One of the most incredible things about the fashion industry is its “brass neck”: people working in this industry often do not have any sense of shame about what they do and, bizarrelly enough, almost feel proud when they pilfer a design, reuse an old idea making it pass for a tribute to the person who originally created it (or as an alternative never acknowledge where they actually took it from...) or commit other assorted “fashion crimes”.
Take the recently unveiled images from the photo shoots that will be featured in the first issue of the hotly anticipated C(arine) R(oitfeld) Fashion Book (hitting the newsstands on September 13). There are quite a few ones that seem to be reminiscent of William Klein's film Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?(1966).
Some of the images featuring a series of models in similar hairstyles that you can preview in the video currently uploaded on CRfashionbook.com evoke some bits and pieces of the film, but there is also a particular spread by Sebastian Faena that is undoubtedly taken from it.
The image is featured on today's WWD and shows model Juliet Ingleby covered only by a lavender veil walking through a cemetery followed by three women dressed in black attire from head to toe. The spread echoes the fashion photo shoot in a graveyard in Klein's film.
What's interesting though is that, in the movie, the rather annoying magazine editor used it to wonder if Paris was dead fashion-wise, while Klein used the shoot and the entire film as a parody of the fashion industry and the modelling business.
It's somehow interesting that rather than being offended by what the film says about fashion (albeit in a funny and ironic way...), fashion is revomiting 46 years after that film was first released a specific scene, attaching to it no specific meaning.
You wonder if Roitfeld is quoting Klein's movie through Faena's lenses to build hype around the magazine or if she thinks that the graveyard shot is particularly edgy or controversial.
I personally find it rather sad and proving that fashion probably doesn't have a lot to say at the moment. After all, as Grégoire says in Klein's film, “Fashion is about money and deception”. Guess nobody ever managed to describe the fashion industry better than this.
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