DosViolines
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nymag
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nymagSweet, But Spooky
There’s something a little dark about the girl next door this fall.
By Harriet Mays Powell
Published Aug 17, 2008
Photographs by Andreas Sjödin
Hair by Fernando Torrent at L’Atelier NYC using Leonor Greyl. Makeup by Fredrik Stambro at L’Atelier NYBouclé coat dress, $3,680, and lace bustier dress, price upon request at Alexander McQueen. Spanish-lace mantilla, $289 at Lands-Faraway.com. C using M.A.C Pro. Manicure by Myrdith Leon-McCormack at Pure Management NYC for Sally Hansen. Casting by David Milosevich. Model: Skye Stracke at DNA Models. Market editor: Doria Santlofer. Fashion assistants: Eve Bertin-Lang and Emma Barker.
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Rodarte draped silk tulle gown with Swarovski crystals, price upon request at Barneys New York. Stephen Jones hat with flower appliqué and feather embellishments, $900 by special order at Saks Fifth Avenue.
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Long organza dress with floral lace detail, $11,985 at Roberto Cavalli. Brocade pumps, $580 at Cesare Paciotti .
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Bouclé coat dress, $3,680, and lace bustier dress, price upon request at Alexander McQueen. Spanish-lace mantilla, $289 at Lands-Faraway.com.
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Long jersey sheath-cape dress overlaid in embroidered lace with jet jewel appliqué headpiece, available through the Christian Lacroix Haute Couture salon in Paris; call 33-1-42-68-79-00 for information.
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Knit dress with crystal embroidery, price upon request at Alexander McQueen.
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Hooded cardigan, $8,550, and skirt, $12,950, at Giorgio Armani.
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Long-sleeve collared shirt, $455, silk stretch neck collar, $395, and lace dress, $4,725, at Prada. Prada lace peplum, $995 at Bergdorf Goodman.
Great cover choice!who is the model in Sweet, But Spooky?
Straight Shooter
Juergen Teller has little patience for most fashion photography. It’s done “by gay people finding women sexy.” He’d rather make out with Charlotte Rampling.
Vater and Sohn, Bubenreuth, Germany, 2005. (Teller with his son, Ed.)
Juergen Teller, the photographer, has spent much of this summer Tuesday editing a shoot commissioned by W Magazine about the art world in New York. The star of the shoot is the 47-year-old actress Tilda Swinton, who has been dressed up as everyone from an artist to a gallerist to an insecure collector mid–Botox procedure. She’s accompanied by artists like Rachel Feinstein and collectors like Renée Rockefeller. The whole thing looks fairly dark; the lighting is not gentle or flattering, and if any of the subjects has a pore, or a sagging breast, well, there it is.
“Most fashion photography is done by gay people finding women sexy,” Teller says, “which is sort of not sexy at all, at least to a heterosexual man. She’s so retouched, so airbrushed, without any human response at all, and, well, you don’t really want to f**k a doll.”
Teller, who is a heterosexual man, is sitting on the patio of his West London studio-house wearing mirrored aviator glasses, spiky hair, a shiny gold chain around his neck, and a great big Rolex on his wrist. He’s circular, with a round head, round belly, and round blue eyes, and he smokes almost constantly—Marlboro Lights with one of those giant European SMOKING KILLS warnings on the pack. The building, which he renovated completely two years ago, features a complicated number of levels: The garage is below the living room and the photo studio is sort of below and beside all that, and from the studio you have a perfect, head-to-toe view of the outdoor shower.
“I just turn the page,” Teller says of those very glossy fashion shots. “It doesn’t really interest me very much. My work has nothing to do with that. I just really like women, and I like men, and I like children, and I like eating, and I like doing everything. It’s something real. I’m for the individual human being, not some plastic figure some gay guy thought out. That’s valid for something, but it’s not my cup of tea.”
There is grit to a Juergen Teller photograph, even when it’s one of his lucrative high-fashion ads. A kind of raw, what-you-see-is-what-you-get sensibility that shows the sometimes very ugly side of a supposedly beautiful business. The photographs are undeniably sexy, but sexy in the sense that you can practically smell them. And they don’t, necessarily, smell like expensive designer perfume.
All this rawness is not presented as critique; “Look,” Teller says, “I have a Mercedes. I wear a Rolex watch. I have no problem with the selling of things.” Rather, it’s offered up mostly as realism: Here, the pictures say, this is what people look like. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, sometimes kind of gross. The pictures can be funny, too. Commissioned to shoot fine jewelry for Phillips auction house, Teller piled diamonds on members of his own family, from his infant son, Ed (adorably bundled into a Motörhead onesie), to Uncle Arthur, visiting from Germany at the ripe old age of 73.
