No one knows fashion week better than Robert Fairer
The photographer shows us his meticulously organised archive of runway and backstage imagery.
By Ryan White
It’s hard to imagine a more detailed archive of fashion week’s golden age than the one Robert Fairer keeps in his studio, round the corner from the King’s Road. Small but meticulously catalogued by his studio director and wife, Vanessa, each of the floor to ceiling cupboards is packed with prints, negatives and contact sheets divided up season, show and country.
Warm and generous and eager to talk about the work, Robert and Vanessa rifle through these different drawers, unrolling posters, flicking through magazines and opening his computer to search his hard drives throughout our conversation. The pair are currently working on turning this different ephemera into a book. Previously they’ve published images centred around specific designers – Galliano, McQueen, Lagerfeld, Jacobs – but this will be the first book to focus simply on Robert and his work between 1993 and 2007. For Vanessa, now is the moment she intends to underline the significance of such an archive, and canonise Robert’s name alongside other era-defining fashion photographers.
As a backstage photographer, Robert occupies a more nebulous space in fashion history than the photographers who shot in studios and on locations. Finding himself at shows in the mid-90s, he was commissioned to report on what happened backstage rather than create the fantasy of an editorial. Yet, as demonstrated by the many magazine spreads laid out in front of us, oftentimes what Robert captured was just as, if not more exciting, than the stories assembled by large teams of producers, stylists and set designers with generous budgets.
After speaking with a handful of backstage photographers about what they think the profession requires these days, we wanted to hear more from someone there when fashion week was a completely different beast.
Where did your photography career start?
London College of Printing, which is now London College of Fashion under UAL. I did a couple of business degrees before that and worked for a while, then put myself through a course called Professional Photography Practice, PPP. It was a quick one-year course. “This is a camera, this is how it works.” It wasn’t a full degree. It was a short, sharp thing designed to get you into commercial photography with a portfolio and running. So that was 1992 to 1993, and then I came out and started working straight away. There was no other choice.
How quickly did backstage photography become your specialty?
First I wanted to work for National Geographic, and I’d gone away on a great trip to Africa for three months. When I came back, relationships and family meant it wasn’t really conducive to that kind of life. Somebody said, “You’ve got all the lenses and cameras, why don’t you go and shoot a fashion show?” Vanessa’s mother was heavily involved in fashion and hooked me up with Drapers Record, an industry magazine, a weekly paper about what was happening in fashion. There were a few graduate fashion shows happening, so I photographed those and did quite well. Drapers liked the pictures. Then London Fashion Week was coming up shortly after that, so I photographed a few shows there and slowly started selling pictures. It was glamorous in a way, and technically quite challenging at that time to get space at the end of the runway and expose everything correctly.