Sittings: 30 Men combines the aesthetics and social discourse of portraiture with both the rhetoric of fashion and the language of contemporary communications.

Described as 'living magazine pages', Simon Foxton's interactive project for SHOWstudio engages with the both the history and concept of portraiture. It is also a work which critiques and expands the premise of contemporary styling and fashion photography. On the one hand the project seems at ease with the language and format of a surveillance TV programme such as The Salon; at the same time, there is an aesthetic and performative element to the founding concept of Foxton's project which brings to mind the Screen Tests of Andy Warhol, made between 1962 and 1964, as well as the sumptuousness and claustrophobia of Sam Taylor-Wood's intense concentration on the framed figure, in her films and photography since the mid 1990s.

Advancing from the simple but compelling creation of a live film portrait, Sittings: 30 Men presents the viewer with a situation which conflates a variety of contemporary cultural trends. While there is an art historical lineage which connects the society portraiture of the late nineteenth century to the filmic glamour of Beaton's photographic portraits, there is also reference to reality TV and the media trend for private life as public spectacle.

The male models in Foxton's project are all minimally styled, each dressed in an outfit by a single designer, and possess the immediate elegance and forcefulness of presence that one would expect of them. But where we are used to seeing the male model as a static image within print media and advertising, here the singular perspective of the web-cast creates a situation in which the meticulously prepared image of the professionally styled model becomes fragmented and de-stabilised. Once filmed over an extended period, within the constantly renewing sixty seconds of a single frame static portrait, the model's enshrinement within the rhetoric of fashion photography is exchanged for sequential casual poses - for the monotone of live broadcast. (You might also think of the studies in human animation undertaken by cubism, in which a figure is seen is the staggered phases of a single activity.)

Thus Sittings is immediately connected to a complex algebra of method and intent - formality is collapsed, intent becomes ambiguous, and untethered; at the same time, the technology of the piece - the ambient sound which the viewer can hear alongside each 'frame' of the live portrait, or the telephone link to the model - introduce further layers of possibility.

To begin with the technological enablement of the work, you could think of Marshall McLuhan's distinction - in his pioneering essays on Mass Age culture, technology and media - between a subject and what he terms as its 'ground'. In this analysis, it is the surrounding apparatus and landscape of a subject (termed 'figure' by McLuhan) which makes eloquent its real meaning within the modern world.

With regard to Foxton's Sittings, such an analysis raises interesting questions: to what extent is the modern fashion portrait more concerned with the capacity of media than the content of the picture? In an age of saturation visual culture, enabled by mass digital technology, do images themselves have enhanced or diminished visibility? Similarly, where does documentation end and entertainment begin? Or is visual culture now adrift in a mass convergence of intents, the end result of which is a mono-environment of pasteurised mythologies and continual mediation?

The elegance of Foxton's male models, the singularity of their appearance and ease with their themselves, proposes his subjects as aspirational - embodying glamour, vitality and all of the agency of contemporary styling. Under prolonged mediation, however, their images updated in fragment, these dandies become stranded between the iconography of film stills, the banality of popular factual programming and the queasy intimacy of surveillance photography. There is also a strand of pronouced sexual theatre to their role as 'live portraits'; in some ways, the sitters appear to be commodified by their situation - presented by the webcast as vicariously available for covert scrutiny.

In this, Sittings: 30 Men combines the aesthetics and social discourse of portraiture with both the rhetoric of fashion and the language of contemporary communications. This conflation of social, aesthetic and technological concerns presents an open-ended enquiry into both the status of imagery and the imagery of status. Foxton's project might thus be taken as a current audit of the heady relationship between glamour, mediation and visual culture - a debate which, in its modern form, might commence with the social portraiture of Jacques Emil Blanche and lead to Sam Taylor-Wood's artful film portrait of the apparently sleeping David Beckham.

If a starting point of postmodernism might be seen as the supremacy of image as an infinitely transferable and quotable phenomenon, then Warhol's Screen Tests - the resonance of which can be felt so strongly in Foxton's Sittings - mark the inauguration of the postmodern epoch. Warhol would request his 'sitters' to simply sit in front of the camera and do nothing at all - not even blink, preferably; he would tell them how great they looked, and then allow the camera itself to both create and record the profound psychological study which the situation usually provoked.

