An open letter to runway models: Slow down!

Now that fashion weeks for spring 2016 have wrapped, I’ve decided I can’t keep quiet anymore. Models need to slow the hell down.

Most march down the runway on such a tear it’s impossible to grab images for social media. The thrilling exception this season? Dolce & Gabbana where many of the girls carried iPhones and stopped several times to take selfies that were displayed on giant screens. Every time a model halted, hundreds of hands in the room excitedly went up to capture the moment. You could sense the relief that went through the audience. “Yay. She stopped. I have a chance of getting a sharp shot.”

In the olden days (that would be the ‘80s, when I started attending the shows) models came out onto the runway and stopped. They walked halfway down the runway and stopped again. And then they walked to the end of the runway and stopped and turned. And, you guessed it, they stopped two more times, halfway back and before exiting.

This is because autofocus was a relatively new invention and most cameras didn’t have it. Runways were built with trenches around them for the photographers to stand in. They shot up toward the ceiling which wasn’t the most attractive angle, but there was no alternative. The models froze on their journey to give the photographers time to focus.

Towards the end of the ‘80s, more cameras came out with autofocus which, combined with a long lens, enabled photographers to move to the back of the room and aim their lenses down the center of the runway. There were still lots of technical challenges that required professional skill (and these haven’t gone away). But the distance and centered perspective changed the style of runway images dramatically.

Around the same time, Japanese designers such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme Des Garcons arrived in Paris bringing a remote, unsexy style of runway walking with them. It was almost as if they wiped the models’ personalities away, forcing us to concentrate solely on the clothes. Girls seemed as if they were in a trance, with the best of them, Canadian Kirsten Owen, throwing a nasty glare at the photographers when she got to the end of the runway.

As seasons passed, and the glamazon era of Linda, Christy and Naomi gave way to Kate Moss and heroin chic, stomping down the runway looking blank or bored became the norm.

A smile on a catwalk is still as rare as a pink crocodile Birkin. It was refreshing, avant-garde even, to see models chuckling and grinning at Moschino earlier this month as they squeezed through car wash brushes on stage.

Everyone there raised camera phones to capture the fun. How many of us walked away with more than one or two usable images though?

I get that show producers like the energy of models racing down a runway to a thumping beat. But what they gain in momentum, they lose in publicity. Models need to slow down so we have something at the end of the show so we actually have something to share. Or maybe the answer is to hire a professional photographer to shoot for social media. Then I could go back to doing what I am supposed to be doing as an editor: assessing the clothes.

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