Mary Duleu, from Premium Models, crossed the UK border at 9am on the morning of the shoot, where a British immigration official prevented her from entering for some time. Boring and arbitrary, events like this are becoming a professional hazard for those who cross this border for work.
Fashion director Caroline Issa selected this look from Prada: an exercise in fashion leadership presenting a compelling idea, a three-tiered skirt, a white tank top and black heels.
Mary was cast by Irene Manicone for her unaffected serenity. Her hair, styled by Hirokazu Endo, produces an ember-like glow in the studio’s relative gloom, a fiery version of Venus emerging from her scallop shell. Fashion can be persona, costume, projection or protection, but before any of that,
it’s an attitude.
It would be a diminished world in which high fashion became only a uniform for elites.
This Dior skirt is paired with a white Gap T-shirt, which is twisted around Mary’s torso so that a visible seam snakes up from her navel. Behind her back, the T-shirt is tied in a knot and secured with a bulldog clip.
The photography assistant, Luca Strano, cuts the sides of the paper floor into flutes, using his phone to measure the distance between each incision, explaining that it helps the paper lay flat. He is helped by styling intern Talia Goodwin. At one point, a small band of Hare Krishna devotees go past the studio. Their familiar chant is heard long before we see them, and when they pass they wave in through the window at Mary in her jacket, skirt and shoes, all by Chanel.
In 1968, a pamphlet produced by artist Manuel Duque laid out how successive art movements necessarily abolish the concepts that preceded them, asking of art: epuration? Or liberation? Finally, he proclaimed that, la langage a pris la place du visuel.
Photographer Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie focuses on where the delicate construction of Mary’s [Sur]naturel earrings by Cartier meets the punky safety pins that hold together her ACT N°1 jacket.
Mary's Zoom meeting look is all by Gucci on the top while her S.S. Daley oversize boxers are kept invisible below her desk. In the pandemic, fashion's ontological purpose shifted. In this dubious time that we have begun to call the post-pandemic, here come power shoulders and tailoring.
Sometimes power comes with a hint of discomfort.
Tailoring involves responding to the feel and weight of a fabric to create an item in three dimensions, made to accommodate movement in a fourth. The waistcoat peeks over the outsize trousers, both by Emporio Armani. Mary’s simple white tank top is by Gap, her brooch by Cartier is called Geometry & Contrast, which would be a good title for this image, while her shoes by Fendi are just called shoes.
The security personnel in attendance to safeguard the jewellery from injury or larceny ordered a flat white at about 2pm. Here, Sohrab had Mary stand on two books to send the ample S.S. Daley trousers floating above the floor. Mary's tank top is also by S. S. Daley, and the air of the supernatural is echoed by her [Sur]naturel earrings and Sixième Sens par Cartier necklace by Cartier.
Caroline paired the delicate fretwork of this sheer panelled bodysuit with slim tailored trousers, both by Nensi Dojaka, set off with [Sur]naturel earrings and Sixième Sens par Cartier ring, both by Cartier.
Fashion is a machine for generating, as well as responding to, desire.
Lead us into temptation.
Make-up artist Seunghee Yoo applied Mary’s eyeshadow after she had put on this Richard Quinn dress to avoid smudging. On the right, she wears a top by S.S. Daley, leggings and shoes by WARDROBE.NYC and a Geometry & Contrast brooch by Cartier. Long gloves by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello accentuate her sinuous height.
The bra on Mary’s Sportmax suit might be a showcase of feminine power that sits triumphantly atop this ostensibly masculine garment, especially when worn with heels by Sportmax, but the seam runs off-centre, the bra sits aslant:
the suit has always been an uncertain site of gendered identity.
Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello’s bulky overcoats and tiny wisps of skirts were a favorite of Caroline’s on the runway. Caroline and styling assistant Stella Umezaki reproduced the skirt’s movement by holding the material aloft and releasing it at the moment that Sohrab took the image.
The tulle erupts from below like an upside-down lily.
The unique challenge of fashion generating the new is the creation of a huge amount of waste. Marco De Vincenzo’s two dresses and suit are from the 1960s and 1970s, updated with silver half-spheres and grommets punched through the fabric, a pocket giving way to the skin beneath.
Dismantling can be an act of creation – think of Colston’s statue in Bristol Harbour.
A corset is built into this jacket; a belt is adhered to the waist. Sacai constructs new shapes from traditional silhouettes, editing together different vernaculars.
There’s a difference between romanticising and troubling the past.
Mary’s S.S. Daley look is inspired by John and Yoko’s Bed-ins for Peace.