Fashion & Lifestyle

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News: Steven Meisel's perfect Versace women come to White Cube2 - 16/07/01

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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