As someone who used to be CMO for a fashion company, I can shed some light on the e-commerce photography process, if any would like.
First of all, most of the time you’re working off samples because the manufactured garments are not available. That can mean that there are finishing issues you need to hide from the camera or face retouching after, which will limit the number of aspects of the garment you can photograph.
Second, you wouldn’t believe how long it takes to get the garments shot from all the relevant angles. Getting 30 garments done properly per model per shooting day is ambitious, because a model day is only 8 hours including hair and makeup.
You always want front view, but it may be that you’ve had to clip the back, and then you have to clip the front in order to get the back view. You may have to resteam a garment. You may choose to combine a jacket with a dress for some shots so that you get some shots of the jacket, and when it comes to doing selects you find that the model’s facial expression or some other thing just doesn’t work and you need to abandon the main front shots. You’ll need to retouch makeup and hair, and you’ll also have to allow an hour for lunch. Plus the model doesn’t just throw on the garment: there will be a stylist there ensuring that it sits right, that bows and other details are just so, that pleats fall right… the whole shebang.
Social media is the reason why you’re now seeing lots of models squatting: brands need square images for product carousels. There’s a limited number of poses where that’s possible.
Models looking moody is lazy. It works for editorial and luxe, but the analytics tell a different story in e-commerce: customers will click on the smiling model in the product listing page rather than the sulky one.
I’m sure someone will say that the trick to solving the need to clip garments is to cast models that are the right size for the samples. Which is fine in theory but harder to do in practice when so many are a size 6-8 and your samples are a size 10: there were times that I couldn’t cast a single size 10, despite looking at models from all the major London agencies. I always tried hard to cast the right size because I wanted customers to get a proper view of how things would fit and sit, but it was a constant battle with the brand’s creative director to achieve this, as well as with the model agencies whose scouts were so often not getting size 10s on the books.
I did manage to stop the practice of photoshopping blemishes and tattoos on the models we used. I managed to get actual size 10s when they were available, and I tried to direct the shoots such that we had the shots I would want as a customer in order to decide whether I wanted to buy. And then I also had to spend many hours going through thousands of pictures to make the selects that would end up on the site. Even with everything being digital, it takes a fuck of a long time, and therefore money.
I can say more if anyone is interested, but all this is to say that I understand how M&S arrived at this photography. With how many garments they have on the website at any one time they are constantly shooting and I think the spark goes out when it becomes no more than a production line - the joys of fast fashion, frankly. I know I was glad we just had two collections per year and I could focus on getting the best possible results.