The Set Up

It’s this more sinister slant to the sartorial that is explored in a new show at KK Outlet, entitled The Set Up.

The exhibition will show a number of pieces that draw their look and aesthetic from fashion shoots, but provide a wry comment on the industry’s fictions – in fashion, things are rarely as they seem.

The photographers’ and artists’ wok on show examine how Photoshop, studio lights and other tweaks create images that offer falsehoods, creating an ideal that women aspire to, but will never achieve.

The title is taken from the ‘setting up’ of fashion shoots, but also ‘comments on the cruel set-up all women are subjected to through the media portrayal of an ideal they¹ll always fail to live up to’, the gallery explains.

Featured artists including Lydia Garnett, Daniel Soares, Emily Stein and Alison Brady.

Garnett is showing her photographic series The Touch Up, inspired by the strange, sometimes hilarious, often disarming retouch notes on fashion shoot photographs, such as ‘We need to sort out the inelegant toe situ’ and ‘We want it to be really fucking perfect’.

Wenzel’s work draws on the impossible contortions many models are forced into, forming surreal still-life-style images that highlight the bizarre behind-the-scenes goings-on of the fashion world.

Meanwhile Daniel Soares’ guerilla tactics helpfully point out the use of Photoshop on campaign images, pasting up the programme’s interface next to the impossibly-perfect pictures of the models.

The Set Up runs from 7 – 29 March at KK Outlet, 42 Hoxton Square, London, N1