What is the relationship between fashion, photography and the domestic space? A new book explores

Establishing the relationship between fashion and the domestic space in the introduction of his new book, The Domestic Stage: When Fashion Image Comes Home, Adam Murray inserts an image from Hulu’s The Kardashians: Sat crossed legged in her closet room, Kim Kardashian appears flanked by rails of muted tones, potential outfits laid on the ground (a few weeks after we speak, I realise I have a near identical screenshot on my laptop). ‘In this instance, the home and the decisions made in the presentation of this space are key components of an aspirational lifestyle,’ writes Murray. Kardashian would subsequently feature in Balenciaga’s 2024 Closet campaign, shot by Inez & Vinoodh in her wardrobe.

While reality TV, and before it high-society portraiture, has long been a vehicle of access for identifying style and taste, less pored over is how photographers making work that exists in the fashion realm have used the domestic as a third space, in addition to the studio or the street. ‘The basic start [of this book] was my interest in fashion image, and how that is often not dealt with in an interesting way,’ explains the curator and MA Fashion Image Pathway Leader at Central Saint Martins. ‘So it's arguing that fashion doesn't exist in isolation, that it's just another part of visual culture.’

The Domestic Stage: When Fashion Image Comes Home by Adam Murray

Indeed, not all of the artists featured are explicitly fashion names: Sarah Jones for example, came to prominence in the late 1990s with Francis Place/Mulberry Lodge, exhibited at Maureen Paley (1997) and Anton Kern Galley (1999). In The Domestic Stage, her striking portraits of the women of the Hilton and Bush families, originally shot for an ‘American Beauties’ story for American Vogue in 2000, are presented alongside her A/W 2024 campaign for Dior; the models mirror the body language and arrangement of her earlier subjects, while the backdrop is similarly grand but lived in. ‘I’m interested in spaces that are domestic but not necessarily an actual home,’ she told Murray in February 2024; another shoot, featuring then unknown actors, was made at the Ideal Home exhibition.

‘I've always been outside of big cities and had a much more home based lifestyle – work that's made outside of major cities has always interested me,’ continues Murray, reflecting on the book’s earliest genesis. Initially drawn to the menswear title Vogue Hommes International, and specifically the period between 1997 and 2001 when Phil Bicker was art director (‘the photography was the best, most interesting fashion photography you've seen’), in 2017 he wrote a piece for Aperture about how the magazine had shaped style (primarily by producing fashion shoots where the clothes weren’t the sole focus). The Domestic Stage was largely born out of this. A further tenet, he notes, was highlighting that image makers were engaging with the domestic space prior to Covid and the arrival of TikTok.

Designed by Ben McLaughlin, the new book wears a dust jacket that echoes the hard-wearing properties of a good tablecloth, bringing together 23 artists working between the 1990s (when the influential ‘Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort’ exhibition was staged at MoMa, and The Barbican put on ‘Who’s Looking at the Family?’), through to the current day. Divided into three chapters – Relationships, Performance and Control, and The Imagined House – it features established names like Tina Barney and Nigel Shafran, as well as recent graduates, including Maya Golyshkina and Jesse Glazzard, mostly accompanied by interviews. ‘I'm always interested in speaking to the people who’ve made the work, rather than trying to make some kind of interpretation or assumption,’ shares Murray.

Perhaps the most familiar images are Corinne Day’s intimate pictures of Kate Moss, practically sans make-up, posing in T-shirts and pants in the model’s own flat. When they were first published in British Vogue in 1993, the photographs came under heavy fire and were labelled ‘tragic’ – today they are widely considered as a seminal work that captured the zeitgeist of the time. ‘The Corinne Day shoot was kind of a key turning point. It's hard to grasp how jarring it must have been for audiences to see,’ offers Murray, adding that he ‘didn't want [the book] to be this pure nostalgia thing. I wanted to make sure it was relevant to work being made currently, and linking it all back.’

Carrie Mae Weems, whose Kitchen Table Series appeared in both the MoMa and Barbican shows, and whose Portraits of Fatherhood work – featuring A$AP Rocky for a 2024 Bottega Veneta campaign – features on the book’s cover, is maybe the best example of this. ‘Her work was a constant reference [I found], though obviously that wasn't in a fashion context,’ says Murray, referencing Kitchen Table Series. ‘When the Bottega campaign came out, it was a really nice turn on it; it's not about her anymore, it's about representations of Black men and fatherhood. By placing it in a fashion context, it’s a great example of what a fashion image can be in terms of how it reaches an audience – I imagine more people have seen that than the original series. Exhibitions, books and galleries can be intimidating – and you have to know they exist; a fashion image, you're just going to encounter.’

The Domestic Stage: When Fashion Image Comes Home is published by Thames & Hudson, available at Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.