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White Cube2 in Hoxton Square, N1,
is preparing to stage the first ever European gallery presentation
of work by fashion photographer Steven Meisel. Meisel will present
a number of large-format photographs that form the core of the stunning
advertising campaign that he recently shot for Versace.
At a time when the teenager continues to be the cultural staple
catered for in both the fashion and music world with Teen Vogue,
boy bands and singers like Britney Spears, Meisel's Versace Pictures
re-introduce the notion of the mature woman.
The pictures, shot in just four
days in palatial Los Angeles homes, feature supermodels Amber Valetta
and Georgina Grenville as virtually identical women with elegant
dresses, sculpted hair, full make-up, and huge flashing jewels.
Posing demurely in their anonymous interior-decorated homes, like
their pampered pets, these high maintenance women appear perfectly
tamed, preened and manicured.
If the images present a kind of over-the-top extravagance, it is
a frozen opulence; languorous and rarefied - a throwback to the
fifties, a pre-teen era, evoking the styles and subjects of Pasolini
and Fellini by way of Beverly Hills. These women, like their interiors,
are perfectly arranged, tranquillised and in control.
Often placed high in the picture
plane they recall the Mannerist portraits of Bronzino and Pontormo
where the sumptuously adorned female subjects are both hieratic
and untouchable. Now, as then, it is wealth that signifies. Bruce
Hainley suggests that what Meisel is doing with these images is
giving us an 'opulent fantasy structure' about the power of the
female adult 'at a time when what many desire is forgoing adult
responsibility.'
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