Corinne Day: 'Be proud of holes in your jumper’
Lucy Davies celebrates the work of photographer Corinne Day, who has died at the age of 48
By Lucy Davies Published: 6:09PM BST 02 Sep 2010
Kate Moss (detail), published in British Vogue, June 1993 Photo: CORINNE DAY
Twenty years ago, the photographer Corinne Day, who has died of a brain tumour at the age of 48, walked into Storm model agency and laid eyes on a 16-year-old Kate Moss. “I looked at her,” she later recalled, “and thought, 'She’s like me.’ She was cheeky, and I really liked that. That’s how it all began. We helped each other out.”
What began was more far-reaching than either of them could have foreseen. Kate Moss was chalk to the Eighties cheese in fashion model terms. Her peculiar blend of gangly, gap-toothed elegance lent her a vulnerability that appealed to a generation tired of high-octane gloss.
Day took Moss to Camber Sands, East Sussex, and photographed her running around the beach wearing nothing but a feathered headdress and a pair of Birkenstocks. Moss is breathless, laughing, and iced with perspiration. The photographs, published in style bible The Face captured the zeitgeist with such acuity that they changed everything.
“Fashion photography had always been about fantasy,” Day said. “I wanted to take it in the opposite direction… The best thing I did for fashion was bringing it down to earth, bringing a documentary quality to it. I wanted to put in that feeling of youth culture. After my pictures came out, the sale of Birkenstock sandals skyrocketed!”
Day had unwittingly opened the door on a new aesthetic that had been simmering at lower levels. As the Eighties drew to a close, a handful of editors and art directors had thrown caution to the wind and commissioned photographers such as Robert Frank, who had produced a series of black-and-white images in an unposed, “street” style for an Alberto Aspesi catalogue, and Saul Leiter, who was given free reign on a Comme des Garçons campaign, his images of grubby, discarded shoes and clothing half-submerged in puddles covered in grit utterly out of kilter with the prevailing style.
At the arty end of photography and film, a gritty, diaristic style had begun insinuating its way into the mainstream. Day took the work she saw in Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Larry Clark’s Tulsa and made the leap from art to commerce. Encouraged by the healthy response to the Camber Sands story, she began photographing unscrubbed models in bleak surroundings.
Her images tuned into a grey, post-Thatcherite Britain and ushered in a new type of beauty that was dubbed “dirty realism”. In discarding the iconically handsome, goddess body, she had turned her back on 60 years of fashion photography. Her wan, pallid subjects looked starving and mildly under the influence. The images came to stand for the Nineties as much as the film Trainspotting, and were smiliarly charged with promoting “heroin chic”.
Her career as fashion photographer ended much as it had begun – with her by now close friend Kate Moss. Commissioned to photograph an underwear feature for Vogue, she took Moss to a grubby flat and immortalised her in sagging knickers against a backdrop of sloppily strung fairy lights. The pictures published several months later, prompted a tidal wave of vitriol.
The then editor of Cosmopolitan, Marcelle D’Argy Smith, branded them “hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the paedophile market.” Day’s three-year run “poking fun at fashion” was over. “Half-way through the shoot,” she said, “I realised that it wasn’t fun for [Kate] any more, and that she was no longer my best friend but had become a 'model’. She hadn’t realised how beautiful she was, and when she did, I found I didn’t think her beautiful any more.”
Looking at the controversial photograph today, it seems remarkably conventional. The wheel of fashion has turned again and we’ve moved into a posed, staged world that harks back to a Sixties aesthetic of glamour and control.
But Day’s work fired the imagination of a whole generation of photographers. Juergen Teller, Craig McDean, David Sims and Glen Luchford are just some who took her underground look and fed it to the fashion monthlies. Later, Day vanished into documentary and autobiographical photography, but her work ignited a revolution in our ideas of what was beautiful and desirable.
“It is all about freedom, really,” Day said “and being proud of the holes in your jumper.”
“Fashion photography had always been about fantasy,” Day said. “I wanted to take it in the opposite direction… The best thing I did for fashion was bringing it down to earth, bringing a documentary quality to it. I wanted to put in that feeling of youth culture. After my pictures came out, the sale of Birkenstock sandals skyrocketed!”
Day had unwittingly opened the door on a new aesthetic that had been simmering at lower levels. As the Eighties drew to a close, a handful of editors and art directors had thrown caution to the wind and commissioned photographers such as Robert Frank, who had produced a series of black-and-white images in an unposed, “street” style for an Alberto Aspesi catalogue, and Saul Leiter, who was given free reign on a Comme des Garçons campaign, his images of grubby, discarded shoes and clothing half-submerged in puddles covered in grit utterly out of kilter with the prevailing style.
At the arty end of photography and film, a gritty, diaristic style had begun insinuating its way into the mainstream. Day took the work she saw in Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Larry Clark’s Tulsa and made the leap from art to commerce. Encouraged by the healthy response to the Camber Sands story, she began photographing unscrubbed models in bleak surroundings.
Her images tuned into a grey, post-Thatcherite Britain and ushered in a new type of beauty that was dubbed “dirty realism”. In discarding the iconically handsome, goddess body, she had turned her back on 60 years of fashion photography. Her wan, pallid subjects looked starving and mildly under the influence. The images came to stand for the Nineties as much as the film Trainspotting, and were smiliarly charged with promoting “heroin chic”.
Her career as fashion photographer ended much as it had begun – with her by now close friend Kate Moss. Commissioned to photograph an underwear feature for Vogue, she took Moss to a grubby flat and immortalised her in sagging knickers against a backdrop of sloppily strung fairy lights. The pictures published several months later, prompted a tidal wave of vitriol.
The then editor of Cosmopolitan, Marcelle D’Argy Smith, branded them “hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the paedophile market.” Day’s three-year run “poking fun at fashion” was over. “Half-way through the shoot,” she said, “I realised that it wasn’t fun for [Kate] any more, and that she was no longer my best friend but had become a 'model’. She hadn’t realised how beautiful she was, and when she did, I found I didn’t think her beautiful any more.”
Looking at the controversial photograph today, it seems remarkably conventional. The wheel of fashion has turned again and we’ve moved into a posed, staged world that harks back to a Sixties aesthetic of glamour and control.
But Day’s work fired the imagination of a whole generation of photographers. Juergen Teller, Craig McDean, David Sims and Glen Luchford are just some who took her underground look and fed it to the fashion monthlies. Later, Day vanished into documentary and autobiographical photography, but her work ignited a revolution in our ideas of what was beautiful and desirable.
“It is all about freedom, really,” Day said “and being proud of the holes in your jumper.”
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