The history of fashion photography is one of power dynamics: a push and pull of a photographer’s imagination and a model’s desire to complement it. The photographer manipulates the model and vice versa — melding into an image of beauty, ambiguity, aspiration and curiosity at the foundation of how clothes reflect the values of our times.
The 31-year-old model Paloma Elsesser has disrupted that structure. One of the most in-demand models of her generation — a bona fide millennial supermodel — she describes herself as “an agitator.” Walking for brands including Versace, Michael Kors and Eckhaus Latta, she is plus size and mixed race, and her extraordinary appearance has challenged the fashion world’s attachment to the idealized woman.
Remarkably open about her body and a model’s role in the construction of beauty standards, she challenges the assumption that the very business of modeling is to be seen, not heard.
“I have agitated what was once the standard — even what was once the standard for plus-size models,” she said, adding that plus-size models were typically required to be “bombshell and commercial.” Still, she said, “there’s just so much work that needs to be done — fundamentally in fashion, [with people] just having empathy, period.”
Elsesser is once again pushing boundaries with a new book, “Treasure,” documenting in intimate detail breast surgeries she underwent in 2019 and 2023. The project wouldn’t have been possible without its photographer, Zora Sicher, 27, who first photographed Elsesser for i-D Magazine in 2016, “when the female gaze was a very popular term,” Sicher said on a recent phone call with Elsesser. Sicher has been one of Elsesser’s go-to photographers since, especially on collaborative projects such as the model’s plus-size capsule for the influencer-favored brand Miaou.
Both have transcended fashion’s propensity for typecasting, Elsesser in particular; despite ongoing cheers about “body positivity,” plus-size models, a category that usually means a woman who is a Size 12 dress size or higher, are less present on the runway than in recent memory. Fashion search engine Tagwalk reported at the end of the Fall 2023 season that the overall number of plus-size and midsize models on the runway dropped by 24 percent from the previous season.
“Treasure” is an intimate and at times disturbing series of images, documenting pain and blood and scarring. It perhaps gently suggests that empathy can be a way of finding beauty. “I trust her not just on a friend level, not just on an artist level, but on a truly fundamentally moral and ethical level,” Elsesser said of allowing Sicher into the operating room to photograph her sliced nipples and breasts.
Many other models of her set have started clothing or makeup lines. A book documenting two painful plastic surgeries — a breast reduction with the insertion of two implants to maintain the roundness of her breasts in 2019, and the subsequent removal of the implants in 2023 — certainly makes a drastic statement. “People are very uncomfortable stepping outside of who they’re told to be,” Elsesser said. But what motivates Elsesser’s career moves, she said, is the process of negotiating the world of modeling “morally and ethically.”
Not everyone admires that outspokenness, she pointed out, which is part of what makes Elsesser such a significant presence in the modeling world. “Zora and I are so upfront about the way that we see and feel,” she said, adding that she and Sicher enjoy existing “on the edges of our industry.” Both carefully interrogate their projects and collaborators, feeling as if their choices and alignments represent something deeper about who they are.
Considering that, following the #MeToo movement, many magazines stopped working with photographers accused of misconduct and put guardrails in place to ensure models’ safety on set, there is something utopian about the model-photographer relationship between Sicher and Elsesser, which makes the book notable on its own.
But then there are the images themselves. They are not designed as a foil to, say, clinical imagery of surgeries — which is often rife with ethical ambiguities — nor is it just an antidote to the lascivious photography of classic fashion photographers such as Helmut Newton, whose images for Vogue often glamorized plastic surgery as a high-tech form of BDSM. As Elsesser put it, “These aren’t modeling images,” executed with the lighting and angles that would capture a model at her most pristine. Though they are in intriguing conversation with both kinds of photography. (Sicher points out the anonymity of medical textbooks, in which identifying features are generally blocked out, which can feel dehumanizing.)
Instead, these images inspire empathy. Elsesser and Sicher said that was one of the most rewarding parts of taking the images: the conversation that has emerged between each other and their friends around the grades of vanity that cosmetic surgery seems to inspire. Breast implants are remarkably common, Elsesser said, and “they’re appreciated and valued when they’re perfect and they’re done, and it’s pornography and images — if they look natural, or they don’t and they look like a spectacle. But one person vulnerably engaging with that conversation — it’s suddenly uncomfortable. It’s suddenly, ‘You don’t love yourself.’”
Sicher finished Elsesser’s sentence: “Which is sort of what drove me to ask a lot of these questions,” of herself and of Elsesser while capturing the images. “Most of the time, we’re just talking [while taking the photographs]. My approach to photography has always been way more emotional than it is technical.”
