If the point of fashion editorial is to visually arrest, then Vice has come up trumps with its latest spread. Known for its shock tactics, the magazine has published a shoot inspired by female writers. Dead female writers. Let’s not beat about the bush: female writers who killed themselves.

Here, a model poses as Sylvia Plath, gazing pensively into an oven; there, Virginia Woolf wades into a river, clutching a rock, determined to live in Richmond no longer. In other images, Dorothy Parker slits her wrists over a sink and Elise Chang raises a gun to her lips. She did that only 9 years ago. In another, Taiwanese author Sanmao hangs herself with a pair of stockings, credited in the shoot as available at Look from London.

Is this bad taste run amuck, or is it part of Vice’s on-going assault against the petty bourgeois mindset? This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last, that doomed literary heroines are romanticised in this way. Indeed, some of the impact these tableaux have had is due in part to the ubiquitous and age-old mawkishness with which these deaths have traditionally been treated: these unhappy endings are part of the myth, part of the personality, part of our understanding of these artists.

What’s more telling, perhaps, is that the only way to become ‘iconic’ as a female writer until now has been to die young, or in horrible circumstances. In that respect, the Vice shoot is only a commentary on our mythologising of these women’s troubled existences.

The real problem lies in the representation, visualisation and, yes, glorification of suicide, a subject which intrigues and upsets in equal dose. There are rules by which journalists must abide when reporting the details of a suicide; too much detail of the method is deemed irresponsible and, while Vice’s images are hardly a how-to, there’s an unsettling realism to them. Should photography be subject to the same rules – or does it not count, because it is 'art'?

Vice has been pulled up for taste levels before, in rape jokes and questionable political sentiment. Fashion imagery too has a rocky past concerning its treatment of women, sometimes violent, sometimes abusive, often far too ambiguous in its boundaries.

The objective problem I have with Vice’s images, beyond the blindingly obvious, is that they don’t do anything new. They merely add to an extant and already clichéd mass of adolescent eulogy about these writers. And fashion imagery, if it is to be successful, must do more than shock or curl lips: it must be original. Without originality, it’s just a cheap thrill, an easy troll. And Vice is normally better than that.