Heroin chic no longer a part of the picture

THIS is a serious health warning: looking at fashion photographs can be damaging to your long-term well-being. Such would appear to be the gist of President Clinton's statement: last week denouncing "heroin chic" photography for making drug addiction seem "glamorous and sexy and cool".

The President's remarks came in response to a new epidemic of heroin usage in the United States and the death earlier this year of 20-year-old photographer, Davide Sorrenti. For the past three months, his mother, Francesca Sorrenti, also a photographer, has been faxing fashion editors around the world, urging them to "pay attention to what they are doing". According to Ms Sorrenti, photographic spreads of young models looking stupefied as though on drugs have potentially dangerous consequences.

President Clinton evidently agrees with this point of view; his widely reported remarks accused the fashion industry of "the glorification of heroin" which "is not good for any society".

The fashion industry is publicly decried on a regular basis. Its high profile, together with a series of inherent absurdities and inconsistencies, make the business more vulnerable than most to attack. Fashion manages to be both extremely silly and, from an economic perspective, very serious indeed. Because of the industry's heavy dependence on marketing and publicity, it has a high profile and is constantly criticised for providing women with a distorted image of how they should be. Fashion photography, through its use of young - and thin models, has frequently been accused on inciting eating disorders among young girls, although no evidence for this has ever been presented.

The latest assault will come as no surprise to an industry accustomed to defending itself against media assaults. Indeed, both in the United States and Britain, fashion designers, photographers and writers have been quick to demonstrate their anti-drug credentials.

Scapegoats will always be sought each time there is a fresh outbreak of drug addiction and whenever the effects of drug taking are shown, suggestions invariably follow that this will encourage rather than deter potential users. Last year's film Trainspotting, for example, despite presenting a distinctly unglamorous view of heroin addiction was nonetheless subject to sustained criticism for tackling the topic at all.

At the moment, heroin - which until recently was favoured only by the poorest sections of society - has achieved more widespread popularity: because of lowered prices; according to weekend reports, in New York a heroin hit can cost as little as $6. But its usage has been a favourite subject among certain photographers for more than a decade.

The best-known exemplar of this trend is Nan Goldin, a former heroin addict who turned her lens on other impoverished drug users. Gold in, who was given a retrospective exhibition in New York's Whitney Museum last year, has been enormously influential on photography in the 1990s, as has Larry Clark whose film, Kids, explored similar material.

Fashion photography has not been immune to this trend. It is, after all, in the nature of fashion that all passing fads are absorbed as quickly as they appear. Fashion photographers - such as Juergen Teller and Corinne Day have made this kind of low-life realism the hallmark of their work. Day was responsible for taking the first pictures of Kate Moss in the early 1990s, criticised at the time because, like many other models starting their careers, Moss was so young and thin. She was later photographed by her boyfriend of the time, Mario Sorrenti - older brother of the late Davide Sorrenti - for a Calvin Klein advertising campaign which emphasised her waif-like qualities and excited fresh denunciations.

Klein is only one of the fashion designers who favoured this kind of wasted look among models, precisely because it was fashionable at the time But in order to survive, fashion must move on and the type of photographs which earned President Clinton's wrath last week are no longer in vogue. Their moment has passed and they now look dated; the mood in fashion photography now is for uplifting, cheery pictures. Essentially, therefore, the fad for so-called "heroin chic" photography was transient and a response to a far wider movement in this medium. Fashion photographers did not initiate the trend, they simply responded to the mood of the moment. Of course an argument could still be advanced that because fashion photographs are much more widely circulated than those by artists such as Nan Goldin their influence on society is correspondingly wider.

HOWEVER, an examination of other trends in fashion photography suggests the potential for influence here is even more transient than in other aspects of the business. In the later 1980s and early 1990s, two American photographers, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, encouraged the use of muscle-bound beach boys in fashion shoots; for a while, it was almost impossible to open a fashion magazine without seeing a succession of bleached surfers on its pages. Yet there was no corresponding global increase in demand for body-building steroids or even in gym subscriptions. The Ritts/Weber style was a temporary phenomenon which left no real legacy and now looks simply passe.

Fashion is an intensely consumer-responsive industry. It may wish to give the impression of being an initiator but the reality is that fashion reacts to trends and reinterprets them for the marketplace. Once the tastes of that market change, so too does fashion. The demand for "heroin chic" work has passed and the fashion caravan accordingly moves elsewhere. Sadly, the demand for heroin is likely to prove less transient.