Photographer Martin Parr's uncompromising work, which spans both the fashion world and "real life" in Britain, is commemorated in a new book chronicling his illustrious career.

For over half a century, the celebrated British documentary photographer Martin Parr&rsquo;s unflinching images of Thatcher-era lingerie parties, New Brighton Beach-goers lounging near piles of litter, and kitschy Manchester malls have chronicled the absurdities of Britain&rsquo;s consumer culture with humour and an idiosyncratic gaze.
Now, a new book offers an up-close look at Parr&rsquo;s own commercial instincts. Fashion Faux Parr, to be published by Phaidon in April, is the first retrospective dedicated to Parr&rsquo;s fashion oeuvre, spanning three decades of Vogue photoshoots and collaborations with brands like Gucci, Balenciaga, and St&uuml;ssy.
There are many ways to read the book&rsquo;s punny title. Is fashion photography a crass side hustle for &ldquo;faux Parr,&rdquo; as opposed to the &ldquo;real&rdquo; Parr&rsquo;s award-winning, documentary-style images? Or is it that his gritty, sardonic photos&mdash;models on the loo for Numero Tokyo, Urban Outfitters necklaces strewn atop dentures at a stall in a Marrakech souk, wrinkled French sunbathers decked out in Gucci&mdash;are seen as faux pas in the glitzy, make-believe world of fashion? Maybe the title refers to Parr&rsquo;s choice to include professional hiccups, like a scrapped 2023 Balenciaga campaign, or a portfolio of emerging London designers that Parr shot &ldquo;for a small magazine that didn&rsquo;t pay the bill,&rdquo; the introduction notes, &ldquo;so the pictures never saw the light of day&rdquo;?

&ldquo;You&rsquo;re welcome to view it however you like, really,&rdquo; Parr says, a wry smile creasing his face. But don&rsquo;t read too much into it. &ldquo;Fashion is just an extension of my own work. I&rsquo;m using the same styles and the same techniques. That&rsquo;s why when you look through the book you can tell it&rsquo;s pictures taken by me because, hopefully, that style and that language and that palette come through.&rdquo; The &ldquo;one difference,&rdquo; he notes, &ldquo;is that I&rsquo;m usually setting things up for photo shoots, whereas within my own work I&rsquo;m just taking things as they really are out there."
The book&rsquo;s 250 photographs mix the mundane with the magnificent, offering a seriously unserious view of the fashion diaspora. There are portraits of Dame Vivienne Westwood standing in a dingy public restroom wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words Climate Revolution and see-through pants; model Stella Tennant collecting flower cuttings in Dunbar, Scotland; and designer Paul Smith&nbsp; sitting at his cluttered desk in London surrounded by stacks of books, fabric scraps, toys, and knick-knacks. A high-watt-age snap of Anna Wintour perched front row during Milan Fashion Week is sandwiched between grocery-store fashion shoots and models mugging for the camera at a gas station in Arles, France. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s mischief there&mdash;I think that&rsquo;s the best word to use&mdash;that is maybe subversive, like going into a dental surgery,&rdquo; Parr said. He was referring to one of the book&rsquo;s highlights: a 2004 shoot for the magazine Kid&rsquo;s Wear that took place at a German dentist&rsquo;s office during an actual young patient&rsquo;s teeth cleaning. &ldquo;The surreal aspect can really turn a photo into a picture that you have to look at twice to try to work out what&rsquo;s going on,&rdquo; he says.

Vivienne Westwood, London, 2012.

Paul Smith, London, UK, 2016.

A fearless and raw approach to photography has&mdash;perhaps unexpectedly&mdash;made Parr, a 71-year-old Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), a designer darling. For a newspaper-printed magazine promoting Henry Holland&rsquo;s Spring/Summer 2016 men&rsquo;s collection, Parr photographed a scarf emblazoned with &ldquo;Martin Fucking Parr&rdquo; inside an ice-cream shop in the Greater Manchester town of Ramsbottom. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a very rare scarf, actually. People ask me about it all the time,&rdquo; Parr says. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know how many were produced, but it seemed to have sold out pretty quickly. I&rsquo;ve got one in our archive."
Last year, he photographed Simon Porte Jacquemus&rsquo;s extravagant waterfront runway show in Versailles for Le Chouchou, a limited-edition book published by the label, featuring Parr&rsquo;s images of guests boarding white rowboats on the park&rsquo;s Grand Canal. When Parr and Jacquemus hosted a book signing at the Jacquemus flagship on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, Parr was treated like a fashion rock star. &ldquo;We signed and dedicated 500 books in three hours and 20 minutes,&rdquo; he says. So beloved is Parr among the fashion intelligentsia, in fact, that his name has become its own slang. While he was Creative Director of Gucci, Alessandro Michele once titled a watch campaign shoot &ldquo;Time to Parr.

Along with the work of equally revered fashion photographer Juergen Teller, the &ldquo;dirty realism&rdquo; of Parr&rsquo;s images helped pave the way for the unguarded lenses used by many of today&rsquo;s fashion documentarians, including Jack Davison, Harley Weir, and Sam Youkilis. &ldquo;Fashion is about solving a problem: How do you make an interesting picture with a certain accessory or piece of clothing?&rdquo; Parr says. &ldquo;And documentary photographers&mdash;we&rsquo;re people that shoot with ideas. So people want to use the ideas that we have and apply them to fashion problems."

There's mischief there&mdash;I think that's the best word to use.

One of Parr&rsquo;s earliest fashion forays was in 1999, when the Italian magazine Amica flew him to Rimini, Fellini&rsquo;s hometown on Italy&rsquo;s northeastern coast, for a photo shoot using the seaside resort&rsquo;s nightclubs and shallow waters as a backdrop. Instead, Parr photographed models in sequined gowns on the beach as local beefcakes flexed in Speedos, and elderly ladies in sun hats wandered into the frame. The editorial felt like a natural extension of Parr&rsquo;s candid shots, which often serve as windows into how style steers identity in real-life Britons, whether it&rsquo;s a spectacle of silk and brocade at a Sikh wedding, half-naked hen-party revelers, or a fishwife wearing a Burberry-style plaid headscarf. Love Cubes, a series from 1972 documenting couples who share the same taste in clothes, functions as a time capsule from a bygone era: women with Farrah Fawcett&ndash;style hair in polka-dot flares, men with bushy sideburns in three-piece suits.
&ldquo;I think the distinction of what people are wearing is much more evident in my documentary work than in my fashion pictures,&rdquo; Parr reflects. &ldquo;I keep it real."

Keeping it real with photographer Martin Parr

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