Happy Victims : Alexander McQueen

For his series Happy Victims, which arose in 2002 as a co-production between Mudam and the Festival International des Arts de la Mode d’Hyères as part of a larger project entitled Universe for rent, Tsuzuki photographed collections of clothes of specific fashion brands in the apartments of their owners. The treasures of these “fashion victims” are spread out in their tiny apartments, reflecting the passion for fashion or a specific fashion label which places such a great strain on their financial resources. At the same time, the insights into their protected interior private sphere reveals part of the personality of these fashionistas for whom the fetish of “Fashion” plays a central role in their life. In a mass society which is largely functional and homogenized in its organizational forms, fashion conveys individuality and thus a distinguishable identity. As a consumer product, fashion is under a permanent pressure of innovation, its conceptual value drastically exceeds its purely functional value. The object of consumption almost has a cult status; by acting as a projection surface for identity-creating longings it becomes a fetish, and it is assigned a mythologically inflated significance as a creation by a fashion creator. Tsuzuki's photographs, which tell us much about the circumstances of life in Japanese metropolitan cities, are not so much the result of the perspective of a sober sociologist who is critical of capitalism, rather they betray the understanding of their author, with only a slight touch of irony, in face of the pride in possessions shown by the “happy victims” whom he portrays.