For Taylor-Wood, inspired by Warhol, the subjects of her portraits (many of them celebrities) are granted a filmic enshrinement by the art making process which is steeped in a luxurious aestheticism. Often, her interest is in the relationship between her subject and the pictorial context; like Warhol, she is engaged in a forensic study of physical beauty, and the point at which erotic presence becomes taut with neurosis.

Simon Foxton, crucially, approaches these concerns from the inside out. His intention with Sittings seems both to enhance and disrupt the poise and intimacy of styled portraiture - to blur further the historically vexed distinctions between cultural media.

Photograph by Jason Evans

Photographers like Jason Evans, who engaged with Englishness explicitly, in order to attack normative British fashion photography, were less desirable to the mainstream international market.

If 'Well Mannered Quality' represented the early 1950s conception of Englishness as specifically rural and Cowan's 'Monumental Ideas About Dressing' the 1960s’ urban, the photographer Jason Evans (Travis) and stylist Simon Foxton conflated these sensibilities and situated them in England's suburbs to explore the 1990s black experience of nationhood. For this image from the 1991 shoot 'Strictly', Foxton dressed the young, black male model Edward Enninful in a riding jacket and plus twos from the luxury tailors Swaine & Adeney and a monocle on a chain: an outfit associated with an upper-class, country gentleman. In an ironic reference to eighteenth century, English landscape painting, the model is pictured in front of what appears to be his 'estate'. However, the modern house with a harled wall and mock-Tudor detail at the gate behind him also alludes to the man's suburban context and situation at the periphery of both urban and rural existence. As I have argued, the ability to recognise and repeat the signs of national culture is fundamental to the process of identification and participation in an imagined community. In this image, the signs of the dominant ethnic and class identity are subverted by projecting them onto the body of a black man to critique the assimilationist concept that cultural harmony can be achieved by cloaking difference in the signs of normative national culture. Instead of the gentle juxtaposition of dissonant elements achieved in Parkinson's nostalgic view of England, Jason Evans' representation of Englishness in the early 1990s is characterised by dislocation and ambiguity.

Although mainstream British fashion titles such as Vogue, Harpers & Queen and even the more journalism-centred British Elle and Marie Claire had resisted the hard-edged, confrontational aesthetics of style photography throughout the 1980s, the industry perceived this approach as conducive to the representation of contemporary fashion in the early 1990s. At the height of the recession in 1992-3, fashionable young designers including Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis, Anna Sui and Martin Margiela used styling techniques to promote their layered and distressed garments that were most closely associated with photographers and stylists working for The Face and i-D. In January 1993, Nicola Jeal wrote in The Times that consequently, 'a new breed of fashion photographers and stylists' including the models Kate Moss, Cecilia Chancellor, stylists Melanie Ward and Anna Cockburn and photographers Nigel Shafran, Glen Luchford, David Sims and Corinne Day, had built up 'a cult following in New York’ (Jeal 1993: 13).

The working partnerships and commissions that ensued signified that English photographers had returned to the centre of mainstream fashion, although their representational strategies had changed beyond all recognition. Any traces of a nation depicted in these images imagined it as alienating, ambiguous and potentially threatening in comparison with John Cowan's dynamic portrayal of 1960s London. It is significant that of all the photographers working for the style press, the appearance of Day and Sims' imagery appealed most to major American magazines like Vogue. These practitioners' admiration for the classic studio imagery of Richard Avedon inspired them to include the least possible information in their shoots, making it difficult to ascertain the precise national identity of the images or of their authors. Photographers like Jason Evans, who engaged with Englishness explicitly, in order to attack normative British fashion photography, were less desirable to the mainstream international market. Englishness was, therefore, no longer a viable frame of reference for English fashion photographers, as the pressures of globalism forced them to seek alternative imagined communities with which to identify.

