This shift is all important, as once something like grunge becomes a mass consumer style, any notion of actually doing anything yourself is redundant you can now buy it. Walker uses the language of luxury advertising against itself, exaggerating the seductive strategies of fashion marketing. Her early works are a humorous presentation of how money and marketing make the banal look desirable. After the laughter, however, making poverty appear glamorous not only involves a ridiculous marketing strategy but a mechanism whereby dissent can be quickly neutralised and co-opted into the service of consumerism. Walker consciously focuses on styles that date rapidly in fashion's continual push for novelty.
Speed is a critical feature of the fashion and advertising industries.
In the mass media the constant change of styles remains unquestioned, consumers are forced to 'keep up with the latest'. Walker's work freezes this motion and looks at the details of the fashion marketing mechanism, providing a site to begin questioning an industry that profits on the insecurity it generates. Unlike the obsolescence of advertising imagery, Walker's documentary project presents a parallel fashion history, an alternative history of contemporary taste. Europe was founded on the principle of verisimilitude, that is, the painter's aim was to create the closest possible likeness to the sitter in an attempt to express the sitter's 'true essence'. Rather than archetypal religious or classical subjects from Greek and Roman mythology, portraits began to focus on the psychology of contemporary individuals.