In the Lightboxes at King’s Cross, Violet Conroy curates imagery which presents fashion as less a materialistic choice and more about “an attitude, a mood”
“Fashion imagery as a genre is more expansive than ever,” says Violet Conroy, curator of Rethinking Fashion Image, an exhibition at the Lightboxes on Lower Stable Street in Coal Drops Yard, King’s Cross. “It’s less about clothing and more about an attitude, a mood, or a style – much of fashion imagery today is defined by a sense of place or people.” Her words resonate in the red bricked underpass of Coal Drops Yard, which was once a Victorian coal depot, and now a network of restaurants, galleries, and gathering places in the shadow of Central Saint Martins. Amongst the food stalls are the works of nine current and former CSM photographers glowing softly in lightboxes. Together, they pose the question: what does it mean to make a fashion image in 2025?
“Editorial, non-commercial fashion work is a space of great visual innovation and freedom,” Conroy explains. “It’s produced some of fashion’s most iconic imagery, by people like Juergen Teller, Corinne Day and Tim Walker.” Having just returned to London from Athens, where I interviewed Teller at his new Onassis Ready exhibition titled you are invited, the photographer’s intimate artistic approach to fashion photography is on my mind. He has the ability to read his subjects not through their clothes, but through their contradictions: their ideas, vulnerabilities, and tensions. Perhaps no image captures Teller’s irreverence toward fashion quite like his 2005 Marc Jacobs campaign featuring Victoria Beckham crawling out of an oversized shopping bag with her name and branding printed onto it. What could have been a glossy luxury advertisement instead became a subtle critique of consumerism and self-image. Teller’s work continues fashion photography’s conversation concerning authenticity, power, and the human body.
Many of Teller’s peers and successors studied at Central Saint Martins, a school whose alumni form a kind of visual genealogy of creative risk. Wolfgang Tillmans, Corinne Day, Rankin, Tim Walker, Harley Weir, Campbell Addy and many more have all reshaped how fashion is seen, transforming the genre and its legacy, and the artists in Conroy’s exhibition continue that lineage, but also turn the gaze inward. For instance, Camille Lemoine photographs friends and family in the Scottish countryside. In one image, a model lies outstretched on a narrow path, swallowed by long sun-bleached grass that surrounds her. The clothes are barely visible, and what remains is a feeling of solitude and breath. Carina Kehlet Schou constructs her images as meditations on nostalgia and identity, balancing the staged with the emotional. For Coco Wu, the act of photographing begins long before the shutter clicks. She street casts strangers, spending hours walking or talking with them before taking a single frame.
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