Terry Jones' notion of the fashion magazine as a collective offered one possible solution to this crisis of identity. In 1998, i-D Books published Family Future Positive, a book composed from invited visual interpretations of the concept of 'family' from i-D's regular contributors. The theme of the publication was based on the premise that i-D was a 'worldwi-De creative community' (i-D Books 1998: 5). This problematic use of the concept of family to bind a commercial community was reflected by the juxtaposition of biological ties (i-D Books 1998: 124-9), professional relationships (i-D Books 1998: 226-33) and philosophical statements about the 'family of man' (i-D Books 1998: 34). By implication, i-D's subscribers were included in the i-D family by purchasing the magazine. Like Englishness, in this global fashion context, family was suggested as an alternative imagined community, used discursively to sustain security and belonging among its consumers.

In conclusion, the essence of a national character of English fashion photography cannot be defined by a single visual style because the two main discourses upon which it depends are contingent on different forms of renewal. Whereas the culture of late capitalism makes it necessary for fashion to constantly attach itself to new discourses in order to inspire identification, Englishness relies upon its apparent continuity with its past for meaning. It is the way that fashion images are used in fashion publishing to inspire identification that determines the nature of the discourse of Englishness in fashion photography. In the 1950s and 1960s, fashion's emphasis on English design and London as a fashionable space created a desire for images that referenced Englishness explicitly, both in their content and style of construction. The notion of a harmonious England was alien to practitioners working for the style magazines in the mid 1980s to 1990s, who used the strategy of repeating familiar narratives, central to the representation of Englishness, to critique the discourse from within. However, their belief that their mundane locations and everyday recycled fashions meant that they reflected the 'reality' missing in mainstream fashion imagery belied the fact that their work was equally discursive. In this sense, one fashionable fabrication replaced another at the will of external, global forces. As national identity becomes eroded by cultural homogenisation, contemporary English fashion photographers seek out new communities, such as the 'family' constructed at i-D, to give meaning to their imagery.

References:

Jeal, N. (1993), 'Getting the new picture', The Times, Looks, 27 January, p. 13

i-D Books, (1998), Future Family Positive (London: i-D Books)

Extract from 'English-style photography?' originally published in The Englishness of English Dress, Ed. Breward, Conekin and Cox, Berg, 2002

Over the 20 years Foxton has been styling, consulting and art directing, he’s arguably helped redefine men’s fashion, even if his aesthetic remains a bit of a contradiction.

There are those who think all stylists are gushing posh bints or mincing gaylords. Feckless fashion magpies who swoop on any aesthetic or scene deemed vaguely underground, exotic or historically obscure - with no understanding of or respect for its original context - then rehash it for the consumer via countless glossy magazines. In many cases, they’re not wrong.

Although stylists have to make images with mass appeal, they don’t have to sell anything directly other than the image. This might sell the clothes by extension, but styling is still a pure art, the logical conclusion of the Society of the Spectacle. The empty image is all, its power to seduce the most important thing, leading to page after magazine page of a visual power war. Styling is our most frequent and populist creative act, because it’s dressing ourselves writ large.

The top stylists influence how we see ourselves. If clothes open up the options of who we can be - hippy, skinhead, businessman, conservative, dominant or good-time girl - stylists create completely new types of people to be.

Men’s increasing interest in fashion - and subsequently fashion’s more masculine agenda - has not gone unnoticed by the industry, or the magazines that champion it. It’s a development that can be in part attributed to seminal stylist Simon Foxton.

After leaving his Berwick-upon-Tweed home in 1979 to do a foundation course and fashion degree at Central Saint Martins, Foxton became a key figure among the first wave of famed stylists - including Judy Blame, Caroline Baker and Ray Petri - who emerged from clubs or colleges in the early half of the 1980s to land in the pages of i-D and The Face. They were the first stylists to get name credits for shoots (before them, styling had been done by fashion editors straying from their desks).

Over the 20 years Foxton has been styling, consulting and art directing, he’s arguably helped redefine men’s fashion, even if his aesthetic remains a bit of a contradiction. Mixing sportswear with regular clothing is now hardly worthy of comment, but it was a Foxton innovation. He has also championed black males as models, often street casting for images that were simultaneously mischievous and regal, removed from the usual stereotypes of black males as exotic or sporty. The resurgence of revamped English classics like Burberry can also be traced back to certain shoots Foxton produced in the late 1980s. He dared to use that familiar check pattern - mixed, of course, with other more outlandish motifs - when others were preoccupied with acid house and its related loose-fit club wear.

