A Missed Trick With Miss Moss

After Monday’s uninspiring visit to Citizens and Kings, it was off to the National Portrait Gallery for a very different type of portrait exhibition. With Face of Fashion, the NPG are no doubt hoping to replicate the success they enjoyed with the blockbusting Testino retrospective in 2002. No mean feat considering the phenomenal ticket sales Testino garnered. Can Corinne Day, Steve Klein, Paolo Roversi, Mario Sorrenti, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott draw in the big crowds? Do you even know who Day, Klein, Roversi et al are? Nope me neither. With the possible exception of Corinne Day, the Face of Fashion photographers will be unknown to all but the most die-hard fashionistas. Therein lies the problem. Without any ‘big names’ the exhibition is likely to flounder which would be a shame since it’s a well put together show. The re-vamped gallery space comes courtesy of David Adjaye who also designed the chapel housing Chris Offili’s Upper Room at Tate Britain; one of my very favourite spots in London. While not quite up to Upper Room standards, Adjaye has created a spacious, yet suitably intimate, series of free-flowing spaces. On the gently curving walls hang a fine selection of portraits, some barely more than Polaroid’s, others great friezes, from some of fashion photography’s leading lights. Yet still this will not be enough to pull in the punters.


The NPG has missed a trick here. They have failed to anchor their exhibition in contemporary events. Since the Size Zero debate erupted last year after the death of anorexic model Luisel Ramos, the newspapers, broadsheets and tabloids alike, have been awash with demands for the fashion industry to put a stop to its obsession with emaciated bodies and underage girls. The NPG have at their disposal a stockpile of photos by the woman who started the craze for stick-thin models: Corinne Day, the photographer who brought Heroin Chic to the masses. But rather than putting Day’s photographs into some sort of context, rather than stressing their topicality and their culpability in this sorry state of affairs on the catwalk, the gallery blurb talks of ‘transitory poses’ and ‘unnerving honesty,’ standard commentary you would find in any GCSE photography project.

The ‘Cocaine Kate’ scandal is still fresh in the minds of the general public, not a week goes by without new concerns about Moss’ relationship with unreformed drug addict Pete Doherty being raised by the gossip rags and red tops. Those Corinne Day photographs capture Moss as a fledgling model at the very outset of her career; an innocent unsullied by the ravages of the industry. Yet, the exhibition leaflet has nothing to say about the commodification of Kate Moss or about fashion’s corrupting effect; about how these infamous photos depict a young girl on the edge of the abyss. No, just more drivel about the ‘special relationship’ between photographer and sitter. This perfectly adequate exhibition could have been elevated to so much more if the curators had had the courage and gall to deliver something more profound than the usual platitudes and clichés.