Undercurrents: a beauty editorial for Falcon magazine
Going from a pristine natural beauty look to crumpled cellophane from behind which our model Tanya Tseng looked like a wilted bridal bouquet straight out of a Tim Burton movie, I asked myself what held these looks together. The answer, for me, was that these fashion looks got progressively more blue, more watery… more unhinged even, like a riptide coming in and tossing us about a couple of times before spitting us out stranded with nothing but our raw emotions on the cold wet sand.
Although I initially toyed with the title “Metamorphosis,” as under the hands of wonderful makeup and hair artist Sarah Lumea our model underwent a progressive transformation from bright and luminous to wet and cheeky (culminating in vaseline and mist spray), I decided to call this series “Undercurrents,” as I felt it reflected this distinctly watery dimension of our beauty editorial.
Playing on the tropes of naughty and nice, I envisioned our model being gradually swept from the top of mount Olympus, of which the above bright and airy look is representative, to fend for herself in the torrential waters of the soul (embodied in the look below). This Apollonian-Dionysian duality, I find, permeates fashion photography with regularity, wavering between an aspirational, statuesque ideal of beauty that is never meant to be attained (unless you have a small army of makeup artists, hair stylists and couture labels at your disposal), and a form of emotional expression: how do I FEEL when wearing these clothes (or, perhaps more accurately, what kind of emotional state do they provoke in me)?
Being a French literature PhD, I can’t help but think that Baudelaire, were he alive today, would likely have been a fashion photographer, always drawing on the interplay of static immobility and (sometimes torrential) movement, as when the features of his muse, “shiny as oil, sinuous as a swan,”
S'avançaient, plus câlins que les Anges du mal,
Pour troubler le repos où mon âme était mise,
Et pour la déranger du rocher de cristal
Où, calme et solitaire, elle s'était assise.
Advanced, more cajoling than angels of evil,
To trouble the quiet that had possessed my soul,
To dislodge it from the crag of crystal,
Where calm and alone it had taken its seat.
Similarly, I felt that, swept by the undercurrent, our beauty series had culminated in some kind of image of Ophelia, watery yet pristine, like a mental breakdown in a glass coffin.
Published in Falcon magazine. For queries, contact us here.