Foxton’s work has appeared in too many magazines to mention, and has been hung on the walls of the Tate Modern and the V&A (which purchased his i-D shoot, Strictly). Here, Foxton talks about where he was, where he is now and where he hopes to be in the future.

James Anderson: When you graduated from St Martins in 1983, you launched a label, didn’t you? What was that like?

Simon Foxton: It was called Bazooka. It was taking sportswear - which is a bit of a crap old idea now - and doing it as club - or daywear. We got a lot of PR and into a lot of magazines, and sold through Whistles, Jones and Joseph. It was considered quite a label of the time. But like so many other British designers of that era we had absolutely no business acumen whatsoever. We were just like kids really; we were cocking things up left, right and centre. So after a year or so of losing money hand over fist we decided to call it a day. That’s when I began to move into styling.

James Anderson: Can you remember the first bits of styling you did?

Simon Foxton: I did a shoot for i-D with Marc Lebon in 1983 or 1984. They had asked Bazooka, Bodymap, Ray Petri and Caroline Baker to do a 'look' each. I did a big group shot - a sort of cartoon-like mess! After that came out Bazooka went under, so they asked me to do some more styling and hooked me up with Nick Knight, who was looking for a stylist to work with. I’d never met him before. We spoke on the phone, and I said I wanted to do 'something with bright clothes.' With styling it’s so much more immediate. There’s still a lot of hoo-ha - but you can have an idea and the next week shoot it, then it’s finished.

James Anderson: Loads of fledgling stylists seem to be permanently broke. How long was it before you made money?

Simon Foxton: There were dribs and drabs of work now and then, bits of advertising work for Shiseido, Coca-Cola clothing and stuff for record companies - I did people like Sly and Robbie, and Prefab Sprout. I soon realised that record company work wasn’t really for me, though; there are a lot of egos involved. Styling for magazines is better - you can tell models what to wear, and they won’t talk back. It wasn’t until about 1988 when Levi’s picked up on me that I began to earn real money. I started styling their brochures every six months. They had decent budgets and would fly us off to the States to do stuff. Then the marketing director got me in as a consultant in about 1989; that was a nice ongoing thing. I would go to big meetings, like the token trendy bit of frippery.

James Anderson: There’s a whole well-oiled structure in place for stylists now, but how did you manage years ago when people didn’t even really know what a stylist was?

Simon Foxton: It wasn’t like now, where I can get in touch with PRs in Italy or France or wherever and they will send stuff over to use. That happened quite rarely. It was mostly using home-grown, local stuff. And also using second-hand stuff a lot, which was the culture that I was from, the do-it-yourself punk thing, then being at college during the whole New Wave and New Romantic things. You often borrowed stuff from the shops and you’d have to woo them a little: I’d take in tear sheets to show what I did, or bring a letter from the magazine. Or you’d have to put a cheque deposit down, and if you didn’t return things you’d borrowed on the same day they’d bank it. Duffer once said they’d break my kneecaps if I didn’t bring stuff back - which they now say was a joke, but at the time I certainly believed them!

James Anderson: How would you compare being a stylist now to 20 years ago?

Simon Foxton: Since the whole style boom in the 1990s people are more eager to get their stuff out there and seen, and because of the internet people can check out collections quickly and easily. One difference, which I regret, is that before, you could get away with all sorts - using second-hand stuff, customised stuff - and now you’ve got to use so many designer labels in there, which is quite restrictive. There’s not enough room for stylists to express themselves now. Because of my longevity I’m still 'allowed' to have that freedom, I can still be giddy. You’ve got to think what styling is about.

James Anderson: What is it about?

Simon Foxton: I think it’s a number of things. It’s partly information, and to do with the selling of clothing. And then a lot of it is just entertainment, and I see myself more on that side - visual entertainment, having fun, exciting people.

James Anderson: Do you still really like fashion?

Simon Foxton: I’ve never really liked fashion, ever. I’ve never coined myself as a 'fashion stylist.' I’m a stylist. The concept that something is right now, but wrong six months later, I find insane. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. I’m not saying what I do is timeless, but it’s not particularly fashion-based, it’s more style- and ideas-based. It’s not about the latest thing. I’ve never really bought into that way of thinking.

