Obsession as Art: Vanity, Authenticity, and the Cinematic Ego in Fashion
Vanity has always been easier to condemn than to understand. It’s been named a sin, a flaw, an empty vessel. And yet, it’s the currency fashion trades in most relentlessly — a devotion to appearance so absolute it starts to look like religion.
These photographs — saturated with theatre, meticulous in their construction — are more than portraits. They are altars to the self. The red hair that slices through the dark, the feathered crown that blurs the line between ornament and weapon, the deliberate imbalance between opulence and ruin. Every element is a sermon on image-making, where the worship is of the image itself.
We are not looking at a model. We are looking at the embodiment of the gaze — self-authored yet audience-dependent, both commanding and complicit.
Brittany Murphy channeling Dada artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven for a 2001 photo shoot in The New York Times Magazine. Photographed by Jeff Riedel, Styled by Elizabeth Stewart
The Staged Confessional
There is no accident here. The way the gown folds like a curtain, inviting you into a scene you’ll never fully enter. The way the light caresses certain textures but abandons others, leaving them in shadow as if secrecy itself were part of the styling. These frames are not chasing authenticity in the contemporary sense. They are constructing it — because even truth can be staged.
It’s easy to read these images as beautiful- it’s harder to admit they are also about control. The control of posture. The control of what is revealed. The control of a narrative so precise it feels spontaneous.
And yet, the cracks are there — a smudge, a wrinkle, a prop that doesn’t belong. Imperfections that remind us this is not immortality; it’s momentary. That the beauty we see is already dissolving, even as it seduces us.
Why do we worship something with no longevity?
Brittany Murphy channeling Dada artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven for a 2001 photo shoot in The New York Times Magazine. Photographed by Jeff Riedel, Styled by Elizabeth Stewart
The answer is buried in the same impulse that makes us stop for sunsets or buy fresh flowers. Ephemeral beauty doesn’t lose value because it fades — it gains value because it fades. The finite nature of the image, the garment, the face, is what makes our obsession so total. In a world where permanence is an illusion, the temporary becomes an object of reverence.
But fashion’s version of this worship is different. It consumes beauty to sustain itself, treating each image as disposable the moment the next one arrives. It packages desire, sells it, and moves on. The scrutiny is constant: Who wore it best? Who wore it wrong? Who dared to be seen? And the cycle feeds itself, because nothing is built to last.
These photographs resist that disposability by lingering. They aren’t selling you the next thing; they’re holding you in this moment. They turn vanity into a still life, a ritual object, something that cannot be scrolled past without consequence. You feel the weight of the gaze — not just the subject’s, but your own, mirrored back at you.
In the end, beauty here is not the goal. It’s the medium. Vanity is not the downfall — it’s the language. And obsession? It’s simply the cost of admission.