and the philosophy of Frank Lloyd Wright – “Less is more” (Mies) and “Form follows function” (Wright).But I was drawn into the melding of fashion and glamour and story of Helmut Newton. And the poetic composition of Akira Kurosawa.