Miles more glamour: Mr Aldridge’s retrospective opens at Somerset House

A music video producer turned photographer, Miles Aldridge has been capturing his unique take on fashion since the mid-90s. Following a launch party last night, attended by model sister Saffron and Tali Lennox among others, today saw Aldridge’s major retrospective open at London’s Somerset House. This is the guy for whom that ubiquitous fashion term ‘colour pop’ would have had to been invented if it did not already exist.

“The women in the pictures are often based on the mother I grew up with,” says Aldridge, speaking to the Evening Standard. “She’s not the wife of a successful illustrator, although she’s glamorous enough to be that. Instead she’s someone who continually cooks and washes and cleans and wears this unemotional, mask-like face…?I think my mother felt trapped by me and my sister, but she was definitely a kind of muse to me.”

And with his trademark glorious technicolour sexiness, his glossy housewives and pouting beauties, with their big hair and veneer of make-up, star in Aldridge’s thought-provoking tableaux on womanhood and womanliness, offering a perspective on women who seem to simultaneously stir up awe and passive anger in the guy behind the lens. There is something about Aldridge’s commercial but deeply personal aesthetic, and the transparent creation of personas in the frame that perfectly capture the cultural zeitgeist and make this an exhibition well worth a visit.

Miles Aldridge: I Only Want You To Love Me opens today at Embankment Galleries, Somerset House and runs until September 29, 2013. Get your fashion photo fix for just £6 – or £3 on Mondays.

A 120 page book – I Only Want You To Love Me – is published by Rizzoli to coincide with the exhibition.

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