The Strange Abstraction of Fashion Images

A strange thing about fashion is how 'meta' all the images are. "Here are photos of people looking fashionable while plausibly doing ordinary things." But of course they are not usually images of people doing anything at all except posing as people doing things. It's funny that we model our outfits on people plausibly wearing those outfits to do things rather than on people actually wearing those outfits to do things. Fashion images are hypothetical; floating, detached from life, like tourists. Even the images presented by clothes bloggers, the more professional they are, seem somehow unreal. Not knowing who these people are or what their lives or like accomplishes this.

Perhaps fashion images have to be detached from life; otherwise, the activities shown , or the person, would upstage the clothes in their attractiveness or interest. If I were to be shown an image of the scenarios I most desire to happen, I would not focus on the clothes.

Perhaps I just feel that the image is incomplete until the person wearing the clothes is really in view. This goes with my general contempt for ready-to-wear; it shouldn't exist. Clothes are for particular people and particular purposes. Abstract clothes are something else entirely; they're ideas, or artistic compositions; often both.