“Why not?” Teller says, deadpan. “My family likes jewelry.”
He photographed Angela Lindvall with a mound of white Champagne foam coming out of her crotch and named it New York, Paris, Milan I’m Coming. He named another series “Fashion Wank.”
Rather than saturating the colors and bleeding his image off the edge of a page, as is typical for a fashion shoot, Teller uses a raw flash that blasts his subjects and keeps his colors soft and somewhat muted. And the pictures are always surrounded by loads of white space; for the W story, Teller will leave a number of pages blank. Sometimes the models in Teller’s pictures are tiny and distant, the color and sheen of their clothes nearly imperceptible.
But perhaps most rare for fashion photography, Teller’s pictures are absolutely never retouched. “I’m interested in the person I photograph,” he says. “The world is so beautiful as it is, there’s so much going on which is sort of interesting. It’s just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It’s just pointless to me.”
"There are elements of Beckett in Juergen’s work,” says Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W. “It’s a very serious business, but there’s no question that if you think about life in a certain way, you come to the realization that there are deep questions about what we are all doing here. Juergen touches on the futility of it all—of trying to look beautiful, the futility of trying to keep up your sagging breasts or of fitting into a certain dress. So much fashion photography builds this false sense and maintains the myth. Juergen’s pictures cut through all that, but they’re not depressing. What’s really depressing is not Juergen’s pictures, but the mindless objectification of women as clothes hangers who pose and wear clothes, but there’s nothing to the picture apart from that it’s a sales tool.”
TELLER'S AD WORK: (Clockwise from left) Vivienne Westwood (2007); Teller with Cindy Sherman, both
wearing Marc Jacobs sweaters (2005); Victoria Beckham in a Marc Jacobs Bag (2007).
Which, of course, in the complicated, push-pull world of commercial seduction, makes them extremely effective as sales tools. “I’m interested in what attracts somebody to a product,” says Teller. “Sometimes it’s not necessarily the product itself. It’s similar to when you go to the cinema and you watch a movie and you’re like, Oh my God. I want to feel something like that. That’s what I have as a double-page spread in a magazine. It’s not I want to be that. It’s I want to feel that.”
Models are not of tremendous interest to Teller. They were, once: In 1998, Teller found himself so deluged with models landing on his doorstep (agencies were hoping he’d “discover” another Kate Moss, as he was one of the first photographers to document her crooked beauty) that he began keeping a record of the visits. He put an ad in a paper for even more models, and suddenly his doorbell was ringing without interruption. He snapped each girl, standing so vulnerable there on his stoop. The result was a gallery show of the photographs—each printed identically small—and eventually a book called Go Sees: Girls Knocking on My Door.
“I wanted to show everything,” he says of the experience. “Some people are very at ease with themselves and enjoy being a model, and you can see that in the pictures. Some people are not, and you can see how insecure they are. It’s really dangerous and weird. And I wanted to show the kind of power you have as a photographer, and the dodgy side of that. You have to be correct with them; otherwise, it’s just awful.”
So Teller shot them all: Sophie Dahl dropped by, chubby and adolescent, and so did Eva Herzigova.
These days, Teller prefers quote-unquote interesting women: Cindy Sherman, Rachel Feinstein, Laura Dern. If he does shoot models, they are older (ideally over 20Mariacarla Boscono, Angela Lindvall, Kristen McMenamy. They are women with stories and strength. Teller knows them already, or he gets to. They often eat together, preferably something sloppy. Meal sharing, he explains, is deeply important to his process—spaghetti nero, with its muddying effect on the lips and teeth, has become, for Teller, something of a leitmotif.
“These women have experience in life and you can really talk to them about what you’re trying to achieve,” he explains. “It makes a hell of a lot more sense to make an ad which creates a fantasy about those women than about a bunch of young Russian models looking all doodly-doo.” For a recent Vivienne Westwood campaign, Teller all but ignored the model and instead photographed Westwood herself. She appears pale and crinkly and not-skinny and absolutely, completely self-possessed. She is gorgeous. But also—and this is important—he has not exactly shattered the rules of fashion: What she represents is every bit as unattainable, if not more so, as being tall and thin and 16.
Teller arrived in London just over twenty years ago, a befuddled German photo-school grad with a thing for grunge. “I wanted to learn English,” he says of his reasons for leaving Germany, “and I didn’t want to join the army.”
He started out photographing musicians like Björk and Kurt Cobain. His photographs appeared mostly in magazines like i-D and The Face, which were, in late-eighties London, as influential as any style magazines have ever been.
