The Director Who Came From Fashion: Pop Music's New Image Economy
The music video has always imported its directors from somewhere else. In the 1980s, photographers moved behind the camera. In the nineties, directors like Mark Romanek and David Fincher treated the three-minute clip as a site of formal experimentation, later crossing into cinema. Fashion played a role — costumes, styling — but rarely drove the conceptual frame. The director’s outside perspective was the point. What has changed, across the past decade, is the nature of that outside.
