Are fashion campaigns during lockdown all the same? A trend that quickly made you show your limits

If there's one kind of photography that quarantine has made thrive on, it's self-portraits. The last few years, moreover, had seen the birth and rise of the selfie – a rise parallel to that of mobile phones – which, in an episode of The OC, Paris Hilton had prophetically called "the autograph of the twenty-first century". But if in the pre-quarantine world the selfie was considered at best a manifestation of narcissism and shallowness, the lockdown made it the only type of photography possible. Without sets, without stylists, without makeup artists and, above all, without professional photographers, all those individuals, those magazines and brands that survive and promote themselves through the multiplication and dissemination of images have found themselves forced to make do with the means they had at their disposal: smartphones and webcams. 

It didn't take long for the DIY shooting format to show its tiredness. Despite the efforts made by the brands, it would seem that, without the factors of novelty and immediate topicality, these shoots do not have much reason to be - even just for their repetitiveness. The trend, after all, was not born to last but to adapt to an emergency - finished one, the other will disappear as well. At first, however, the concept worked: those slightly grainy images of the glitterati locked in their own home were a pleasant deviation from the usual, artifact photo shoots. At most, then, the trend has clearly shown how much fashion has stuck to its usual dynamics: producing as many content as possible and trying to stay relevant with every means available. It remains to be seen whether the audience that emerges from the experience of the Covid-19 will still be tied to those same dynamics or will help the fashion industry to implement those major structural changes invoked by many of its leading exponents.