James Anderson: What about people who really over-intellectualise fashion?

Simon Foxton: I’m slightly wary of it. When you see exhibitions on fashion and you read the blurb you sometimes think, 'That’s not true - that’s rubbish!' But some journalists who are a little more scholarly are gradually winning me over to their way of looking at it. But it’s not how I approach my work. If someone reads something else into it, then all well and good, but I don’t sit there beforehand with a pen and paper and work out why I’m using this garment and that model.

James Anderson: Yet some of the images you’ve produced - like the famous one with black skinheads wearing Marxist imagery on their jackets, and flames everywhere - surely they provide for some weighty theorising?

Simon Foxton: It’s great if people want to read interpretations into it, but I’m not crusading. I haven’t done it with a political agenda, you know. With the black models, well, a lot of them were mates of mine, and I generally fancy black men. The one thing I did try to change was the lack of black models in magazines. I did make a conscious effort to use more black guys in my shoots, and to use them in an across-the-board way. I have had stick in the past with people saying I use models as dress-up dollies, and it did get some people’s backs up because they were black models.

James Anderson: Do you still do a lot of street casting for models?

Simon Foxton: I’m not great at that as I’m quite shy, and I’ll see someone and by the time I’ve decided to ask them, they’ve gone. But the photographer Jason Evans, who I work with, is brilliant at spotting people. And initially, with some of the people he finds, you think, 'What?' But he’s got a special eye for that. But most people you ask - even those who are initially a bit wary - deep down believe that they’re quite special, so they’re usually quite flattered, and think, "At last someone’s noticed me!"

James Anderson: How important is it to you to make images that are sexy?

Simon Foxton: Quite important, that’s often the driving force. Not that I fancy all the models - even if initially I think they’re cute, when it’s the process of working I’m not lusting after them, it’s just about getting on with the work. Basically, I like to dress nice-looking boys in silly clothes - ha, ha!

James Anderson: Enough about fashion, I hear you have a quite fancy shed in your garden. Tell me about that. I want a shed, too. Is it carpeted?

Simon Foxton: There’s a big Persian rug in there, yes. My desk is in there, and it’s heated. There’s a phone line. I’ve painted the shed a sort of mint green gloss on the inside, and it’s white on the outside. There are double doors that open out. It does get a bit damp, though, so I can’t leave all my scrapbooks in there. I don’t know why you’re so interested in my shed.

Originally published in Tank, Autumn/Winter 2004

Fashion itself, over the last decade, has become so generic and mainstream, and the stylist is more at the forefront helping the brand realise a different perception. I've never known a time that has such a distinct look as now.

Simon Foxton interviewed by Charlotte Cotton 

Simon Foxton: I see editorial photography as being about crafting these separate little worlds. Working on the initial concept means getting a feeling for the world that exists in the photographs, the different emotions and perhaps new rules for dressing. It's like creating a little scenario. I'm not sure that's the right word but it's like writing a book and describing an environment, that sort of thing. Creating a separate space, a separate reality, is the side of it that I find most interesting. 

Charlotte Cotton: How do you compile your ideas?  

Simon Foxton: I'm an avid collector of images and I have scrapbooks. A lot of it is to do with collecting existing images from all over the place. I suppose if you're asking where the inspiration comes from, it's from all sorts of things. I watch as much television as anyone, go to the cinema and galleries, and I love watching people in the street. It's a silly cliche but it's that magpie thing where you're constantly picking up bits and pieces. It's the blending of elements from different pieces that I find quite exciting. I've never called myself a fashion stylist because I don't really know if I understand fashion as a concept. I like style and I like clothing and the drama of it, but fashion as a concept is slightly alien to me. I can never quite grasp the idea that something is right this season and wrong the next. That built-in obsolescence slightly jars with my way of thinking.

Charlotte Cotton: Out of your list of influences you didn't mention the catwalk.

