In March, I met Dangin in Los Angeles, where he had gone to work on the Lanvin ad campaign, to be shot by Steven Meisel. At six in the morning, he picked me up at my hotel—in a red Mini Cooper—and drove to Smashbox Studios, a sprawling complex of soundstages in Culver City.
We arrived to a mostly empty set. Fifteen full-sized wheelie suitcases were waiting for the makeup artist, Pat McGrath. One of them was labelled “Gold-Blonde Wigs.” Dangin went to get a cup of coffee at the craft-services table. There were two models on hand, Liya Kebede and Raquel Zimmerman. Meisel would shoot them separately against a black dropcloth—equivalent to the sort of blue screen a weatherman uses—to set off the movement of the clothes. The idea was for Dangin to take Meisel’s favorite shot of each woman and splice the two onto some sort of artificial urban background of his own creation.
Dangin huddled with Lanvin’s designer, Alber Elbaz, along with McGrath, Enninful, and the creative director for the ad campaign, Ronnie Cooke Newhouse. After some debate about just what sort of glamour the team was going for—“We’re doing our downtown smoky burlesque woman, right?” “So, rich rather than dangerous?”—Meisel arrived, and the shoot began.
At one point, Dangin, examining the pictures at his console, approached Meisel. He had an inspiration: he would be able to do a cool halo effect on the silhouettes of the models’ bodies if Meisel shot them with some backlighting, to simulate an exposure delay with the flash. Meisel came over to the computer table, where Dangin prepared a quick mockup. They switched to backlighting.
Later that night, Dangin showed me some prototype images that were the result of the day’s work. One of them featured Kebede, wearing a black strapless gown with ruffles down the front, and Zimmerman, in a plum-colored dress that tied around the neck, in the middle of a dark city street. They looked kinetic, caught in mid-motion, as if they were about to hail a cab. Behind the pair were the blurry lights of New York in the rain. Or so it looked. Dangin had actually assembled the cityscape mostly from hundreds of random images that his staff had culled from the Internet. A restaurant marquee in the top left corner of the image was borrowed from a picture of Shanghai. The opposite side had looked inert, he thought, so he imported a white storefront from Amsterdam.
I really liked this collection and I think Liya would do a great job.
but I thought it was mentioned here already 
exciting news!
