The Panel Celebrated the Work Their Industry Would Have Rejected
13 of the 25 images were not made as fashion photographs. 2 of the 6 panelists were working photographers. 0 of the gatekeeping questions came from either of them.
T Magazine recently convened six industry figures to select the 25 most influential fashion photographs of the past century. Count the images. Thirteen of the twenty-five were not made as fashion photographs. The panel noticed this, repeatedly, and kept stopping to debate whether a given image really belonged. What they didn't notice is who was doing the asking. That asymmetry is the actual story.
"Hiroshima Chic" Is Now Entry Number Three
When Rei Kawakubo brought Comme des Garçons to Paris in 1981, critics did not celebrate the collection. They called it "Hiroshima chic." The deconstructed silhouettes, the asymmetry, the refusal to flatter the body in any conventionally understood way: none of it read as fashion to the people whose job it was to say what fashion was. Hans Feurer's 1983 photograph of model Susan Hess for a Comme des Garçons catalog, the image that the T 25 panel placed at number three on their list, exists inside that same rejection. The photograph is kinetic, abstract, joyful in the way the panelist Ian Bradley described it: "It helped ground the avant-garde by making it joyful." Kawakubo's work went from being dismissed outright to being described, forty years later, as "a foundational influence for generations of designers." The Feurer image went from catalog photography for a label the industry hadn't accepted yet to a touchstone that the panel says made the leaping model in editorial fashion photography possible. The rehabilitation is total. The original resistance has been reframed as proof of how radical the work was, which is a neat institutional trick: claim the radicalism without acknowledging you were on the other side of it.
Comme des Garçons is not an isolated case. Corinne Day's 1990 portrait of a sixteen-year-old Kate Moss for The Face, entry seventeen on the list, was the opening image of what became known as "heroin chic." The moral panic that followed Day's 1993 British Vogue shoot of Moss in mismatched underwear in her London flat was loud and sustained. The work was called irresponsible, damaging, and exploitative. It is now described in the T 25 write-up as the image that "kicked off a new era." Robert Frank submitted "The Americans" to American publishers in the late 1950s. Every one of them rejected it. The book was published in France first. When it finally appeared in the United States, critics called it bleak, hostile, and un-American. "Rodeo, New York City," one of those rejected photographs, is entry twenty-one on a list of the most influential fashion images ever made. Diane Arbus's work was included in MoMA's 1967 "New Documents" exhibition, a show that was itself a break from the photographic establishment, not an endorsement from it. She is entry twenty-two.
The pattern is consistent. The institution celebrates the transgression only after the transgression has been absorbed, monetized, and made safe. At that point the celebration costs nothing and signals sophistication. Embracing the work in real time, when it was actually disruptive, would have cost something.
Fashion Has Always Hired Artists.
That Is Not the Same as Welcoming Them.
The T 25 panel defined fashion photography broadly enough to include "the work of fine artists, street-style photographers, backstage and nightlife photographers and paparazzi," provided the image "later inspired a designer, collection or trend, or changed how we might think about style." That is a generous and defensible definition. It is also a retroactive one. The industry did not extend that generosity at the time of making.
What the definition obscures is a distinction that has existed since the mass-market fashion magazine emerged in the early twentieth century. There have always been two kinds of fashion image: the trade image, made for buyers and showrooms, built to show the garment accurately and efficiently, and the public-facing editorial or advertising image, made to manufacture desire in someone who was not yet in the room. Hearst and Conde Nast understood this as early as the 1920s. The public-facing image has always needed to do something the buyer's sheet could not. It needed to stop a reader, hold attention, and transfer a feeling. That required hiring artists, not catalog photographers, because artists knew how to make images that operated on that level.
