Everyday Life Can Be So Absurd
Fashion can, quite honestly, be ridiculous. But it still tries to appear flawless. Think poreless and airbrushed models or celebrities set against lush backdrops. It’s picture perfect, right? But at PAPER, we celebrate all the weird and beautiful and ugly, the perfect and imperfect. That’s why we’re excited to show you what happens when a group of wild creatives in London get together to do a shoot, featuring Russian pop star K.
Creative directed by Muriel Seiquer, the concept revolves around a series of uncomfortable situations inspired by the everyday and its more trashy, spontaneous and real side, while still presenting it all in a glossy editorial. The different scenarios captured are ones where feelings like shame and guilt are exposed, like catching your partner cheating on you, getting pooped on by a bird on your first day at university, having happy birthday sung to you in public and getting a stain while eating.
“We live in a society obsessed with aesthetics and beauty, wanting to show only the perfect version of one’s self, trying to hide and keep away any detail that may interrupt this,” Seiquer tells PAPER. “My intention is to bring fashion concepts that enhance the vision and reality of that rejected by the society we live in. We have to remember that everything we are ashamed of is also part of us. Accept and embrace yourself in all your versions and forms, and then make the most of it.”
Photographer Pablos Mas says he wanted to take a more commedia dell’larte approach to fashion — an early form of improv comedy that used sketches to tell story vignettes. In this case, the idea was to take uncomfortable realities and use meme culture to make it relevant to today’s audience, taking a documentary approach while still being high concept and bizarre. “This was a real labour of love,” Mas says.
