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rondered · 13 years ago

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Rebranding Africa

By SUZY MENKES

Africa is in the news — but not just for the sad and familiar reasons of conflict and suffering. The continent is entering the fashion arena, with the quality of its handwork, artistic creativity and its potential for economic growth bringing Africa literally in vogue.

The key word for an overall résumé of changes in attitude and perception is “rebranding.”

“They are not my own words — they come from Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan — but I do believe in the ‘rebranding’ of Africa,” said Franca Sozzani, editor in chief of Vogue Italia, which has devoted this month’s men’s wear issue to the continent.

The May Uomo Vogue is an all-Africa magazine with images of beauty and grace far removed from violence and poverty. And the magazine’s cover features an unlikely figure: Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations.

Inside the magazine, an interview with Mr. Ban contains an impassioned plea to move Africa away from bad news toward positive thinking.

“Africa does not need charity — Africa needs investment and partnership,” said Mr. Ban. “Joining forces with civil society and private sector, including non-traditional players, like the fashion industry, has become indispensable. Sustainable development is my top priority.”

Ms. Sozzani did an “all black” issue for women’s Vogue in 2008, and she has subsequently promoted multiculture with a focus on black creativity and beauty on the magazine’s Web site,Vogue.it .

Ms. Sozzani’s personal commitment helps to dispel any idea that rebranding Africa via fashion is a gimmick or that it might sit uncomfortably beside the deep-set issues of poverty, disease and gender.

The editor has been appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for Fashion4Development — a global campaign that uses fashion-based initiatives to support the United Nations’ wider issues in helping Africa.

On a recent visit to Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria and Uganda, Ms. Sozzani met with Africans working in the design field from creative fashion through product development and film.

For Ms. Sozzani, “positivity” is the key word in taking an uplifting attitude to a nation where “the image is so low.” She wants to present in her magazine an Africa that is “creative and confident of its own strengths. ”

But most of all in the May issue, she wanted to celebrate images of individual elegance and style.

“All the pictures are made in a glamorous way — there is nothing sad, trashy or poor,” she said. “People may say that Vogue does not want to talk about sickness and poverty, but if we can give an uplifting image, it is helping people who would not have considered Africa at all.”

The concept of small projects leading to an upgraded image includes not just people, but place: the lush beauty of the country and its allure as a tourist destination.

There is also “Nollywood.” The cinematic creativity of the continent ranks alongside Hollywood and India’s Bollywood in terms of cinematic output: 1,093 films are produced on average in Nigeria each year, compared with 555 in the United States, according to a 2011 Unesco study.

But the emergence of Africa as a source of fashion creativity is about more than elegant images. The continent’s craft work, varying not just between countries but also to specific tribes, offers to a jaded fashion world objects that have been touched by human hands — the greatest of luxuries in a 21st-century world.

Textiles are another important area, even if production is shifting toward China. However, fashion weeks across the continent are drawing attention to African style locally and globally.

The enthusiasm of a young generation to build careers in Africa rather than emigrate has encouraged Fashion4Development to be optimistic. In the last decade, African economies have grown at an impressive rate, with several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa rivaling growth rates in countries such as China, India and Brazil, according to the World Bank.

Aside from any idea of encouraging investment in the creative professions, Ms. Sozzani hopes that her joyous Vogue celebration will help to bring a shift in attitude.

“The whole issue is packed with portraits of local personalities: not just presidents, first ladies and queens, but also artists, singers, musicians, actors, stylists, writers, models,” she said. “Every one has been portrayed in a positive light. They all agreed to take part in the issue precisely because presenting a positive image of the continent means focusing world attention on an area that has been hitherto excluded.”

#Goodluck Jonathan #The May Uomo Vogue

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rondered · 13 years ago

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The Creative Class | Inez and Vinoodh

NEW YORK, United States — In hindsight, it seems remarkable that there was once a moment when combining digital technology and fashion photography was a radical move. But when Dutch photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin first began to manipulate their images, they were among the first to see and seize the tremendous potential of these new digital tools in a fashion context.

“We saw a demonstration of what Paintbox could do,” van Lamsweerde recalled, referring to a Quantel-produced precursor to Adobe’s Photoshop. “At that point it was used to straighten lines and shine up the wheels of a car for advertising. It hadn’t really been used for fashion or for images of people. We were like ‘Oh my god’ – it was so unbelievably exciting. It just opened up the whole world for us.”

Working as a team, Lamsweerde and her husband, Vinoodh Matadin, have forged a unique personal and creative union which has given rise to a remarkable body of work that seamlessly spans global campaigns for advertising clients including Balenciaga, Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, editorial assignments for magazines such as American Vogue, French Vogueand W, classic black and white portraiture for the New York Times’ annual Oscar portfolio, music videos for the likes of Björk and fine art pieces that have been exhibited in some of the world’s most influential galleries and museums.

