Collection: Fashion

Overview
Cindy Sherman's 1983 collection "Fashion" turns the glossy language of commercial style photography inside out. Using herself as model, stylist, and director, she stages a suite of color photographs that mimic the conventions of magazine spreads and advertising while undermining them at every turn. Clothing stands front and center, yet rather than flattering or empowering the wearer, garments become masks, shells, and awkward costumes that exaggerate the artifice of the fashion image. Produced at a moment when her practice was shifting from cinematic archetypes toward the broader spectacle of mass media, the series brings Sherman's signature self-transformation into direct dialogue with the aesthetics and commerce of the 1980s.

Visual Strategies
The pictures adopt the familiar vocabulary of studio fashion photography, three-quarter poses, tight crops, high-key lighting, saturated color, but their polish is punctured by deliberate misalignments. Wigs sit slightly askew, makeup skews theatrical or smeared, and expressions register as vacant, brittle, or strangely defiant. Backgrounds read as set-like rather than seamless, with visible edges or artificial textures that call attention to staging. Sherman often selects garments whose structure overwhelms the body, and she poses in ways that resist the seductive fluidity of editorial movement. The result is a surface that gleams like advertising while quietly sabotaging its promises of glamour and ease.

Themes and Tone
"Fashion" probes how femininity is produced, performed, and consumed through images. Sherman's figures appear as composites of competing expectations: poised yet off-balance, expensive yet precarious, styled yet unraveled. The clothes "wear" the figure as much as the figure wears the clothes, an exchange that destabilizes agency and highlights the body as a site of projection. Humor mixes with anxiety; the portraits flirt with caricature and edge toward the grotesque, but they never fully relinquish allure. This friction, between seduction and critique, surface sheen and psychic abrasion, animates the series and keeps it from settling into didactic satire.

Context within Sherman's Practice
Coming on the heels of the "Untitled Film Stills" and the "Centerfolds", the series extends Sherman's investigation of mass-image archetypes from cinema to the fashion industry. Moving decisively into color and adopting a scale and finish associated with high-end editorial production, she positions her art within the media ecosystem it scrutinizes. The 1980s emphasis on branding, power dressing, and celebrity culture provides a fertile backdrop: the photographs channel that decade's appetite for visual excess while revealing the strain required to maintain its façades. At the same time, the images anticipate later Sherman bodies of work in which costume, prosthetics, and exaggerated theatricality unmask cultural fantasies by overperforming them.

Ambivalence and Critique
What gives "Fashion" its bite is the refusal to stand outside the systems it questions. The pictures are undeniably stylish; they benefit from the visual seductions of fabric, color, and lighting, and they satisfy the eye even as they estrange it. That ambivalence implicates viewers in the same desire economy the images anatomize. Sherman's presence, both everywhere and no one, underscores identity as construction, a mutable image assembled for the camera and for consumption. Instead of offering a fixed moral, the series stages the unstable relationship between commodity, image, and selfhood, asking how easily roles slip when clothing, pose, and gaze collaborate.

Legacy
"Fashion" helped set the template for the porous boundary between contemporary art and fashion that would define the decades to come, influencing editorial photography, designer collaborations, and a generation of artists who interrogate the politics of style. It remains a sharp lens on how the fashion image manufactures aspiration and alienation in the same frame, and a pivotal chapter in Sherman's continuing exploration of persona, performance, and the power of pictures.