Commercial. Catalogue. Couture. College Hall?
Clad in a Michael Kors bolero and Christian Louboutin shoes, English professor Wendy Steiner appeared last month in a photo spread for the college issue of The New York Times Magazine.
Steiner - a self-proclaimed "lifelong subscriber to Vogue magazine" - has always believed in a close connection between the worlds of fashion and the arts.
Much of Steiner's work focuses on the fashion model and how beauty in modern literature and fashion has been replaced by more negative and artificial images.
This objectification ties into the feminist "idea of a woman as passive and manipulated and made the object of gaze," she said.
And so when she received an e-mail from the NYTimes Magazine, Steiner jumped at the chance to experience the model's world firsthand.
On the day of the shoot, Steiner spent two hours in hair and makeup and another two hours being photographed in the Penn Club Library in New York City.
"They sat me down and took a gazillion photographs . it was exhausting business," she said. "Sitting there like a lump for an extended amount of time worrying what you look like is kind of wearing."
Steiner said the experience "was fascinating in every way," but she was surprised by "the mechanical-ness of the project."
She explained that the NYTimes staff and the student photographer instructed her to show "no particular expression on [her] face" throughout the shoot.
She had no say in the clothes she wore, the position she sat in or which photograph ultimately ended up in the magazine.
"You really give yourself over in some profound way to [the photographer's] needs," she said. "It's kind of body-snatching, I think, or celebrity-snatching."
While Steiner has spent most of her life researching the connection between fashion and the arts, she admitted she couldn't quite figure out what the photograph was supposed to be saying about what it means to be an academic.
"Cruella De Ville seemed to me just right," she said in describing the photo. "I'm an inquiring and adventurous person. That person in [the photograph] looks like someone who has never taken a chance in her life."
Steiner said in doing the shoot, she witnessed "one of the great psychological struggles" in action: "The absolute clash of motives between the artist and the model."
Although she admits to finding reality TV shows such as America's Next Top Model and Project Runway "absolutely mesmerizing," Steiner said that, in a way, much of her frustration with the photo shoot has to do with an essential aspect of reality TV.
"It pretends to be about a real person, but in fact it was staged beyond belief," she said of both reality TV shows and her fashion shoot. "Why do people want that? Why don't they want real people?"
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