By NICKY CHAMP
I don’t know about you, but whenever I buy new shoes I always think, ‘Gee, it’d be good if there was a pair of amputated legs in the box.’
Am I right?
Christian Louboutin, the shoe designer responsible for the ubiquitous red-soled heels, has released a calendar for his AW ‘14 collection with creepily dismembered legs modeling his latest shoe designs.
The campaign heavily references 1960s fashion photographer Guy Bourdin’s work. His images were the first to capture a complex dystopian fantasy – shocking, sexual, predatory, violent and sinister – and associate that moment with a fashion item like a pair of heels, clothes or makeup. The women in his images are handcuffed, tied to train tracks, dumped in garbage bins, hung, drowned and crushed by cars.
One art critic said of Bourdin’s work, “It was fashion at the brink: clothes to be raped in, shoes to be found dead in, a scarf to be strangled by.”
Unfortunately, it’s an aesthetic that is still used in fashion photography today. Seeing women in violent and ill-fated situations in advertising is something that most of us have witnessed on television, on billboards, in magazines and online. The problem now, nearly 50 years later, is that these images have lost their shock value. The shots aren’t exploring surrealist art; they’re just straight up derivative.
Style.com are calling them “just a healthy dose of Pop surrealism,” but fashion commenter, Kate Finnigan, for the Telegraph.co.uk sees it differently.
“The objectification of women in calenders has always made me feel uneasy but this is on another level. Amputated limbs in a gift box? You can artfully arrange the beautiful tissue paper as much as you like, Monsieur Louboutin, but if those legs and arms are meant to represent real human limbs then they must have been separated from the rest of their bodies by some pretty revolting act of mutilation.”
What do you think, are these images beyond creepy or do they appeal to you? Does it make you want to buy any of these shoes?
