Top models Anok Yai, Freja Beha Erichsen, Gigi Hadid, Liu Wen and Maike Inga star in Prada‘s Spring Summer 2019 advertising campaign captured by fashion photographer Willy Vanderperre. In charge of styling was Olivier Rizzo, with creative direction from David James, and casting direction by Ashley Brokaw. Beauty is work of hair stylist Duffy, and makeup artist Aaron de Mey.
“The advertising campaign takes the form of a series of enigmatic and intriguing film posters, drawing their visual language from the moving image, translating them to stills. As with a fashion campaign, movie posters are synched to a particular moment in time – by their nature, fleeting and ephemeral, yet later prized and pored-over as emblematic of the cultural moment in which they were devised. Here, they transgress their time, visual quotations reactivated for today, cinematic conventions used as literal frames, to entice, attract and seduce the viewers.
Drawing on the distinct and immediately-recognisable iconography of cinema, the images imply their place as part of a larger whole. Each is presented as a fragment of the original films’ narrative – figures turning away, seemingly captured in locomotion, without comment or explanation, gazes panning out of frame, in ambiguous aesthetic conversation. Frozen in attitudes and gestures drawn from classic cinema, in moments seized, their poses are half-remembered, part familiar. They are both reflections and refractions, simultaneously old and new.
The implicit duality is made explicit by a graphic layering of imagery – another duo, black and white portraits as backdrop to the foreground action, a double-vision of each figure, images that are still but hint at movement. They are immediately reminiscent of the dual personality of actor versus the role they play, of movie star versus movie character. But they are also expressive of the multiple personae inside all of us in the cinéma vérité of everyday life.“
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