The main part of Hans-Peter Gerner’s new autumn/winter campain focusses on the aspects of tradition, craft and handwork that lie in every piece of his outstanding collection. We decided not to shoot with a professional fashion model this time and worked with Natalie Gerner who is the head of Gerner’s tailoring atelier.
Craftsmanship, authenticity, aesthetics, quality, and passion for the detail – that’s what this photoshoot was about – can’t await to post the finished pictures!

We were shooting the NORDENFELDT spring/summer 2011 lookbook yesterday in Munich. It was an awesome production using a “quick & dirty” ringflash technique that made the images look like accidental streetshots of a variety of typical city scenes. The focus was on the boots, so the pictures had to come across like anonymous “snapshots” (a pity we had to cut Val’s beautiful face). But at the same time they had to tell a story of a typical day of our Nordenfeldt girl’s big city life.

Here are just some impressions from the first couple of set, there’s a lot more in the actual lookbook which I’ll post here as soon as it will be printed.

To show how much his work had affected a whole generation of young creatives, Chiara and I decided to shoot a couple of homage pictures.

The 1st one was shot in my studio with Maria Justus wearing a dress that Chiara made from 40 meters of fabrics. The inspiration for the dress comes from McQueen’s S/S 1999 show. We wanted Maria to look not like an object of desire, but strong and untouchable, with certain historic references. Make-up and hairstyling by Maren Endraß.

The 2nd photograph was taken in a private chapel. Chiara is wearing a vintage Yamamoto dress that’s enlarged with additional layers of textile by Lorand Lajos (who also made the headpiece and the collar) and an Italian vintage wedding dress. Make-up by Maren Endraß.

The last one has become my new portfolio cover. I came across this fascinating dog during a walk downtown. The Xolo breed is truly controverse and altough it is based on a genetic disfunction it has been honored as sacred for thousands of years now. To me, the Xolo represents a certain kind of Otherness. Looking like a creature from culture’s unconscious depths, he seemed to embody the McQueen-principle quite well. And to bring the relation to clothing back into the picture, we decided to make him a coat from fur rejects.

- ZUM VERGRÖßERN ANKLICKEN! -

Gestern war’s nun soweit: Ich habe die Modestrecke geschossen, die ursprünglich als Seminar an der Uni Augsburg geplant gewesen war und vor einem Monat für diesen Skandal gesorgt hatte. Nachdem ich meine Lehrtätigkeit dann als Konsequenz daraus beendet hatte (obwohl mir nach wie vor nicht verständlich ist, was an dem Projekt z.B. “hochgradig sexistisch” gewesen sein soll, so ein Vorwurf der Frauenbeauftragten damals in der Presse), habe ich das Projekt nun mit ca. 20 Praktikanten/-innen fertig gestellt anstatt mit ca. 20 Studierenden.

Special Thanks to:
- Martina Fromme & Jan Thiemann vom UNICUM Verlag (Bochum) für die Offenheit gegenüber einem innovativen Projekt
- Sigrid Kafka & Nazret Tecleab von kafka&tecleab für die tatkräftige praktische und kreative Unterstützung allen Konzeptions- und Realisierungsphasen
- den Stadtwerken Augsburg für  die großartige Location
- unseren Models Anja, Susanna, Wanja & Richard, ihr wart fantastisch gut und es war eine Freude mit euch zu shooten!
- Maren Endraß für für die umwerfenden Make-ups und Frisuren
- Chiara Padovan & Maria Justus für  die super Assistenz
- allen Studierenden / Praktikanten für die engagierte Arbeit von der ersten Idee bis zur Umsetzung

Die Strecke erscheint im November in den Lifestyle-Magazinen UNIQUEEN und UNIKING und wird an jedem Campus zu finden sein. Wohl auch in Augsburg.
^,..,^

Erstes Fotoset: das Ofenhaus im Gaswerk, optimale Location durch die enorme Höhe und die vielen Metallträger. Für die räumliche Aufteilung des Fotohintergrunds sorgen Baumwollstreifen, die die Praktikanten zwischen den Säulen spannen. Besten Dank an Strenesse für das Textil-Sponsoring!

