Normally we don’t really think about backstage photography as an asset for ACHTUNG, especially during fashion weeks as we feel this part of fashion week coverage is saturated – but then came Sally Moore who made us want to give it a shot again. We talked to her before starting off the Milan season, here’s her two cents on the matter:

ACHTUNG: How did you get into fashion photography/covering fashion events?

Sally Moore: I’ve always had a profound curiosity for art. I grew up wanting to become an architect for more than a decade, but then I started an internship in an art gallery, then a fashion magazine, and finally entered the big fashion houses. The impulse was always to follow my genuine curiosity and whatever felt exciting to me.

A: How do you define your type?

SM: I’d say my type is theatrical and narrative. I like staged images that feel cinematic and slightly uncanny. I see models as actresses, they perform emotions, gestures, and attitudes that I whisper to them. For me, fashion photography inevitably carries a sense of tension and paradox, where the line between control and spontaneity, the familiar and the uncanny, begins to blur. In the end, that’s the goal. My pictures are reflections of my own obsessions. I’m very obsessive as a person, and I’m fascinated by repetition, really.

A: How does it differ from reportage?

SM: I come at things with an angle, with a point of view. To me, everything is a spectacle, society itself included, and I want to capture it that way, as it exists in my head, not as mere reportage.

A: What do you think you can add to the saturated genre of backstage photography?

SM: Adding a vision on top of someone else’s vision. It’s risky, because you don’t want to disturb someone’s ideas by imposing your own. I think backstage photographs may be the only moment where you can see the pure vision of the designer. Backstage can be more than documentation; it can become part of a narrative, theatrical in itself.

A: How has your work evolved over the years?

SM: At first, I was obsessed with fashion references, especially from past decades. I collected thousands of them in folders, on hard drives, and my favorite ones on walls. Now, I’d say my references have little to do with fashion photography. In the beginning, I wasn’t the one holding the camera; I was the person gathering images for photographers. Once I was behind the camera myself, it felt very different. Over time, many of those references have become so engraved in my mind that I don’t need to look at them often, I just know.

N°21 is a brand that ACHTUNG has been following for a while now and if it’s one thing then it’s consistent. Consistently N°21 with the sheer layering, muted range of colors with some flashes of excitement here and there seemingly chosen by shooting an arrow at the Itten circle as if it were a dartboard. Even down to the quirky disheveled hair-dos. Once again, consistent. Alessandro Dell’Acqua is becoming sort of a curator who looks at everything going on in fashion and turns it into the N°21 version. Polka dots? Very the moment, but N°21 has been doing it. Flashes of metallic? Check. In gold (skirts) AND silver (floral brooches). Sweet knitwear layered in a very instagrammable way in even sweeter colors. Beige and pastels that is. The blue billowy shirting coming out underneath of grey jersey, the brown wide-legged pants held up on the waist by a simple velours belt, the grey knit socks staggering out of chunky heels. It’s all in there making this collection seem like a roadmap pointing out every micro-motion and direction of this moment’s fashions.