AFTER years of denial by the fashion industry that heroin use among its players had any relation to the prevalence of the so-called heroin-chic style of fashion photography, the death of 20-year-old Davide Sorrenti was like a small bomb going off.
The period of denial is over. Magazine editors are now admitting that glamourising the strung-out heroin addict's look reflected actual, and common, drug abuse among the industry's young and also had a seductive and damaging power. Evens President Clinton has responded this week by condemning the glamourising of drugs by the fashion industry.
And three months after the death by heroin overdose of Sorrenti, a promising photographer at the very heart of the scene, the magazines that published his work - and which served as catalysts for the look - are declaring that they are going to move on, with a more up-beat mood that will be visible in July issues.
It was a coincidence that Sorrenti's final fashion photos appeared - with a tribute hastily inserted after his death on February 4th - in the March issue of Detour magazine, along with another spread featuring models apparently posed in drugged stupor. But it appears that, given the amount of drug-use in the US fashion scene, and the number of magazines publishing such images, such an unhappy coincidence was bound to occur.
The eerie silence in the industry immediately following Sorrenti's death may have reflected a fear of complicity. By publishing such photos, magazine editors could be seen as enablers, implicitly condoning the lifestyle represented.
Unlike the music industry, which has rallied with interventions and programmes to, get, musicians off drugs, or the film industry, where known users have been subjected to drug tests for insurance on movies, the fashion industry has done little to combat drug abuse among the young people in its ranks.
Michael Williams, a photographer and a friend of the Sorrenti family, said all that is changing. "Photographers now know if you take heroin-type pictures, it's out of fashion," he said. At a recent meeting at I-D, the English magazine that first published the work of photographers specialising in the look, such as Juergen Teller, Craig McDean, David Sims and Terry Richardson, Williams asked what direction the editors were taking.
They literally said, "We are not looking for any heroin pictures'," Williams recalled. "That's what they started off saying. They want everything positive and healthy. And I-D isn't only the cutting edge - it's the grass-roots leader."
For three years, the defence for such photography was that it represented rebellion against false, air-brushed images. The rationale that it reflects a new idea of beauty has had a long, successful run, considering how apparent it has been to almost, any observer that the models are posed to look sickly, if not drug-addled. They have nonetheless been commissioned because they help sell clothes to young people longing to be cool. The glibness of the industry in its rationalisations harks back to the Studio 54 era, when a frenetic cocaine esthetic was explained away in much the same manner.
THE heroin-chic photos were inspired by the real-life subjects of the photojournalism of Larry Clark in the 1960s and Nan Goldin in the 1970s, images that could be considered deterrents, since they eloquently showed the seedy desperation of addicts. In the 1990s derivation, the staged fashion photos are far from deterrents.
"When people are using, they are almost invariably recruiters," said Dr Mitchell S. Rosenthal, the psychiatrist who is president of Phoenix House, a US-wide network of drug-treatment centres. "Because they are in the culture of the communications business, they are communicating a message of acceptability. They are also communicating that this is not dangerous: an informed or smart user who's got it together will know what to do. They are lowering the threshold for use. In a sense, they go forward as proselytisers."
In the last three years, some version of the look has been seen in almost every fashion magazine.
"It's been used as an accessory in every shoot," said Dewey Nicks, a photographer whose cheerful snap-shot-like photos do not fall into the heroin-chic category. "It's the Manolo Blahniks of this particular period," he added; referring to the designer shoes.
When more commercial photographers began copying the style for high-profile advertising campaigns such as those for Calvin Klein over the last four years, the look went mainstream. As did the message.
"The Calvin Klein kind of campaign is not making any connection with how dangerous this is," Rosenthal said. "They're out there using those images to promote their business and thinking this is just another fashion statement rather than a statement of encouragement or invitation or acceptability to use drugs. It's particularly shocking in the case of Klein himself, who has publicly acknowledged his own drug problem." Klein checked in to the Hazelden Foundation, a drug and rehabilitation centre outside Minneapolis, in May 1988.
Klein declined to comment.
Sorrenti was part of a family that his mother, Francesca Sorrenti, 47, said was being referred to as "the Corleones" of fashion photography. His older brother, Mario, 25, is best known for the Calvin Klein Obsession campaign he photographed, featuring his then-girlfriend, Kate Moss. His mother's photography has been seen in Interview, The Face, Italian Glamour and Vogue. His sister, Vanina, 24, is a fashion stylist.