He met and fell in love with a stylist named Venetia Scott, a square-jawed, no-nonsense beauty who looks something like a photograph by Dorothea Lange. They worked together, slowly sorting out what they considered beautiful: “We just kind of very naïvely and innocently had a lot of time on our hands,” Teller says, “and we thought very long about what kind of girl or woman interested us and what we wanted to do. Sometimes we did one fashion story a year, and sometimes two. It was really slow, but it was great. We couldn’t go faster.” Fashion was quite glossy and supermodel-driven then, but Teller and Scott got hung up on Kate Moss, who was impossibly short and quirky by the standards of the time. “It was a bit scary for the Vogue people,” Teller says. “We were kind of free-spirited and hippieish and kind of dreamy.” They often shot with vintage clothes because the big design houses—“the Gucci Puccis,” Teller calls them—wouldn’t loan to them.
But they had worked it out, their idea of beauty: It was young and human, a direct sort of opposition to all that was glamazonian in the world. And it took: By the early nineties, The Face and i-D had moved outside the status of cult and were suddenly being mined for talent by the biggies. Soon, as Teller puts it, “those magazines became mainstream, and now everything is mainstream. The force was too strong not to listen to me. I was able to humanize the person wearing the clothes.”
Clockwise from left: Charlotte Rampling cradling Teller, for Mark Jacobs (2003); Björk, Spaghetti Nero,
Venice, 2007; Nürnberg Winter 5, Nürnberg, 2005, from Teller's autobiographical series.
The Beefcake in the Backcourt
Another way in which ripped, raffish Rafael Nadal and his cardigan-wearing Swiss rival aren’t anything alike.
Take your time. It’s okay. That photo of Rafael Nadal on the back cover of this magazine is undeniably … what’s a polite way to put it? Arresting. The mussed locks curled just so above the shoulders. The biceps curved like a particularly ripe aubergine. The shadows playing across the deeply grooved abs. All demand extended scrutiny.
When you’re done, ask yourself this: Would Roger Federer ever pose for a photo like that?
Federer and Nadal, in many ways, are perfect foils. All-court finesse versus baseline power, fluid grace versus relentless will, Swiss precision versus Majorcan passion. And that opposition extends to their sense of style. Even if you’ve never watched a minute of their epic matches, a single glance at, say, the photo of them posing at net before the Wimbledon 2008 final would tell you all you needed to know. Federer wears a herringbone-patterned cashmere cardigan, emblazoned with a royal RF logo, and loose white shorts; Nadal is in a sporty sleeveless Nike-emblazoned top and shorts so long they’re practically Capris.
Male tennis fashion has mostly been conservative, built on frequent returns to the preppy classicism of Lacoste and Perry. Federer, who has an interest in high fashion—Anna Wintour famously attends his matches, features him in shoots, and throws parties for him—has flirted with that tradition like no player before. (At previous years’ Wimbledons, he has arrived at Centre Court in a white blazer.) So it’s perhaps appropriate that the year in which Nadal finally conquered him—the Spanish player assumed the No. 1 ranking last week—was also the year in which Federer’s look tipped over into full-blown prissy self-parody.
Nadal has made a point of saying “I don’t have anything to do with the design” of his clothes. Yet he’s managed to create what might be the most original look in men’s tennis history: sleeveless tees, shin-length pants, and bandannas tied with a cheeky flourish. Most tennis style revolutions have happened in the women’s game, from Gussy Moran’s lace-trimmed panties to Serena Williams’s skintight catsuit (see the time line here). Precedents for peacocking are pretty much limited to Björn Borg—known for his body-hugging outfits, headbands, and, for the time, prominent logo display—and Andre Agassi, who turned denim shorts, blond highlights, and garish color choices into a marketing tour de force.
And now here’s Nadal. His has been called a “pirate” look, but the interesting thing about Nadal’s style is that it’s so feminine—a thinner, less physical player could not pull off those clothes. Maybe that’s why he’s been greeted with the kind of moral outrage—“Abominable!” “Infernal!”—usually reserved for the latest female player to show too much skin. Debate over the pants in particular, and Nadal’s habit of reaching back to loosen them between points, has trespassed on the familiar terrain of comfort versus sex appeal. Are they too tight? Is it one of his many elaborate on-court rituals (Nadal’s own explanation)? Or are his butt muscles just too big?
Men’s tennis has always been a modest, gentlemanly affair, its sex appeal limited to handsome faces and wolf-whistles during between-game shirt changes. Not so with Nadal. Not only is he more muscular than any player before him, he’s also more willing to be ogled. Which brings us back to those photos.
Oh no you didnt!!!My RAFA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I LOVE "Sweet, but Spooky!"
I absolutely hate Teller...he is such a pretentious prick.
Hahah he is, but speaks the truth sometimes, however i would never ever want him to photograph me, have no interest in his "reality showing" pictures.I absolutely hate Teller...he is such a pretentious prick.