Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Beyond Fashion’: A journey through the blurred lines of art and advertising

If you’ve ever seen adverts for fashion brands and wanted to know more about the photography behind the advert, then you’ll be pleased to know that several rooms in the Saatchi Gallery are currently filled with the original photos.

This exhibition seeks to demonstrate how fashion photography has moved past the simple presentation of product lines into something more arty and often, frankly, utterly baffling.

I tend to struggle with fashion photography as a sales tool, as so much of it seems to have little to do with the goods on sale and more with the artist showing off their photography skills.

Some of the “adverts” are baffling — from the clever and quite appealing collages made from old jeans, but there’s no way anyone looking at the photo in a magazine would have known the abstract “painting” is made from clothes. Then there’s a photo where the people wearing the clothes are obscured from view, leaving just the hands in front of the camera as the focal point of the advert. What on earth is the point of that?

I’ve often considered fashion ads as akin to selling a ready meal by displaying a photo of the napkin. Baffling.

So here, at the Saatchi Gallery, is an exhibition of photographs that blur the boundaries between commercial photography selling a product and artistic photography.

Thanks to the way fashion ads are now so detached from the product, this exhibition can feel as if you’re walking through a room of ads—as if someone is in the middle of laying out a copy of Vogue magazine and just needs to add the logos to the ads.

It’s not that the exhibition is bad if you look at it from a purely aesthetic point of view, it’s a very good collection of very good photography. But as someone who sometimes notices adverts in magazines that are trying to sell something, the exhibition mainly reminded me of why I find so many fashion adverts so pretentious.

One room of prints on fabrics is also adorned with beanbags, and we’re told it’s “a truly immersive experience, exploring notions of beauty, identity, and gender”, which is a big ask for what is a room of beanbags and handing photos.

However, if you consider the exhibition a display of good photography, then it’s a good collection.

I just wish fashion advertising designers would try to sell the product rather than the artist.

The exhibition, Beyond Fashion is at the Saatchi Gallery until 8th September 2024.