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If imagery is as much a part of the fabric of fashion as silk, satin and thread, the imagemakers of the fashion business bring something immaterial to the cloth itself. Call it what you want; like all creativity, it's hard to define. We can feel it as an aura of allure or fantasy, the mysterious fever of the cool, the new, the now.
Unlike the work of the red-carpet paparazzi or the clever pests who surprise celebrities in supermarkets, the images that animate the fashion business are works of the imagination.
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Even when they are designed to look like moments plucked from the flux of the street, they're highly wrought visions crafted by a raft of photographers, stylists, creative directors and retouchers — people whose main goal, apart from satisfying their aesthetic impulses, is to lure your credit card out of your wallet. The art of these dream merchants is ultimately graded against the bottom line, and the high cost of their productions reflects the extravagant returns at stake. One 30-second spot of Missy Elliott and Madonna for the Gap required 400 hands (including those of a Kabbalah teacher). A 20-page fashion story for Vogue can demand five days of scouting, four models, three assistants, 200 rolls of film and a six-figure budget. Several million dollars goes into the development of a $50 bottle of perfume, including the ad campaign and the photographer's fees.
It's a lot of money for a photograph. But the right picture of the right perfume in the right bottle by the right designer can significantly fatten L'Oreal's bottom line. One Lanvin suit in a Russian department-store window or on Kate Moss on the cover of a fashion magazine can inspire thousands of sales and raise the profile of the designer, the store and the photographer who shot the photograph.
But such is the nature of fashion that its ecology is tremendously unstable. Every six months or so, the cast of imagemakers can change. One season the leading lights may be photographers like Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, rich and famous for their airbrushed Vargas-style pinups. Another season influence falls to teen marketers like the FARM Team, college kids who spread the word about cool products on campuses. There are creative directors who elicit emotion from the familiar combination of a favorite song and the golden autumn glow of a tungsten movie lamp. There are designers like Reed Krakoff, who trusts that his intuition will enable him to tool leather handbags and accessories in a way that will appeal to millions of consumers. There are rock-'n'-roll stylists who know just how to rip a T shirt to transform a garage-band punk into a pop-culture It girl.
Once it's in the can, as they say, the image isn't yet perfect. In search of the right one, art directors and photographers will click through thousands of digital versions. Retouchers like Pascal Dangin will artfully erase, pixel by pixel, the circles under the eyes of a cover model who has just traveled to London and back in 48 hours. The camera exacts its price. On the following pages, TIME draws back the curtain and looks at 10 top imagemakers and how they influence the fashions we see and buy and wear in the ever returning hope that some wonderful new feeling will come into focus when we put them on.
- Kate Betts