Campaigned Art

Last night I flicked through a preview of next season's fashion campaigns on the New York Magazine website (http://nymag.com/daily/fashion/2011/06/fall_fashion_ads.html). What jumped out was the savvy use of art references in both the clothes and the ads - here my favourites.  

Jil Sander - Miró



F/W 2011, Photograph by Willy Vanderperre

Joan Miró, Hope of a Condemned Man I-II-III, 1973, Triptych

This is more than association- the motif on the pullover is an almost exact inversion of Miró's Hope of a Condemned Man II.  Jil Sander's Head Designer Raf Simmons might have seen the big Miró retrospective at the Tate Modern (14 April - 11 September 2011), in which the massive triptych is displayed in a separate room. See Guardian critic Adrian Searle in ecstasy about the painting - http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/video/2011/apr/13/joan-miro-hope-condemned-man-video-review.

Is the bent over body on the left an allusion to the title of Miró's painting? The model on the right certainly makes a face as though she had just been condemned (to death/ fashion thinness). But for me it works -anyone good at knitting?  

Stella McCartney - Magritte (ish)

F/W 2011, Natalia Vodianova photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott

                        

                          

This comparison might be stretching it a little, but to me the feel and perspective of this Stella McCartney campaign have something of the mysterious yet sharp surrealism of Magritte (ex. the above Waterfall 1961 and Waisted Effort 1962). I can also sense a hint of Alice in Wonderland/Minnie Mouse. Approved!

Marc Jacobs - Cerith Wyn Evans

F/W 2011, Cerith Wyn Evans photographed by Juergen Teller

Cerith Wyn Evans, Inverse, Reverse, Perverse 1996

Marc Jacobs' latest campaign features Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans, and it includes several images more risqué than the above (for example Evans with a throng of baloons attached to his...http://www.models.com/work/marc-jacobs-marc-jacobs-fw-11-mens-campaign-with-artist-cerith-wyn-evans/54176). This one, with the artist contorted in front of a mirror, seems like an echo of his own work with mirrors, for example his Inverse, Reverse, Perverse. As Evans said in an interview, the installation is meant to be "a machine for generating strangeness". Not hard to see why the collaboration with Jacobs has been so...fruitful.