Simon Foxton: No I've been to quite a few shows in the past. I stopped going because it's just a bit too full-on for me. I found that I was being seduced by the designer's presentation of the clothes. You get caught up in the music, lights, staging and the models. I find it far more useful to look at the clothing once it's back at the PR offices, away from all of that hoopla, so I can take a detached view and actually see the clothes as they are.

Charlotte Cotton: Is there a difference between styling men's and women's fashion?

Simon Foxton: To be honest I so rarely do, or have done, womenswear. I'm sure it must be a different mental process but it would be difficult for me to say. There are different boundaries from year to year. Perhaps I got away with things in the eighties that I probably couldn't get away with now. I think it is far more conservative now for men.

Charlotte Cotton: So what did the launch of Arena magazine mean for you?

Simon Foxton: At last there was a magazine within which you could express yourself and your styling talents, but at the same time felt more glossy and heavyweight. It was suddenly like, 'Oh, it's a serious magazine,' because i-D was not taken that seriously at the time. It was still an underground magazine so it was just nice to have another vehicle. I've never really been a The Face person. I think people fell into two categories work-wise- it was either i-D or The Face - so with Arena it was nice to be able to do stories that would have perhaps been too staid or grown-up for i-D. As a menswear stylist, and the sort of stylist I am, I find there are so few vehicles that allow you to do the things you do. That's why I stick with i-D, Arena and the new magazines such as Self Service or Dutch. Eventually Levi's took me on as a consultant, which was a whole new world for me. I was quite taken aback because it was like getting paid for my opinion. With Levi's, there were very clear guidelines. It wasn't about fashion; it had to be about the 'authentic' and 'original' brand, so you work on ideas that fulfilled this brief but were current at the same time. I worked with them for quite a few years on the clothing side and PR - shows, shop windows and point of sale material.

Charlotte Cotton: Did you also commission photographers?

Simon Foxton: Yes, Every season they produced a catalogue, which was for the buyers and sometimes for the general public. I realise now that we had decent budgets to produce this catalogue every season and quite a free reign on how to do it. Over the years, we worked with a lot of photographers - David Sims, Nigel Shafran, Craig McDean, Sean Ellis, Donald Christie - many of them just starting out. We went away with these people and basically gave them a free hand. We set up the environment for them and said, 'We're going to Cape Cod', or wherever, 'and we need to use these clothes.' We often went without any models and hoped to find people out there in the street. You tend to get a certain repertoire of expressions and emotions from a model because they've been in front of the camera so many times. Working with Levi's, I wanted to get a sort of perceived reality. For me, you can't get that with models because they're all slightly better than life. I like people with a few more flaws to them. I think that's more rewarding, photographically.

Charlotte Cotton: In retrospect, how do you feel about the perceived notion of a rising group of British fashion photographers?

Simon Foxton: I think they're all talented people. They're all very dedicated and serious about the work they did. I never see them as a group. Maybe they're lumped together because they're of a similar generation, but they are all just doing they're own thing.

Charlotte Cotton: Do you think the role of stylists, and in particular I mean freelance stylists, has broadened out in the nineties or has just become more visible?

Simon Foxton: It has broadened out. I think stylists are now taken more seriously and are being used a lot of the time as designers. Fashion itself, over the last decade, has become so generic and mainstream, and the stylist is more at the forefront helping the brand realise a different perception. I've never known a time that has such a distinct look as now. Fashion has become a real force, whereas to me it was always more diverse and experimental.

Charlotte Cotton: It's almost as if fashion per se isn't quite the desirable thing. It's more about the representation of fashion.

Simon Foxton: Yes, very much so. This is why there has been such a rise in the number of style magazines and the concept of brands. It's through people perceiving stylists as something more than wardrobe masters that has afforded me diverse types of work. In advertising, I work closely with all sorts of different departments within one company and help to unify the company as a brand. It's been a steep learning curve.

Charlotte Cotton: Does it feel the same working on editorial photography?

Simon Foxton: Over the last few years I've been so busy with consultancy jobs that I don't do as much editorial as I used to. It's very nice every so often to be able to do an editorial job. The same process is involved in the way I think about it, but I can suddenly let out all this creative energy. I still enjoy doing it very much.

Originally published in Imperfect Beauty: The Making of Contemporary Fashion Photographs, V&A Publications, 2000