But hiring artists is not the same as understanding them, and it is not the same as giving them latitude. Richard Avedon shot portraits, anti-war reportage, and nudes across his career. He did not become a different photographer when he walked into a Calvin Klein studio. The aesthetic intelligence that produced his 1969 triptych of Andy Warhol and his creative circle is the same intelligence that produced the Brooke Shields campaign in 1980. Irving Penn shot cigarette butts, tribal portraits, and platinum still lifes. He shot 165 Vogue covers. He was one photographer with one continuous practice and multiple clients. The billing designation, "fashion photographer," describes who was paying the invoice. It does not describe what kind of photographer Penn was, because Penn was simply a photographer.
The industry's habit of treating "fashion photographer" as a category with hard walls, rather than as a job description, is what produces the confusion the T 25 panel kept running into. The confusion is not about the images. It is about a framework that was never accurate to begin with.
The Photographers on the Panel Were Not Confused
Here is what the T 25 panel discussion actually shows, when you read it against the grain.
Six people voted. Two of them are working photographers: Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, who have spent decades shooting for brands including Jil Sander, Yohji Yamamoto, and major editorial clients. The other four are a model (Linda Evangelista), a fashion designer (Cate Holstein, founder of Khaite), a creative director (Patrick Li, T Magazine), and a stylist (Ian Bradley). The moderator, Nick Haramis, is the editor at large of T Magazine.
The questions challenging whether an image belonged in the conversation came almost entirely from the non-photographers. Evangelista asked whether Cindy Sherman qualifies as a fashion photographer. Holstein raised the difficulty of artists crossing over into fashion. Li, the creative director, was the most consistently preoccupied with the boundary question, asking whether certain images could be made today, noting the tension between commerce and art, observing what graphic design does or does not make an image indelible.
Van Lamsweerde's answer to the Sherman question was immediate and flat: "I think she's the biggest influence." No category anxiety. No hedging about whether Sherman belongs. Matadin does not question Robert Frank's presence on the list. Neither photographer performs the boundary maintenance that the non-photographers keep returning to, because neither photographer needs to. They understand from the inside that the work is continuous. The camera, the eye, and the aesthetic logic travel with the photographer from job to job. What changes is the client, not the photographer.
This is not a coincidence. It is what fluency looks like. When you have fully internalized the practice, the rules become invisible. They have been absorbed into instinct. The person who learned the rules as a way of gaining access to the field still needs them as visible scaffolding. Remove the scaffolding, and they lose their orientation. This is why the most devoted fans of any genre are often the most rigid about its boundaries, and why the musicians making work inside that genre are frequently the least bothered. The fan learned the genre from the outside in. The musician learned it by making it, which revealed immediately how porous and negotiable the walls actually are.
The fashion industry version of this runs deep. The insider who has never operated a camera, who has learned to read fashion images as a language of status, aspiration, and belonging, will experience any image that does not speak that language as foreign. The working photographer, who produces and manipulates visual language across multiple contexts, experiences categories as administrative rather than essential. Sherman is the biggest influence. Frank is on the list. Goldin's dress is the main character. These are not controversial positions if you are a photographer. They are only controversial if the category boundary is still doing cognitive work for you.
The Industry That Dismissed This Work Is Now Its Curator
The cycle that produced the T 25 list is not unique to fashion photography. It is the standard relationship between institutions and disruption. Punk was suppressed by radio programmers and label executives who later commissioned anniversary box sets and retrospectives. Hip-hop was dismissed, then monitored, then absorbed, then celebrated. Grunge was an embarrassment to the mainstream music industry until it was the mainstream music industry. The Sex Pistols are on postage stamps. The celebration is only possible because the threat has been neutralized. What was dangerous when it was alive is safely historical now, which means it can be honored without cost.
Fashion moves through this cycle faster than most industries, possibly because its relationship to time is more acute. A season is the basic unit. What was radical in one becomes the reference point in the next, and the citation in the one after that. "Heroin chic" took roughly thirty years to travel from moral panic to entry seventeen on the most influential list. The Comme des Garçons dismissal took about the same. Robert Frank's rehabilitation took longer, but Frank was operating in a different register entirely: he was not trying to enter the fashion conversation, and the fashion industry had to come to him.
