Style Odyssey: Mortality and Design

It is my pleasure to share with you these photos. While they are not a direct collaboration with myself and the Creative Director; Miss Elfi Seidel, I feel that our conversations about design, styling and philosophy towards creating has been such a beneficial process for our works. Looking at the notion of mortality in design was the starting point for this editorial shoot (and the article in the last post). It was wonderful to have this dialogue during the creative process and it was so exciting to see the final products together.
I particularly like the use of shadow and links to Surrealist motifs.
I hope you enjoy it too.

Memento Mori Now

This shoot addresses beauty and mortality and looks at their links. Baroque inspired, beauty and death are being personified as allegorical figures.

Reinterpreting vanitas symbols such as flowers and violins, the images put fashion’s ephemeral nature in a modern context. The photos were taken at the gallery W139 in Amsterdam, a hyper clean environment contrasting the Baroque and mythological references with abstract pieces of contemporary art. Shadows cast by a semi-present character add to a certain whimsical feel. Inspired by the close bonds between fashion, death and decay, the protagonists blend their contrasting characteristics. The compositions allude to the relation of the opposed characters without being very explicit. Combining a visual language of symbolic overload with a theatrical and staged feel, the series comes off as a moody narrative about the beauty of fashion haunted by its ghost of death.

- Miss Elfi Seidel