Corinne Day 1962 - 2010

It's ironic that on the day Corinne Day dies someone writes an article about how girls apparently want to look like Christina Hendricks, not Kate Moss. They don't by the way, they just tell themselves they want to so they can eat more and seem au courant. Or maybe they're confusing themselves with men, who do want that.


Day has always been one of my favourite fashion photographers. I've talked about this before (the 90s pretty much run on a loop in my head), but her work came to the fore just as I was becoming interested in the fashion industry, and I longed to look like one of Corinne's waifs. Sadly I was simultaneously growing out of my training bra, taking me right out of the running. But her impact went way beyond ushering in (with the help of Kate Moss and Rosemary Ferguson) the era of the waif. It was a fresh perspective on what could be considered beautiful: the plain, the squalid, the flawed, the natural.


Those who made all that fuss about heroin chic missed the point. The point, and what Day brought to fashion imagery, was the inherent beauty of reality.