Decolonizing Ethnography, Refashioning Photography

Fashion magazines have a positive appetite for ethnographic photography when it is celebrated as elite romantic escapism while enabling concepts of western fashion to be upheld that are simultaneously European, international and somehow ‘beyond’ ethnic categorization. So I concluded, seven years ago in a study of aesthetic and semantic tensions in the ‘exotic’ location shoots of Tim Walker, Patrick Demarchelier and Mario Testino in Vogue. That first response to the National Geographic/fashion frame attempted to write back against the cultural hierarchies and exclusions of the fashion media and fashion studies. This paper explores how more activist approaches are now not only possible but necessary. It focuses on the ethnographic registers that make Walker’s work so beguiling, and an upcoming exhibition celebrating Walker’s work as ‘fantastical worlds’ (Victoria and Albert Museum, September 2019), in the context of important sea-changes in society as a whole. An onus on contemporary cultural institutions is to decolonize and make efforts to rewrite and re-imagine. Similarly, the Western fashion system has been tasked with radically challenging the power relations encoded in its ideologies. The V&A is in the process of redesigning its fashion gallery as a ‘global fashion gallery’. The Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion is advocating for inclusive fashion narratives, and currently working with the National Museum of World Cultures (Netherlands) where ethnographic collections are being refigured as fashion collections. This paper explores how involvement across these spaces has provided new methodologies and transformational insights into the ways that Walker’s photography can be discussed.