Relativ einfaches, aber sehr spannendes Lichtsetting: brilliantes Fashion-Licht durch den Broncolor PARA FB mit Ringblitz, einige weitere Blitzköpfe (auf den Bildern nicht zu sehen) setzen Akzente im Hintergrund.

Das Glück der richtigen Stunde: wunderschöne Sonnenspiele auf Boden und Wänden durch die riesigen Fabrikfenster, die wir teilweise in unsere Fotos mit einbauen konnten

Visuelle Inspiration im Aufenthaltsraum:

Maren Endraß at her best!

Letzte Details…

Sigrid und Nazret beim Styling:

Maria und Maren nach getaner Arbeit (zumindest der Hälfte davon…)

… and finally… here we go!

Kurze Pause nach dem ersten Set auf diesem kleinen Sandstrand direkt vor unserer Halle…

Zweites Set: der imposante Gaskessel mit seinem Foucaultschen Pendel. Hiervon vorerst nur zwei Bilder, die kompletten Strecken gibt’s dann im November in Uniqueen und Uniking zu sehen!

I’ve posted a preview some time ago, now it’s officially out: MOCK magazine Vol. #1 featuring a futuristic fashion-photo-comic-editorial that we’ve shot last winter for Schön! magazine’s THE FUTURE competition which brought me the “Aspiring Talents” representation by SPECTACULAR STUDIOS (Stockholm, New York & London).

Credits
Photography: Thomas Sing (www.thomas-sing.de)
Art Direction: Thomas Sing & Chiara Padovan (www.pixerette.com)
Illustration: Andrea Padovan (andreapadovan.daportfolio.com)
Hair & Make-Up: Daniela Schatz (www.make-up-art.com)
Styling: Chiara Padovan (www.pixerette.com)
Models: Vero Jack @MostWantedModels, Miseong @MostWantedModels

Clothes
Ms. Trend Scoutee: vintage jacket, gloves & belt, swimsuit LaPerla, leggings H&M, shoes model’s own, hat IKEA
Scene 1: (left) pink gloves Armani Jeans, hat Hutcouture by Sylvia Müller
Scene 2: (left) leotard Aria, all white stuff made by stylist; (right) all stylist’s own
Scene 3: (left) dyed fox tail courtesy of Atelier Gerner
Scene 4: (left) all stylist’s own
Scene 5: (right) fur outfit made by stylist, mixed fur courtesy of Atelier Gerner
Scene 6: (right) lycra catsuit Fets Fash

CLICK THE PICTURES TO SEE THEM IN FULL SIZE !

Inspirations:

For this project we decided to mix media, combining studio photographs with black&white illustration. We wanted to create a not so far future between science-fiction and noir comics.
Inspirations for the city were certainly cult movies like Brazil, Blade Runner and the 5th Element and we had to think of Frank Miller and Roy Liechtenstein a lot!
The background was illustrated mixing hand-drawing, 3D and 2D graphics.

Our heroine should stay above the trend, we wanted her to be zen, futuristic and classy at once. Therefore the choice of the colours black, white and red. She should be determined like Star Wars’ Princess Leya, but also pure like the Childlike Empress in the Neverending Story.

The billboards in the city should reflect a technologic culture with a strictly coded style, so we opted for static poses and geometrical, stiff clothing. Suburbia should represent a contrast to this well-organized and mannered world. We chose metal and fur as the two main styling themes for the underground first to convey an aggressive attitude, either sharp or wild, but also to remind of recyclable materials in a world where resources are limited. (All fur used is recycled fur!)

For the beauty part, we wanted to emphasize hair as a distinguishing feature, using extensions or hats to blow up head proportions. (For there is a lot of brain work about fashion.)

We didn’t want to make a steady statement about the future of fashion. That’s why in the end we left the question open to anyone’s creativity. We hope the viewers will enjoy our little story and be inspired to an answer of their own.

