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Fashion Without The Fashion

Coco began working commercially as a photographer even while completing her studies in fine art, and both her editorial and commercial work for fashion brands, have been published in magazines like Vogue, Dazed and Documents Journal. This part of her practice , which is deeply connected with her approach to art in general, nevertheless shows both the strong influence of classic fashion photography, and her immediate responses to contemporary pop culture. Her technique for photographing her subjects, even within the limits of the professional assignments she is given, is to engage with the personality, character and posture of her model, so that in many ways her editorial commissions often become portraits of the young people with whom she works. Capitan also challenges some of the conventions of the ways in which photography is normally used in advertising and editorial work, introducing a kind of knowing, self-reflexive humour. In this way her images become as much about contemporary fashion photography as examples of it. She has also sought, increasingly, to fuse aspects of her broader artistic practice into her approach to fashion, using constructed interiors, narratives, painting and text. Having taken the images from their original contexts on the pages of magazines, and divorced them from their original commercial functions, Capitan describes these works as Fashion without the fashion, evoking perhaps the less-used second meaning of the word ‘without’ – which is ‘outside’ rather than ‘lacking’.

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Dust: Bums & Tumbs, London, 2017