Wednesday, July 14, 2010

On the Fire Escape

I am all for progress, change and the democratization of fashion that the internet has brought about. It's revolutionized the industry in a very good way. But sometimes, too much is too much. Case in point: I don't see too much difference between these candid shots from the making of the Chanel F/W 10.11 campaign...




and this actual campaign shot in the current issue of W Magazine...


At the time the candids leaked, I was as happy as anyone else was to get a glimpse of Karl, Freja, and Abbey at work. But now that the ads are starting to come out, I wished I hadn't seen all those candids because the final campaign images seems less special. In fact, some of them look just like the candids but with the "Chanel" logo slapped on them. It's pretty disappointing.

But that's life. You make some sacrifices in order to make some gains. So I guess I sacrificed the element of awe in order to satisfy my curiosity early on with the candids.

Image Credits: My scan, streetlevel.com, rachel_photo flickr

3 comments:

dj shaq said...

Yeah the internet has mad it way harder to suprise people but sometimes that can be a good thing. Like with music, in the past people spent money on terrible albums but now you can listen to the album on the internet before you decide to spend your hard earned money. Check out my blog acceptedoutcaste.blogspot.com I just did a post on nudity in photography. With the whole Terry Richardson thing happening I think you would find it interesting.

Anonymous said...

I don't know... I still get excited with each new image from this campaign. It probably is because my interest in fashion has only just begun, so the threshold for excitement is relatively low. As of right now, whenever I see new updates about Freja, a passage from a short story published by the New Yorker instantly springs to mind: "Where Luisa or I or anyone else saw only repetition and tedium, he must, at every moment, have seen a remarkable spectacle, as multiform, varied, and absorbing as a painting can be when the viewer forgets about the other paintings waiting for him and loses all notion of time, and loses, too, therefore, the habit of looking, which is replaced or supplanted—or, perhaps, excluded—by the capacity to see, which is what we almost never do, because it’s so at odds with the purely temporal."

Also, I first stumbled upon your blog after a search for the name of the model who bore such strong resemblance to Margot Tenenbaums. From then on it is pure fascination with a world so foreign to my own yet not without its own charm and... treachery.

By the by, would you write a critique on the "Predateurs" editorial? I saw an analysis that has Aristotle and Karl Lagerfeld in the same sentence, intriguing to say the least.

Here's the link:

http://www.anneofcarversville.com/art/like-aristotle-karl-lagerfeld-sees-women-as-predators.html

Rrose Sélavy said...

@ anonymous: I know that feeling of excitement that you speak about. I think that maybe I've lost a bit of that after all these years. :( Btw, fabulous New York quote. :) Thanks for the link and thanks for reading. If I get some time I'll try to do a post about the ed, but I don't think I have too much to say about this one that hasn't already been said by everyone else...