What the T 25 list does, without meaning to, is document this cycle in unusually candid form. The panel members are on the record celebrating images that their industry, operating by its own institutional logic at the time of making, would have filtered out, rejected, or actively condemned. Evangelista sat in a conference room and expressed discomfort about a photograph of a young woman smoking at Jones Beach, on the same day she voted for a list that includes Corinne Day, Nan Goldin, and Diane Arbus. Holstein raised the difficulty of artists crossing over into fashion while voting to include Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deana Lawson, three artists whose practices are rooted so far outside the fashion industry that the crossover framing barely applies. Li asked whether certain images could be made today while validating a list built almost entirely on images that would face serious institutional resistance if they arrived as proposals tomorrow.
The panel is not being hypocritical. They are doing something more structurally revealing: they are demonstrating, in real time and on the record, that the institutional reflex which originally resisted this work has not gone away. It has just been time-shifted. The resistance now falls on the present rather than the past. The past is safe. The past is on the list.
The Next One Is Already Being Dismissed
The images that changed fashion photography were made by photographers who did not ask for permission to work across categories. Avedon did not ask Vogue's permission to make his 1969 Warhol mural. Frank did not consult the fashion industry before documenting the American West in a cowboy's slim jeans on a Manhattan sidewalk. Sherman did not ask anyone whether her self-directed, unstyled, identity-destabilizing photographs qualified as fashion. Goldin made "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" as a document of her own community's life, with no interest in whether it would translate into editorial references.
The fashion industry found all of them anyway, because the public-facing image has always needed what those photographers were already doing. It needed images that operated on the full register of human feeling, not just the narrow frequency of commercial aspiration. The industry's categories did not produce those images. Its checkbooks occasionally hired the people who did.
The T 25 panel, assembled in July 2026 in a conference room at the New York Times building, celebrated thirteen images that were not made as fashion photographs. Two of the six voters were photographers, and they were the least troubled by this. The other four performed, politely and on the record, the same category resistance that greeted the work when it was new.
The next image that changes fashion photography is probably already being dismissed somewhere right now.
Where This Comes From
The following pages from scottparkerphoto.com/education anchor the historical arguments in this piece. Each is listed with the specific argument it supports.
History of Photography — Module 08: Modernism, Dada, Surrealism, and the Birth of Fashion Photography: The mechanism by which avant-garde aesthetics were absorbed into commercial and fashion photography almost immediately after being developed. The Comme des Garçons / Feurer case is a later instance of the same pattern.
History of Photography — Module 11: Cold War Photography, Street Photography, and the Rise of Color: Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and the "New Documents" generation who rejected polished formalism and whose work fashion later claimed as foundational.
History of Photography — Module 12: Postmodernism, Digital Photography, and the Smartphone Era: Cindy Sherman's staged self-portraits and the broader postmodern challenge to the stable, coherent image, the same challenge the fashion industry found difficult and then indispensable.
Modern Art — Module 05: Post-War, From Paris to New York: Andy Warhol, Pop Art, and the deliberate erasure of the boundary between fine art and commercial production, which is the theoretical ground the T 25 panel keeps tripping over without naming it.
Modern Art — Module 06: Contemporary Art: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Mapplethorpe, Carrie Mae Weems, and Deana Lawson; the identity, race, and gender themes in contemporary art that fashion has metabolized unevenly and selectively.
Further Reading
T Magazine, "The 25 Photos That Changed Fashion Forever," The New York Times, September 8, 2026.
Sourcing note: This article was produced by T Magazine, a publication of The New York Times Company. The panel was convened, moderated, and covered by T Magazine's own editorial staff, including its editor at large (who moderated the session) and its creative director (who was a voting panelist). The piece is an institutional artifact as much as a reported one. It should be cited as "T Magazine's panel selected" rather than as an independent industry consensus.