The Difference of Fashion Photography and Product Photography for Fashion Brands

Fashion Photography and Product Photography are very different even if they show the same piece of clothing. The difference is important for anyone who aims to earn the attention of audiences for their fashion line as the key difference is emotion.

Product photography is all about the product and ignores people. This is why it carries little to no emotion. Even if you took the most beautiful product shot of a leather coat it remains an object without relationship to people.

Fashion photography is not about the clothing but about the fashion. It’s an aphoristic exaggeration but it means that the chief target are the people who wear the fashion. It is about their relationship to the world, their life experience, their story.

The clothing is in the picture and through that interaction with the people and the world has become fashion.

Picture the Fashion, not the Clothing

All human beings understand the world in the context of story. A story is a series of events leading to a certain outcome, surrounded by a personally experienced world that is in fact emotional.

If a fashion photographer pictures a beautiful leather coat he photographs the story of the person in the picture. This creates emotions and those emotions transfer to the leather coat.

The leather coat will get its proper treatment as beauty and elegance is a chief goal of fashion photography (and which you rarely see if ever in product photography).

The outcome of the story can be whatever it is but emotions are guaranteed.

Stories create Emotions

Such a story can be a single picture or a series of pictures spanning across a website and a fashion campaign over social media and ads to fashion magazines. It can be enhances by fashion video a written story.

Emotions are created when people follow the story and put themselves into the shoes (and leather coats) of the performers. Hearts will beat faster through that personal connection created between the fashion and the audiences through the story.

Product photograph on the other hand will always stay distant and remote because it has no story.

Fashion Photography as an Art Form.

The best photographers like Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin transcend fashion photography into the sphere of art. It’s the ideal uplifting of commercial products to pieces of art. Artists have made fashion lines immortal .

Fashion Campaigns, Fashion Editorials, Lookbooks and Online Stores

Focusing on story through fashion photography the difference between a fashion campaign, a fashion editorial and a fashion lookbook disappear. They are all just different formats to tell a story.

You can also put fashion photography into online stores instead of product shots. Then the story continues at the place where people get out their credit cards.

Story is seduction and personal connection and is free of the high pressure of sales funnels that squeezes people through a standardized process that feels so terrible to customers.

Fashion photography stories not only do wonder for high end fashion brands – they create the perception of the high end brand altogether.