The Back of Her Head: The Fashionable Wartime Ruins of Cecil Beaton

Abstract

Cecil Beaton's 1941 photograph Fashion is indestructible, published by British Vogue, depicts a model in a couture suit looking at Blitz ruins. The image claims fashion as timeless, contrasting it with ruins, which in their destruction hold out a promise for future rebuilding, time manifesting itself in the rubble of bombsites and the fabric of clothing. By reading the photograph as a historical document, we confront photography's complex relationship with time and the ambiguous boundaries between past, present, and future which defined the experience of the Home Front.