Deciphering the Vampire Fatale

Today's post starts where we left yesterday with an exploration of the symbolic meaning behind the haunting images of vampire women in fashion photo shoots, a theme derived
from Genuine: The Tale of a Vampire.

Vampires have somehow always been popular in fashion: while many people in the fashion industry actually behave like vampires (figures that inspired a few years ago also the chick-lit fashion vampire novel Blood Is the New Black by Valerie Stivers), usually the images of blood-sucking creatures are mainly associated to ideas of capitalism and consumption, the main engines behind the fashion industry.

Entire essays could easily be written on the theme we will instead analyse today, women and vampires, approaching it from different angles.

One of the first iconic portrayals of women as sinister vampire-like creatures appeared in Louis Feuillade’s ten chapter series Les Vampires (1915-16; here you find embedded the first episode, "The Severed Head").

http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf

French silent film diva Musidora starred in it as villainess Irma Vep (an anagram of “vampire”), the femme fatale and muse of the Vampire Gang, a group of thieves, poisoners, wall climbers and hypnotists terrorising Paris with their criminal activities.

Musidora is a dark and mysterious vision in the film, representing the corruption of the social mores.

The body hugging leotard she wears in the series inspired in later years many iconic styles in fashion, film and photography, and her figure also anticipated with its dark eroticism and exoticism the liberated women from the 20s.

Some critics also claim Musidora’s leotard was the first costume ever created purposely for the big screen, even though a similar costume appeared already in a 1916 play entitled Souris d’hôtel.

There is actually another vampire-like figure in the film, dancer Marfa Koutiloff (Stacia Napierkowska), portrayed in the second episode of the saga "The Ring That Kills" wearing a bat costume as she dances in a ballet entitled “Les Vampires”, an image that shows an uncanny resemblance with Irma’s look.

Make-up was an integral part of Irma and Marfa's image: the emphasis on sinister pale skin and the heavily made up lips and eyes is directly linked to the dark beauty of other vamps and divas of the silent screen, from Theda Bara to Louise Glaum, Nita Naldi and Pola Negri.

Fashion always showed a great fascination with vampire themes, but the interpretation of such themes changed with the time. 

One early inspiration for vampire photo shoots was obviously Bram Stoker's Dracula and models were usually portrayed in a passive way, as the victims of an act of vampirism, sporting at times a bite on their necks.

Soon, though, the role reversed in favour of a sort of "vampiric eroticism".

Transported into the pages of fashion magazines, femme fatales and vamps turned into vampires, mysterious and ambiguous creatures capable of generating terror not by biting other people, but with their dangerous and often ambiguous sexuality.

In many different photo shoots by Sean Ellis for The Face, styled by Isabella Blow and taken during the mid-90s, there were unsettling and dark images of women portrayed in gothic atmospheres.

In one image from "The Clinic" photo shoot, Shaun Leane’s spiked mouthpiece designed to accompany Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1997 collection, was worn by a model posing as if she were piercing with the protruding metal spikes of this deadly accessory the neck of another model.

It's interesting to note how, throughout the 90s, many images inspired by the vampire theme and portraying women as blood-sucking creatures also hinted at lesbianism, with models that seemed to represent a sort of threat to heterosexuality. 

The 90s had actually opened with erotic interpretations of vampire women: in 1991 Jonathan Lennard – the photographer who worked through his career for The Face, Vogue Italia, Vogue UK, Femme and L’Officiel, and who turned in more recent years into a fashion commercial director – took a photo shoot of his girlfriend Susan, a fashion model, focusing on the theme of the "vampire fatale".

On their way back home from a fashion photo shoot in Australia, the couple stopped in Thailand.

Lennard walked around Bali for three days looking for the proper locations to do a quick shoot and, during his explorations, he found a wooden sculpture of a bat, an isolated temple and a cave full of bats and snakes.

In the main images included in the shoot, the model mimicked in her poses a bat, but Lennard managed to infuse a little bit of gothic symbolism and
occultism in an image taken at the mouth of the bat cave that shows Susan surrounded by bats and in one shot taken on the beach.

In the latter Lennard's muse is wearing the wooden bat the photographer had found while scouting for locations fashioned as a necklace (apparently this picture caused a few problems and the photographer almost ended up in jail for taking it since local regulations prohibited to take images considered as erotic in public place such as the beach).

The best image of the entire photo shoot remains the one taken in a temple that shows Susan in a black leotard, in a pose that reminds of villainess Irma Vep and dancer Marfa.

Attractive and repulsive, vampires still prove to be inspirational for fashion and accessory designers (remember Victoire
de Castellane's jewellery line for Dior entitled "Fiancée du
Vampire"?), stylists and photographers and what's more interesting is that these creatures are nowadays often used as metaphors for powerful and strong modern women walking on the dark side.  

This is the image evoked also by the latest photo shoot for fashion label Garland Coo, a creative collaboration between designer Jasmin Isabel Eckerle and artist Marcel Singer (I'll hopefully explore their work further in a future post in connection with art, film and literature). 

Garland Coo's collection is based on sharp tailoring, slim cut silhouettes and bondage elements, and it's inspired by the atmospheres of the German Black Forest, that gives a sort of mysterious and tribal edge to the designs. 

Looks like the power of vampires – turned throughout the centuries from scary, frightening and repulsive into something romantic, erotic and alluring – has more recently transformed into a desirable weapon ideal to repel the fears, terror and anxiety generated by modern life. 

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