You Can’t Lose Something You Never Had: Longing and the fashion photograph

This conference paper is part of a themed panel titled 'Fashion's Image: Haunting, Obsession and Fantasy'.

Abstract: There are a select few fashion images imprinted in my memory. At first casually encountered, they have come to haunt me, what they depicted ever beyond my grasp yet distinctly remembered. More powerful than mere remembrances of images once seen, recalling these photographs- and, more significantly, the garments they depicted- elicits a longing not unlike unrequited love. In the case of each, my impulse is impossible: I have borne these images for years, during which time I have never seen any of the pictured garments in the material “flesh”, let alone owned them. This paper seeks to map the complexities of this phenomenon, drawing on Young’s work on fashion imagery and desire as well as Benjamin’s partially-developed theory of the ‘dialectical image’ to examine the curious and lingering possession elicited by encountering the unattainable in fashion photographs.