Why Fashion?

Why Fashion?

All business relationships are complex and often more so than personal relations. But adding the artistic, emotional and illogical aspects of the arts business to the pot really gets things boiling.

 The fashion industry is a mix of business strategy, emotional uncertainty, artistic need and uncontrollable compulsions that would leave a business coach reeling in its wake. How anyone survives in this industry has always been one of the questions asked by many and understood by so few.

 What I do find interesting is that those who do succeed to a certain degree in this metier do so for all of the reasons most of those outside of the circle can never really comprehend. In fact those who do do what they do in this business would probably not know why they are doing what they are doing neither. Those who do succeed do so more often than not with a certain retrospective humility that can only be understood in hindsight. While they were on the road going to where ever they thought they were going, they knew one thing for sure is that they had to go there.

Where is there? “There” is the build up to that orgiastic climax called the collections and all of the rigamarole that comes with the process. What leads up to them and what follows are in my estimation two entirely different animals. I would liken it to pre-prod the experience and post prod. But to be even more specific I would break it down to pre-prod the pitch, the product, the presentation, the pitch, pre-production the shoot and the product etc, etc, etc.

 “Now WTF does he mean by all of the above” you ask? Fashion is an ongoing cycle with peaks and troughs perpetually cycling like the planets rotating around the sun and as the solar system spinning within our galaxy and on and on and on.

 What I find fascinating is the constant re-birth aspect of fashion that allows us creative types to invent, reinvent, copy, regurgitate and produce on an ongoing conveyor belt of creative product output.  Hey!!! Maybe that is why I like this business. It IS predictable in it’s unpredictability, because the unpredictability happens every season. In fact it happens all the time in all of the fashion capitals and fashion satellites around the world and that is good for us creative types.

 So what started as an essay on what I thought I would write about, ended as a tiny revelation that I didn’t consider until the last sentence of this post. That is just like Fashion…

About Benjamin Kanarek
Fashion and Beauty Photographer. Some of the magazines I have shot for include: VOGUE (China, Portugal, Brazil, Italia, Paris and South America & Mexico editions), RG VOGUE Brazil, Harper’s BAZAAR (China, en Español & Latin America, Hong Kong, Italy editions), L’Officiel Paris, ELLE (Spain, Portugal and Greece editions), Madame Figaro (France), Cosmopolitan (France and Italy editions), Glamour (France), Votre Beauté, Jardin des Modes, Dépêche Mode, New York Daily News, Fashion District News, New York Times Magazine, W (British edition), WWD, Fashion Magazine (Canada), Flare (Canada), Oyster, Tank, WestEast…