Caught on Camera: The Fashioned Body and the Criminal Body
Fashion. noun;
a popular or the latest style of clothing, hair decoration or behaviour
the production and marketing of new styles of clothing and cosmetics
a manner of doing something.
Crime. noun;
an action or omission which constitutes an offence and is punishable by law
Illegal activities
an action or activity considered to be evil, shameful or wrong.
Definitions from the online Oxford English Dictionary
Fashion and crime are not words that are commonly associated; they represent very different cultural and psychic spaces. Fashion is a sphere that is perceived as ephemeral and transient—constantly renewed and therefore perpetually optimistic. The word crime, on the other hand, occupies a darker territory; something hidden or submerged that we understand as negative or threatening. The definitions above, drawn from the online Oxford English Dictionary, make explicit their polarities. We consider fashion to be generally legal (although child labour and counterfeiting are clearly not) while crime is unequivocally illegal. We regard fashion as visible, readable and on trend while crime is opaque, shadowy and off radar. Fashion is about the right and acceptable way to dress; crime is about the wrong, unacceptable way to behave. In the lexicon of meaning, these two words, fashion and crime, could not be further apart.
Yet, despite their disparate starting places, representations of fashion and crime have travelled a strikingly similar journey. It was the media theorist Marshall McLuhan who first put forward the idea that the medium is the message and through the examination of evolving media technologies, it is possible to map this unexpected relationship. It is the technological interface—or medium—that seals our relationship to these messages of fashion and crime. And central to this, it is image that joins these two diametrically opposed realms of light and dark. It is through the two-dimensional image, still or moving, that we understand, participate in, construct and consume our notions of what constitutes fashion and crime.
It was through researching postwar criminal iconography for a master’s thesis that I became increasingly aware of the parallels between perceptions of crime and fashion. For instance, both areas, commonly regarded as ‘low-brow’ in the cultural hierarchy, are imbued with ambivalence and suspicion. This ambivalence seems to generate a similar ‘push pull’ compulsion among its consumers who are drawn with a guilty pleasure to their subjects. It could be argued that both fashion and crime contain varying elements of drama and glamour which enthral legions of loyal fans. These devotees become hooked on their genres. Both readers of fashion magazines and crime thrillers scan respective texts, hungry for more information and clues. The question What happens next? is as important for readers of crime media as it is for decoders of fashion media.
By focusing on three types of photographic image—still, moving and digital—this interdisciplinary examination will demonstrate how changing mediums have been and continue to be vital to our understanding, perception and processing of visual representations of both fashion and crime. By looking at images, past and present, this empirical account, based on many years research into both fashion media and crime media, will attempt to extract some of the underlying processes involved in the production, construction and definition of these distinctly different categories, which create, on the one hand, the fashionable body and, on the other, the criminal or deviant body.
Extract from 'Fashion Media Past and Present', published by Bloomsbury.
“An exemplar of academic writing is Nilgin Yusuf’s carefully constructed and fascinating essay: ‘Caught on Camera: The Fashioned Body and the Criminal Body’. It draws persuasive parallels between fashion and crime using both historic and contemporary examples such as how current interest in revealing fashion practice, performance and process through media platforms correlates with revelatory images posted online in the criminal context.”