Among Davide Sorrenti's clients were Detour, Interview, Surface, Ray Gun and I-D magazines and the Japanese fashion companies Hysteric Glamour and Matsuda. He had been dating James King, who just turned IS, and who is a rising model who was the subject of a cover story in the New York Times Magazine a year before his death. In the article, she admitted to getting involved in drugs at IS, when she started modelling, and insisted she was no longer using them.
Sorrenti became a fixture at fashion events with his mother when he was 18 and first picked up a camera. He suffered from thalassemia, a genetic blood disorder, and needed transfusions twice a month. The disease made him look half his age.
"He'd become New York's darling because he looked so young," Francesca Sorrenti said. She said he was both a homeboy and a homebody, friends with skateboarders and graffiti artists (his tag-name was "Argue", which can be seen throughout the city), but he also painted, played golf and liked opera. His death, in Manhattan, has motivated his mother to become an outspoken opponent of not only the heroin-chic imagery, but also the use of under-age models on strenuous fashion shoots, where drugs are increasingly part of the picture.
On the ABC news programme 20/20 and in magazines such as French Vogue, she has called for more responsibility on the part of editors.
"Davide was allowed by a lot off editors to do whatever he pleased," Ms Sorrenti said. "I'm saying, figure out why you're getting tons of hate-mail."
The mail Detour received for its druggy photos included a letter from the actress Juliette Lewis, published in the May issue. "This was the most deliberate junkie layout I have ever seen," she wrote, "and I don't know why this is being allowed, as it is promoting such a degraded state."
Magazines like Detour and I-D sometimes accept work rejected elsewhere as too way-out. They have been the showcase for new photographers and ideas often later seized upon by the mainstream.
"Davide's death has highlighted a problem," said the editor of I-D. Terry Jones,
Detour's style director, Long Nguyen, said, "With Davide's death and the mess of this look, we realised how powerful fashion pictures are.
Acknowledgments that the heroin look was problematic now come suspiciously easily - this look, in fashion circles, had in any case run its course. It is, however, difficult to find a young photographer today not experimenting with the style.
"They want to show what their world is about," Ms Sorrenti said. "Then it becomes a competitive thing. `My world is hipper than yours.' In the photography world everyone started wanting to outdo everyone else - `how much can we shock?' And the advertisers allowed it to happen."
But Ms Sorrenti says ending the drug problem in fashion won't come from changing the esthetic of the photos. "The bottom line is these pictures can be smiling all they want and the girl behind the smile might be on drugs," she said. "Heroin chic isn't what we're projecting. It's what we are. Our business has become heroin chic. Someone taking pictures of that magnitude has to have experienced hard drugs."
The Sorrenti family isn't the only one mourning for Davide Sorrenti. Terry Jones, the editor of I-D, has a 21-year-old son, Matt, who photographs for the magazine and was Davide's friend. "Yes, I guess he did slightly see the glamorous side," Matt Jones said of Davide Sorrenti. "He also saw the real side of it. And he glamourised it himself, which is the sad thing. It was a whole circle. He glamourised it, and got caught up in it a bit"
Hindsight has led to a lot of finger-pointing. Photographers blame the modelling agencies for not monitoring their charges, and the agencies point to photographers, art, directors, stylists, and magazine editors for creating the look, no matter what state the models arrive in for the shoot.
"I think no one really knows for sure which came first," Williams said. "Heroin use was up at the time the photography started, and a lot of models are taking heroin now."
Michael Flutie, the owner of Company Management, a modelling agency, said many models with Company, including James King, were deeply affected by Sorrenti's death. "She has taken it in a positive way and got her own life together as a result," Flutie said.
What Sorrenti's death has revealed is that fashion photography is indeed a mirror of the tightknit world that produces the photographs. And as long as drugs are unchecked in the industry, that image will be difficult to change.
"THE issue is to know the difference between mindless, unconscious commercialism that's being done in the name of edginess and truth, versus real truth, which always has such human qualities that it reveals something about the human condition that, we need," said Ingrid Sischy, the editor of Interview, which has published photos by Sorrenti and other young photographers, but none that could be called heroin chic. "To me, one can always tell the difference between a photograph that has substance and one that's just abusing the mirror to life that photography can be Those are the pictures that cheapen human life."