Fashion and Anti-Fashion - David Beatty's Portfolio

I never imagined I would shoot fashion until I was offered the chance by Media 24 of South Africa. I was less interested in the content of fashion itself than in how I could frame it, the possibilities the genre presents to tell stories with images. This was also an opportunity to showcase a number of young and talented Kenyan designers who had never before enjoyed the publicity a quality pictorial spread provides. In terms of photography there is a lot of creative freedom within the ten or twelve pages you are offered each month. I am grateful to Media24 for the freedom they allowed me to create narratives with a degree of playfulness the genre demands, and for the dedicated support team of Kenyan stylists, hair and make-up artists who helped to put Kenyan fashion on the map in this way for the first time. For me the clothes, while obviously an important element, were secondary to the stories I could tell, the aesthetics I could explore drawing on my travel experiences, and the opportunity to create atmosphere occasionally with a cinematic style of lighting.

Fashion conventionally presupposes a heightened beauty and elegance of form, but equally reflects a society’s generational change and the shift in perceptions that accompany it, and which challenge conservative values often with a desire to shock. Fashion, as well as the way it is depicted, on occasions merges with art, and becomes social commentary, carrying subtexts that express the aspirations, youthful hopes and dreams for change, even if, like fashion itself, time exposes their illusory nature.

Stories can be imbued with moods sometimes lyrical, elegiac, surreal, or even tragic: a girl submitting herself to the clinical procedures of a hospital for the sake of beauty, two girls on the run in a 1960s convertible Chevrolet, an urban ghetto story of a rebellious girl, a woman subjected to domestic violence, an African girl fantasizing about a life as an exotic Geisha girl, a girl alone with her twin sister in a seemingly haunted house. Proof that stories have wide appeal to all Kenyans was when we discovered that pages of the story ‘Urban Warrior’ had been torn out and pasted inside numerous matatus, local minibuses. Matatu culture is notoriously streetwise, and responded to the story of youthful urban discontent.Even a fashion story can communicate a relevant social message.

In an increasingly multi-polar world people's identities become many-faceted. The clothes they choose reflect the many selves projected in an age of cultural exchanges against the quest for the true self behind the masks they wear. Retrospectively this collection may reflect a time when a new spirit of celebration, freedom of expression, and youthful euphoria gave voice to a generation’s hopes for change between the end of the Arap Moi dictatorship in 2002 and the global financial crisis of 2008.

But with a demographic that increasingly favours a youth hungry for real change the passions that were lit then are the embers that still glow to light new fires of change in the years ahead. Fashion, like politics, is indeed ephemeral, here today, gone tomorrow, but it is one way we tell stories about ourselves.