Documenting Kate Moss : fashion photography and the persistence of photojournalism

Abstract

In the early 1990s a new image of British national identity emerged on the pages of The Face, Dazed and Confused and Vogue. Fashion and style photography created an aesthetic out of the lives of young Londoners and the places they lived in, including second-hand markets, the rave scene and shared flats. Corinne Day's seemingly private photo-diaries became the basis for her fashion magazine work. In these pictures she featured her friends, her flat, her sofa and fairy lights, and also a girl called Kate Moss who "didn't look very much like a model." For Day and other innovators, new ways of documenting contemporary reality were achieved through fashion and women's magazines, rather than by classic photojournalism.