Yesterday the Independent on Sunday asked curator and art adviser Carrie Scott to analyse fashion’s autumn/winter campaigns from her professional perspective, and, perhaps predictably, she came to the conclusion that the imagery is by and large following the male gaze template that has been around for centuries. 

Scott, who is also the director of the SHOWstudio shop,  found that: ‘If we sample the autumn campaigns, shot mostly by your usual suspects of, yes, mostly white men – Hedi Slimane, Steven Meisel, Steven Klein – we find composition after composition enforcing and reinforcing the classically unavoidable voyeuristic male gaze onto female figures who are styled in traditional exhibitionist roles’ and as she singled out campaigns for analysis –she chose to focus on Dior, Saint Laurent, Lanvin, Kenzo, Balenciaga and Prada – she pointed out some prescient parallels from art history.

Examining the Dior campaign, shot by Willy Vanderperre, above right, Scott says: ‘The models in Willy Vanderperre's images for Raf Simons' revitalised Dior directly engage the gaze of the camera. So that's something – let's not forget, though, that this direct stare was first employed by Édouard Manet some 150 years ago in Olympia (1863) [above right]. Then it was a challenge, an affront to the viewer. Today, in these images, as the models lean, recline, and lay in an effort to best highlight the House's triumphs, they have mouths slightly open and/or legs slightly parted: this is the subtle height of sexualisation used to sell. Which is appropriate.’

Looking at the autumn/winter 2013 Saint Laurent campaign, which features Cara Delevingne in a baby doll dress shot by Saint Laurent creative director Hedi Slimane, above right, Scott remarks: ‘While the composition clearly references Dalí's surrealist Woman at the Window (1926) [above left]– and we all know how Dalí felt about women – the scene is set so the clothes become the feature worth focusing on.’

The Lanvin campaign, shot by Steven Meisel and starring Edie Campbell, above right, is her favourite as she praises its humour and compares it to a Renaissance painting (we think it's also quite reminiscent of A Market Girl Holding a Mallard Duck, an 18th-century painting by John Russell, above left). Scott says: ‘Lanvin product is integral to the shot – the model, Edie Campbell, is dripping in Lanvin – but the portrait doesn't make the clothes the subject. Nor does it make the woman the subject to be looked at. Note the turn of phrase: portrait. Our model is the subject in the grandest of Renaissance manners. Despite the jewels, the silks and indeed the furs, those portraits made their sitters the subject. It's much the same today. Meisel's portrait is commemorating her, and all of her most precious items – her eccentric dress, her pristine coiffure, her living feathered accessory. This is a celebration of a woman, not an objectification.’