Through the Lens: Exactitudes

If uniformity spells out the death of personal style, maybe our fear of sameness is something worth learning from. Garment by garment, we assemble ourselves in ways as intimately entwined with one another as with our own bodies. Because even when we think ‘I’m one of a kind,’ we do it in unison.

This paradox sits at the center of Exactitudes, the cult photo project and fashion anthropology study by Dutch photographer Ari Versluis and profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek. A portmanteau of “exact” and “attitude,” the project is heralded as one of the most influential photo series in contemporary fashion, and works by arranging grids of 12 portraits of participants bound by obsession, subculture or sartorial resemblance. From fur-clad Italian women, Beijing screamers, to buff leathermen in Rotterdam, each piece pins down a niche social archetype or fashion “tribe” with an almost surgical precision.

The project started in 1994 when a telecom company tapped Versluis and Uyttenbroek, then students at Willem DeKooning Academy, to document Rotterdam’s explosive gabber scene. The duo took to the legendary party, Nightmares, for a better look at the ravers. As attendees filtered out of the dance hall, the artists invited several fashionably fit participants, still coming down from the night before, for a quick portrait back at the studio. Then came “Gabbers,” the first-ever Exactitude.

“Boredom is excellent, it asks you to look harder. Hype is too easy.”

The lone gabber may turn a head or two. But 12 gabbers, 12 shaven heads and candy-colored zip-ups, makes a dress code, or as Versluis and Uyttenbroek call it, an “in-your-face uniformed identity.” With the premise of Exactitudes on lock, the artists would spend the next three decades using this same style of portraiture on other groups around the world, each grid wrought with irony: the more people broke away from the mainstream “look,” the more visible, and classifiable, their identities became. In short: you stand out by fitting in.

An Exactitude can start in several ways, the artists explain. A subculture may reveal itself, though the best way to catch one “is to sit down somewhere, stay there for weeks and let your observation guide you.” The two spent countless days combing through streets, clubs, churches, cafes and malls to scout their over 3,000 subjects. “The most memorable places we’ve been to are the most mundane. Boredom is excellent, it asks you to look harder. Hype is too easy.”

After 30 years of collaboration, Versluis and Uyttenbroek have decided to bow out with the seventh and final print edition of Exactitudes to return focus to their respective studio practices. While the project has come to a close, it will always hold a special place in the zeitgeist, having introduced a new legibility, clarity and order to street style photography, a mode typically marked by a candid grit.

A single pass through Exactitudes makes its thoughtfulness clear, with each subject posed with careful, exacting intent: the ever-so slight thigh graze in “Bimbos,” the moody “Mohawk” side profiles or the rotund, hands-on-hip confidence of the “Young Activists.”

Grids themselves swing between humor, tenacity and tenderness, without cruelty or exoticism. Subjects are plucked from their natural environments, and positioned against a white studio backdrop. Every style family is held at a healthy arm’s length – intimate enough to humanize, yet far enough to see that even our most “unique” are never alone.

“The further you stay away from consumer culture, the more authentic you become.”

Over the years, the project has caught the attention of several fashion titans, going on to inspire more than several collections by major designers: Raf Simons channeled a similar fixation on youth identity and collective dress codes in his 2005 exhibition, Isolated Heroes. Helmet Lang once tapped the duo for a 3×4 ode to its diehard collectors, alongside Heaven for its Deftones-inspired capsule with Stray Rats.

Still, Demna Gvasalia is the most Exactitudes-esque by far. Versluis and Uyttenbroek first met the designer in 2014. “There was a mutual respect for both our artistic practices and visions,” the artist said. “[We] share the conviction that social identity is more relevant than ever.”

The self-described “fashion anthropologist,” now Gucci creative director, credits the series as a major influence in his work across houses and eras — from VETEMENT’S AW17 collection, which sent flocks of “stereotypes” down the runway, to his Balenciaga swan song last year, which the social science of dress codes.

Despite a rather warm embrace by the industry, Exactitudes keeps confident as a rebuttal to capital-F Fashion —the endless stream of high-low drops, aspirational aesthetics, the shiny promise of a belonging that can be bought into. “The further you stay away from consumer culture, the more authentic you become,” the duo note, with the hopes that younger generations will “[consume] less and [return] fashion to the level of individual expression.”

“Fashion, for us, is first of all language, a way of speech. From loudest cry to the loveliest poem, and everything in-between”

In our contemporary digital moment, social identity has never been more slippery, they argue. It’s more of a thing to perform, curate, flaunt or monetize, than to have, or, better yet, be. Identity has always been inherently relational and eternally in-flux, yet with the onslaught of microtrends, TikTok-ified “cores” and online monoculture that continues to loom large, Versluis and Uyttenbroek prefer to keep things in the here and now: “The net is the net; the street is the street. The street wins, at least in our opinion.”

Embedded within each and every Exactitude is a manifesto of style, a stake claimed in the world through a cipher of sartorial codes. A good outfit can communicate who you are in the eyes of others. A great outfit, an honest one, will teach you something about yourself. “Fashion, for us, is first of all language, a way of speech,” the artists continue. “From loudest cry to the loveliest poem, and everything in-between.”

The final edition of Exactitudes is now available via the artist’s store and Dover Street Market.

All photos courtesy of Exactitudes for Hypeart.

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