FASHION NEW IS NOT THE NEW NEW

Is 'new' in the photo fashion world different from 'new' in the ,well, real world?
Fashionistas say stupid things like 'brown is the new black' Their magazines are the 'Biggest fashion issue EVER' They speak in largely tri-partite sentences 'Big.Beautiful, Blonde and describe some clothes as impossibly pretty.
We have to understand NEW in fashion photography as fashion-new not new -new.
Some photogs are getting near to fashion speak already. I cant understand why theyve missed the point of fashion-new. Going well beyond the well worn 'awesome' as as a suitable description we sometimes get 'killer'or the best yet'achingly beautiful' which Im sure youll agree is getting near to impossibly pretty.
New in fashion is ringlite-new, polaroid-new, or anything new as long as you do (or re-do it) first.
Some of the newness is not image but sensibilities attached to it.
Remember the point on Frank Horvats page
Marvin wanted me to do for BAZAAR the same kind of "natural" fashion photos I had done for ELLE. But Nancy White, the editor, wanted the models to wear extravagant hats and plenty of lipstick ("otherwise Revlon may cancel their ads" ). She eventually agreed to publish the sequence, but some of the best photographs had to be dropped.
Bailey,Donovan and Duffy were new not so much because their pictures were different but because they represented then then societies sensibilities toward fashion-new, rejecting the conventions of the time for a more rough, heterosexual viewpoint. This was new to the fashion world.
Photographers such as Norman Parkinson took umbrage at this ill-mannered uncouth approach. What he didn’t realise was that the (young) world was about to become a more ill-mannered,uncouth place. Sensibilities were changing.
When Arthur Elgort said to his model 'just hold this newspaper and walk towards me' this was new, although Munkacsi and Toni Frissel had done things like this, it wasnt with Arthurs sense of professional-amateurism which was just right for the time.Liberman described his pictures as full of happiness and light. New.
So whats new. Terry Richardson-new is that its the same old sexy pictures but they always look as though the photographer is a particiant(or he will be shortly) in whats going on. Not new to photography (Larry Clark) but new to fashion. Newton and Bourdins pictures dont take on this sensibility.
What else is new: Designers want photographs that look like them. Galliano talking about Dior pictures taken by someone famous hired by the advertising agency as being not like me, not making the product his. He fired them and now travels to London to oversee and get involved in Dior advertising with Nick Knight that presumably mirrors his sensibilities. Its fashion auterism. Its new. Well fashion-new.
New? Exerpt from Washington Post Chic click review
‘There is today a School of High Abjection, as you could call it, that gives an artist's snaps of drug-addicted friends and other sexy down-and-outers the kind of status that a School of Paris painting had in 1920. (Nan Goldin, whom Washingtonians got a chance to come to grips with in the last Corcoran Biennial, is the new school's master.) And that well-established status may be why fashion editors are willing, even eager, to have this look within their pages. It may not illustrate the clothes -- it may not even show them -- but it sends the crucial message that even a line as dull as Sisley can claim some kind of kinship with the art world's cutting edge. And that's because the most prestigious fashion photography no longer has a special job to do that speaks, even obliquely, about designer clothes; it just has to assert its fine-art status, so some of that glory can rub off on the fashion house that's paid for it.’
U.K. TV is running a series as to how the business world applied Freuds psychological principals to consumer manipulation. As the mood of society changes and its sensibilities, the old will no longer do.All those magazine questionaires that get filled are for a purpose. Its not a circle, its a spiral, things go round come back but are not (quite) the same. This is the new.
Believe me, New is the(not quite the same) old of fashion photography.