Fashion Portfolio MarĂa Lozano Rojas BA Fashion Marketing & Communication, Level 6, 2017-2018 6FAMK003C Visual Arts CWK2 Anna Mary Rowe, Chiara Legittimo, Gina Ripoll Word Count: 1041
“A r t s e r ve s n o o t h er purpose than to of f er beauty” -O scar Wilde While developing CWK1 and analyzing Visconti’s film Death in Venice, one found the conflict between art and life as one of the main motif of the story. In various occasions, including mostly the final scene, Tadzio is percieved as a work of art due to his physical perfection, even seeming unreal. His symmetrical face, goldilock hair and careful way of being, resemblant a statue. Throughout the film, Tadzio offers the beauty which art is supposed to be serving. On the other hand, the viewer saw Gustav’s slow decadence into mortality, falling into his own lust and desires. In Visconti’s film, Gustav was the personification of the harsh reality of life, while Tadzio was a pure masterpiece. For this reasons the student decided to focus the editorial on the theme of the conflict between art and life, to portray the relationship between the two worlds. As stated by the student in coursework 1, art representates not only beauty but the idealization of what lies on people’s mind. It is the practice through which one can express imagination skills, meaning that it is often a fantasy and a reviere, one that illustrates everything the human mind wants but can not have in real life. Reality washes away all the beauty mainfested in art, where there is reality there is no perfection, where there is beauty, there is no reality. As art does not age, the eternal youth and beauty in the masterpieces remains intact, while life goes on, leaving aging as a footprint. What made Gustav von Aschenbach so obsessed with Tadzio was not only his perfection but his youthfulness and juvenescence, while the composer was aging and mellowing, seeing his life flashing in his eyes and slowly falling into mortality. He saw something in Tadzio which he was missing, the young boy was the representation of the timelessness and the eternal youth found in art, never in life. In the following editorial Tadzio transformed into a statue as for one, he is literally a masterpiece. Gustav’s character remained practically the same, using important symbols of the film in the styling, such as the white suit, the yellow flower and the round glasses. The model that represents Gustav is rather younger than the composer itself, while “Tadzio” (the statue) looks older than adolescente in Morte a Venezia. The student made this character selection on purpose to alter in a slight way the ages, proving that in this editorial, that aging is not about a number. The editorial narrates a story, which begins when Gustav meets Tadzio. He is completely astonished with his perfection, while he takes his time to admire the beauty in him. Gustav then takes a big step forward and goes ahead to touch Tadzio, to feel both his face and his delicate hands. Once Gustav touched the masterpiece named Tadzio, his life is never the same. His decadence and suffering begins, his face is not longer young and his skin flawless and clear; instead it is cracked, aged and ripped. Little did Gustav know, that his desires and lust would turn out to be the ones that made him fall into mortality. As his skin and life fades away, he holds onto Tadzio (simulating his final scenes on the film, dying and melting at the beach while watching Tadzio in the immensity of the landscape) with a last living hope, which is personified by the symbolic yellow flower. In the end, Gustav dies and dissapears, the only object left from him? The yellow flower, held in Tadzio’s hand.
For the student, it was of extreme importance to focus on a concept and to develop artistic photographic images that would transmit a sentiment. As Death in Venice is such a delicate film that exudes beauty and art from beginning to end, it is not commercial nor mainstream, instead it is a beautiful composition, the student wished that the editorial would be aesthetically pleasing and very elegant, exquisite and romantic. As of the styling, the student wanted to recreate Gustav renown white suit. As his final scenes dying in the Venice Lido beach became iconic in the cinema and literature world, it is easy to recognize his character by this all white outfit with a red tie, which the student changed into a red bow. As Tadzio’s character was so altered by the student, turning him into a statute with no clothes, she decided that in order for viewers to identify the movie, Gustav’s styling had to reminiscent almost completely the composer in the movie. The student also included symbols from the film as the yellowish rose in Gustav’s pocket during his agony. Also, his melting white makeup and a Vogue China editorial, inspired the student to use a white clay mask, that could clearly showed and portray aging by a cracked, flawed and broken skin. The clay mask had two roles, one, symbolize Gustav’s iconic white makeup and two, symbolize decadence and weakening. The editorial photographs were taken in a cementery named “Cementerio Central” in Bogotá, Colombia. The student comes from this city and she traveled for the holidays. The statue used for the photographs is the one of Leo Siegfried Kopp, a German man who went to Colombia and founded one of the biggest brewery companies in Latin America, Bavaria. Pictures were taken by a friend photographer named Isabela Garcia and the model is an emerging young man in this career named Nicolas Quevedo. The choosen magazine by the student is the artistic publication Acne Paper. It perfectly fits with the film as it is a magazine focused on culture, arts and aesthetic, which never seeked to go mainstream. Acne Paper is an intelligent, serious, modern and independent magazine. As it has a strong focus on every art form (“ACNE” stands for: Ambition to Create Novel Expressions) adding the student’s editorial for this magazine seemed just right. The editorial as well as the publication embrace and enhance the beauty of art. “Each issue has been created around one idea – a theme big enough to appeal to everyone interested in the arts regardless of their age or their culture.” (Acne Paper, 2017) In both Fairytale Bliss (editorial) and Acne Paper, the purpose is to highlight the gracefulness in art and create beauty around a specific concept.
A story by María Lozano
FAIRYTALE BLISS Photography Isabela Garcia
Styling/Direction María Lozano
Model Nicolas Quevedo
To make alive what is quiet and asleep in your existence. To do that work. To find you, in you. That is art to me. -Nayyirah Waheed
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. - Thomas Merton
No Gustav, no. Beauty belongs to the senses. Only to the senses. -Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
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