The A-Z of Visual Ideas

R

Reinvention

To reinvent is to radically change and create entirely anew. Often a customary way of doing things remains unchallenged – leading to things like magazines, shop windows and exhibitions looking pretty much the same. Reinvention should be constant as there are no rules or boundaries – only conventions, as photographer Bill Brandt remarked about his creative discipline – ‘it is not a sport, it doesn’t have a book of rules’. You cannot be offside or sent off for foul play in creativity.

Spray dressAlexander McQueen brilliantly reinvented the fashion show in 1999 when two industrial paint spraying robots danced balletically with a model ...