FASHION / INSIDE OUT
August 18, 1994|DEBRA GENDEL | TIMES FASHION EDITOR
When Hiro, who trained under Richard Avedon, was asked by Mirabella magazine to come up with the face of American beauty in the '90s, the legendary fashion photographer considered his options.
"I could have gone into the cornfields of Iowa," he said by phone from his New York studio. "Or I could have drawn on the type of beauties from the past, like Ava Gardner or Merle Oberon."
Instead, he chose to create a woman of the future.
The clue to this futuristic female's family tree floats to the left of her cover portrait. A tiny computer chip is a tip-off that Miss September is more (or less) than meets the eye. A computer-generated composite of several women, to be exact.
"When people first see her, they say she's very beautiful," Hiro said. "After I tell them she does not exist, they say, 'I thought there was something weird about her.' "
Others have called her vacant, inhuman, detached, said Pat Beh Werblin, Mirabella's director of communications. (Reminding us of some flesh and blood cover girls.)
Overall, she's not as ethnic as she ought to be, given our increasingly ethnic population. The 35 women Hiro initially interviewed represented a cross-section of ethnicities. He says he wanted to get away from the "peaches and cream, blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordic beauty." Yet the features of his creation remain steadfastly Anglo-European. Ultimately, Hiro photographed five women in similar poses and scanned the photos into an image generator. Then he went to work, blending eyes, noses, skin tones, cheekbones into his own conception of American beauty.
"In America, beauty has a history of being manufactured," said the Chinese-born photographer. George Hurrell made beautiful women ravishing. Calvin Klein turned a skinny adolescent into an object of desire. "The camera sees more than we can ever see. But a photograph doesn't always tell the truth."