I was shooting a huge photo story with four dancers last saturday at this wonderful place of Olli Marschall who does those amazing wood sculptures. It will take some time until the whole set will be published, in the meantime I’ll just post a few behind-the-scenes shots.
Among the models: Natalia Fioroni (from Toronto, currently at Stadttheater Augsburg); Lucyna Zwolinska (currently in Augsburg, soon in Saarbrücken); and my creative genius Stephen Delattre (Mainz), it was already the 4th time I was working with him.

Steph getting his make-up done by Maren Endraß.

Me and my cam.

Natalia waiting for her hair to be styled.

Lucy falling free.

That’s what kept us going for 14 hours

Our host Olli Marschall. Thanks for providing us such a great place! — Please visit his homepage to see the outstanding objects he’s creating from wood! => www.marsart.de

Fashion as free play

The same is true for fashion as such: fashion isn’t a narrative in itself, it induces multiple narrations of different kinds. Fashion as a sign-surface doesn’t provide any distinct intrinsic meaning, but it is open to fluctuating assets of meaning according to how, where and when it is worn.
Fashion as a free play (I don’t speak about its merely functional aspects here, neither about an exclusively upper-class phenomenon) is neither a substantial nor a ‘lexical’ phenomenon, it is a structural and social one. That is to say it is not working symbolically in the way in which every word of a certain language has a specific meaning that all members of the linguistic community understand; it is on the contrary a loose system of indices where symbolical meaning can be temporarily linked, but never permanently attached. At its heart, fashion is anti-totalitarian, though it can be adapted by totalitarian purposes (remember e.g. how various regimes use fashion to create a rigid and enclosed aesthetics of power).
It is a main principle of fashion and one of its most subversive strengths that it can reverse any usurpation by appropriating the symbols of power and de-symbolizing them into an iconic-indexical play of cuts, colors and forms: the current military shapes that we saw in many of the A/W 2010 collections e.g. do not stand for something anymore as an inflexible code (like an uniform does in the army), but create a self-reflexive aesthetic value that merely causes associations of a certain social or historical field (‘military’) without signifying a particular denotation.

‘Dress’ as a complicity between clothing and body

It could be that the often-stated close relation between fashion, eroticism and death (as analyzed first by poets like Baudelaire and thinkers like Walter Benjamin) comes from this mode of fashion being a ‘zero-sign’ which structurally does not allow any clear signification of lexical meaning. Erotism and death are eruptive and discontinuous spheres in which the formation of symbolical meaning is dissolved into unintelligible vectors of desire, ambiguity and obliteration. Fashion can of course be a way to make these vectors visible on the body – up to their permanent inscription by means of body modifications, tattoos, and so on. And by doing so, fashion is deeply human: a singular enigmatic statement against all systematical knowledge. Every dress is one of a kind. Because a ‘dress’ is the complicity between clothing and body. And as serial as clothing may be – the body always is unique.

I think to argue in a (post-)postmodern society that fashion was simply a capitalist vehicle of reification is completely beside the point of such a complex phenomenon of contemporary culture. Fashion today is the self-conscious quotation of reification; it is an ironical play with commodity culture far more than a dumb assimilation to it.

Deeply superficial

Being a ‘fashion-victim’ thus would not mean to surrender to the bewitching forces of an all-devouring capitalism running at idle; it would just mean a thoroughly modern refusal to the cultural dictate of being a well-defined subject with a stable and unchanging substance. Fashion is a constant flux, a never ending re-invention of the self through the means of a potentially infinite alteration, combination and re-combination of surfaces that have no meaning in themselves but produce volatile and fragile associations of meaning exactly because they are put together to an actual dress. A free play of forces without a distinct goal other than creating the “cocktail effect” (Omar Calabrese) of style that makes the impact of a ’stylish’ or ‘fashionable’ dress much more than the sum of its single pieces of clothing.

Frankly said, I don’t understand photographers who aim to portrait people ‘like they really are’. It’s simply impossible for a two-dimensional medium like a photograph (that’s punctual and frozen in relation to time and space) to depict any reality even approximately adequately; – still the most ‘documentary’ picture is determined by a far too large variety of codes and selectional decisions on the part of the photographer and his camera to give a trustworthy evidence of ‘the real’. Today every child knows that images are digitally manipulated, and contemporary photography also self-reflects this fact in many creative ways (just think of Alison Jackson’s ‘celebrity’ portraits…). A photography does not make a decisive statement on what it is depicting. It’s making a supposition on what it could be.