This 25 year partnership has firmly establishing the duo, known simply as “Inez and Vinoodh,” among the most successful and powerful imagemakers in the fashion industry.

And while digital has long been central to their work, from high-gloss fashion images to the surreal, often disturbing, manipulated human forms that appear in their personal work, technology has always been a means to express a searching imagination and never the object of fascination itself. “For us, it’s about the emotion,” van Lamsweerde confirmed, more than creating something that’s “formal or technical.”

“With digital, finally you could also visualise internal things, you could show an emotional idea or a concept,” she added. “It was that whole thing of breaking through the surface, visually and figuratively speaking.”

Van Lamsweerde met Matadin in 1986 at the Vogue Academy of Fashion Design in their native Amsterdam and first worked together when van Lamsweerde, who went on to earn a masters in photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, was commissioned to shoot Matadin’s clothing line Lawina. The label folded in 1990, but by this time they had become a couple, with Matadin also working as van Lamsweerde’s part-time stylist.

After van Lamsweerde was awarded a yearlong residency at New York’s PS1 Contemporary Art Center in 1992, the couple decamped to New York, a move which allowed them the freedom to continue to aggressively experiment with digitally manipulated images, while also exposing their work to a broader international audience.

In the mid 1990s, when fashion magazines were full of grunge-inspired, documentary-style raw imagery, Inez and Vinoodh’s groundbreaking, highly manipulated and surreal editorial series “For Your Pleasure,” published in the April 1994 issue of The Face, broke the mold and put the pair on the map. Shortly after, major fashion titles came calling and Inez and Vinoodh were soon slipping effortlessly between fine art and fashion from their new home base in New York, to which the couple permanently returned in 1995.

“Consciously, we were never really so busy with the idea of fashion and art,” van Lamsweerde recalled. “At some point, there was attention around that, but for us, we were just making what we were making. It had to do with what we felt we needed to communicate at a certain moment in time and context-wise the venue might be an art space or a magazine.” In this way, the concept behind a 1999 exhibition image titled “Me Kissing Vinoodh (Lovingly)” was effortlessly repurposed, more than 10 years later, for an advertising image for Lanvin Homme.

Over the course of more than 20 years of shooting together, Inez and Vinoodh have developed a conjoined approach to taking photos, which allows them to focus on a single subject from multiple angles. “I’m usually the one that directs the model and gets the pictures where the model is looking into the lens. Vinoodh is the one that walks around,” said van Lamsweerde. “Because the model is looking at me, there is a real look in her eyes that you don’t achieve by saying ‘look away,’ where you get a vacant thing,” she explained. Since 1996 their final output has been a mix of both their images, published as a single author. “We share the responsibility, so it really feels much less heavy,” said van Lamsweerde. “Since we both shoot at the same time and shoot from different angles, we know that between the two of us the picture is always there.”

While the duo continues to push the boundaries of fashion editorial, Lamsweerde has seen the space become increasingly confined. “Editorially, there used to be so much freedom that nobody would ask you to shoot a big advertiser for a story. We would, as a joke, put an outfit from Chanel in an editorial, but that was very tongue-in-cheek,” she said. “Now, basically all the editorial pages are infused by the advertisers. To us, it sometimes feels like there is more freedom shooting an advertising campaign, because you sort of strategise the whole thing together with them and understand who they are representing or wanting to reach out to. Whereas, with the editorials, in one story you are covering twelve different designers and it all has to make sense together,” she added. “Sometimes it’s not easy.”

Given her early and passionate embrace of digital, it’s perhaps not surprising that van Lamsweerde is highly active on social media platforms like Tumblr, something which is anathema to many prestige artists. “Tumblr is great for us,” she said. “It’s like having your own magazine.” Indeed, rapid-fire publishing on Tumblr has allowed van Lamsweerde to refresh her approach to photography. “It has made us look at photography differently again because I take a picture and boom it goes on there,” she said. “It doesn’t have to have the whole production around it and it gets an immediate response.”

But for van Lamsweerde, an equal challenge is making sure that their images remain human despite their intensely digital process. “That’s really why we are photographers: because we love people. The possibilities of expression through the body – its forms and poses and movement – is what really drives a lot of our work. It all has to do with showing how magnificently a human being’s body is made. I always feel like every body is interesting. Everybody’s physical appearance is so unique and endlessly fascinating for me,” she said. “We love making people as heroic as could possibly be.”

“I guess that’s the end result,” she said. “It’s finding the ultimate version of the human being that’s in front of you and trying to pull out the essence of what that is for us.”

#Inez van Lamsweerde #Vinoodh Matadin #fashion #photography

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