This meta-discourse on the real is also always evident when it comes to photograph fashion. Even the most ‘provocative’ fashion pictures (think of Jürgen Teller, Oliviero Toscani or Terry Richardson) do not make a final statement. Toscani’s Benetton ads or Teller’s lipstick-Versace-heart shocked the public not because they had been ‘provocative’ per se, but because they had been taken for depictions of a reality that they never were and never could be. Taking into account that provocative potential of an image, it’s clear that it deals with reality; but it’s the socially coded reality of the viewer where the shock takes place, not the medially coded virtual reality of the image. The image always remains silent.

The razor blade within the picture

A good fashion photograph provides nothing than a surface structure that’s open to phantasies, stories and imaginations, but also to fears, prejudices and insecurities. This surface can be well-styled (e.g. in mainstream commercials), or it can be rough and full of trip wires. Of course the reality effect that is created when I look at an image and feel touched (no matter if positively or negatively) is starting on the side of the image – but it is solely my own reality that I feel if it ‘hits’ me. A bit like music or a poem: it gives you some hints, but it has to be felt and interpreted. And there’s never just one interpretation, one truth.
That’s what distinguishes literature and art from an user manual or a propaganda sheet, and it’s what draws the distinction of Teller and Toscani from simple porn; – of course you can get off to some pictures of Terry Richardson while other ones make you want to throw up, but his imagery can never be reduced to such a plain functionalization. It’s the implicit irony even in his most explicit photographs that make them a multi-directional surface on which any one-directional interpretation inevitably has to slide and fall. Every good picture has at least one element that can be substituted by a razor blade. (And that’s the point where the ‘real’ slips back into the picture… Roland Barthes knew that when he spoke of the ‘punctum’, and Jean Baudrillard was searching for it in his own photographs… and both were aware of the fact that this ‘reality effect’ was the only thing in a picture that cannot be planned or ’styled’.)

Fashion & fetish

Eroticism, desire, seduction and sexuality are surely parts of the ‘fashion drive’, and their influence on it cannot be valuated highly enough. High fashion and the sometimes exaggerated behaviors connected to it are often compared to fetishism; ‘commodity fetishism’ is a widely used term in sociology and cultural studies since Marx, Benjamin & Co., and I think we cannot deny there’s something true about it. But it is more than that. A ‘fetish’, by definition, is always fully determined: it is a (e.g. sexually charged) object that unambiguously stands for something, and this one-way-conjunction can be analyzed and named. Fetishism’s main difference to fashion however lies in the fact that fashion’s conjunctions are ‘open‘; actually, fashion brings no fixed conjunctions with itself, more a ‘connectibility’ which can develop associations in different and unpredictable directions, with its indices being invertible in a way that the whole system will be influenced and possibly even re-written: Aimee Mullins’ carved artificial legs in McQueen’s SS 1999 show for example are – needless to say – not some strange mutilation- or prosthesis-fetish (as a weird porn-movie would perhaps determine them); they are high-fashion items that provoke discussions on aesthetics, on fashion’s relation to the body, and so on. And it’s the images that make fashion’s communicative drafts public and effective.

An infinite wardrobe

Discourses on multiple layers (theoretical, sociological, historical, narrative, emotional, of course also functional and sexual) – that’s what fashion at its best accomplishes. And that’s what I have in mind when I shoot fashion pictures. Of course photographing fashion is a cool job and lots of fun, but more than that for me it’s the challenge of transposing a fragile system of textile signs that lives through its organic relation to time, space and the body into that fascinating two-dimensional photographic medium without obtruding it a meaning that’s cropping away the open (and at the end: ‘modern’ and ‘democratic’) communication value that it has when it’s worn.

Fashion provides the paradigm, photography the discourse. Or, simply but true: fashion is a huge wardrobe, pull out some pieces and suggest with your cam what they could mean…