aussie daria

telegraphic post for the moment: daria on the cover of australian vogue. reprint from vogue nippon, but at least there’s no g on her face.

little daria under the christmas tree

as usual when i’m just surfing cos i’m too tired to do something else i get the best finds… voilà a very young daria from an old aritzia postcard (caption says even 1998) .

daria on a sofa

i’d say one of her best juvenile shots. i’d like to know who the photographer was.
full pic at the aritzia blog.

queer christmas…

… to everybody and happy new year! enjoy this *old* picture…

bowling at the fashion week (february 2005)

i’m not at home and can’t post more, but i’m thinking about the final 2008 entry…

new campaign

daria joplin

daria’s are vogue eyewear eyes this season! the complete series of images was posted by lovely sweet rus at tfs. it’s nice to see daria back in a campaign, even more relief! 😉 i’d define this as an average campaign: nothing special, nothing bad. i prefer the gipsy and the hawaii looks, but honestly i’m not that fond of the vogue eyewear glasses…

endless romance

a new proof of the existence of divine

maybe you many girls and few guys were better than me and noticed this ad already. me, i didn’t. i found it the other at the day at the site shown by the writing. i think that this picture is a proof of the existence of divine. or at least, of the existence of supernatural – like photoshopping nose, twisting body to hide edgy hips… :p kidding, this picture is a perfect demonstration why daria seems to live up pages and screens when she stares at us from magazines… not only the sublime beauty of her body, but that deep intense fierce enigmatic gaze. daria’s eyes, we could write an endless romance into them.

pirelli 4: daria subcalendar or allegory vs. symbolism

art of modeling

so, let’s finish my pirelli review. make sure you read the earlier 3 posts about it (see sidebar on the right) and be ready for the conclusion of my argument. which basically is: there’s a little subcalendar in the 2009 cal made by a few pictures of daria where in my opinion the conjunction of ecologism and erotism is successful. it’s not fontana calendar, it’s not de paula calendar, it’s not boscono calendar and so on. it’s daria and her allegoric body which overcomes the poor plain bland symbolism of the cal. that’s the pearl in the desert i have been talking about since the cal was available on line.

most of daria subcalendar consists of the series of the pics in the pond, where she’s finally alone, with no fontana around to contaminate the purity of her modeling. her effortless nudity is what we could call a pure ecological erotism. put together the fact that she never looks at the camera with a heterosexist gaze that beard must have understood is out of her skills, the fact that she never shows off her beauty, the subsequent fact that when she does nudity that is not autorefential, but a mean for a wider purpose. add her dramatic gender conflict between the feminine features (breast, hair, legs, and then melancholy, softness, modeling docility) and the masculine ones (edgy face, nervous muscles, narrow hips, and then boysh gesture, fierceness, a sort of modeling ascetism as a mark of her talent to get the essential in posing). you’ll get what we can call ecological in a sense of daria’s allegoric representation through her body of a beautiful nature in pain. unlike her colleagues daria is not a beautiful woman posing in a natural context, but she is a part of such a natural context, which is beautiful, confictual, dramatic, even painful as much as her body is. that’s the difference and that’s the secret of daria’s genius in modeling: daria is allegoric. if you allow me to intelletualise things a bit, she’s allegoric in the meaning of walter benjamin’s modern allegory: she represents an unsolvable conflict. that’s why, in karl lagerfeld’s words, she’s the face of today.

there are other pieces of daria cal i would save, like the pic with the dead bird, despite all its limits i talked about below. the tree picture with all the models on the branchs is suggestive. so is the march with the elephants. but i must say that whenever i watch the corresponding pieces of the backstage videos i find performance so superior to the final result that i can’t help regretting how much more beautiful the cal would have been if it was a bit more substantially daring. or maybe if it was shot by a different photographer with a less elementary symbolism in his mind (for instance i find fontana screaming ‘help’ close to daria under elephant very flat in the may extra 3). or maybe simply if it featured only daria in all 12 months. look at the pictures above. they are taken from the backstage videos available at menstyle.it with a few new images that weren’t in the official pirelli video. look at how much they epitomise what i meant with ecological erotism, at least in my view! so again, not all nudities look alike… too bad majority doesn’t catch it…

more relief

a couple of more pics from the forum shooting. looks like it’s going to be a great campaign.

daria shooting in nyc for forum

source: l’officiel brasil.

relief

okay, i know, i still have to finish writing my pirelli review (btw, i just noticed an unxpected oscillation between beard and beards!!). i’ll do it when i’m back home. meanwhile let’s enjoy the backstage pics of the forthcoming froum tufi duek campaign by david sims that were posted at tfs by francyitaly (click there).

forum tufi duek backstage

at first sight hair and make-up remind me of the cavalli ss07 show (i’ll add a link later). i really appreciate the mix of feminine style and slight masculine attitude. i hope that remains in the final results too. to be honest, despite loving some – really not more than some – of the pirelli shots, this is the kind of work i prefer: fashion high photography (more than high fashion photography…). there’s a refined and sober elegance in daria’s posing here that i really feel a darialogistic relief. in particular, i can’t wait to see the final result of the first picture on the left. i don’t know how the whole outfit is and you know i’m not a fashion expert, but i heart a 40’s (???) aura that fascinates me.

pirelli 3: daria’s subcalendar

while chanel mystery was resolved at tfs – that looks like a ss04 haute couture picture – and there’s some excitement around about february issue of vogue paris fully devoted to a girl adored by roitfeld, it’s time to analyse pirelli daria werbowy. 

pirelli february extra 3 (published anywere)

i think later this month in the final balance of 2008 the main issue will be definitely nudity. it’s undoubtful that this year daria has done more nudity than in the past, being her initial peak in love and her final peak the cal. i’m totally okay with that, but certainly next year will tell us if there’s been some strategy in it or it’s been a mere call by economically appealing contracts. okay, i don’t want to talk about nudity now, otherwise this becomes a different post from the one i intend to write: a review to daria pictures in the pirelli 2009 calendar.

today i went through the whole calendar again. again i find some pics good and very good while some (especially in the second part of the calendar) look really so so, not to say poor. for instance the pics that show de paula in that sort of night rite with native look pointlessly violent to me. and what about her and lara stone lying oiled up in the same bath-tub? at the same time, again, what ultimaltely i may like of this calendar is this trip atmosphere. like it tells the story of a western dark mental trip to africa. i may like that, even if i can’t help asking myself – and i really don’t know how pertinent this question is -, i can’t help asking myself what this trip would have looked like if it was photographed by bruce weber instead of peter beard. i like some of the collages, they have this pop art aura. too bad some (most) of the models are so unexpressive and some are even too expressive in some shots. and ultimately there’s a sense of death i may appreciate too. like, yes, explicit message is: beauty will save the world (or how to make a quotation trivial btw), but inner content is: beauty and  the world will die together.

a western mental trip to africa

 daria. who can better fit a so dark content than daria? as i said in my previous posts she looks so effortless nude, never showing off her beauty, and that makes her particularly suitable for a calendar that, may it be successful or not, aims to link beauty and nature. too bad i can’t post the picture. i really recommend to visit the pirelli site, so you can enjoy the perfection of her modeling in some of the shots. unfortunately n0t all of them are at the same level. imo, may extra 2 (detail 5/2 in the pic above) and may extra 3 (5/3) are more than dubious, let’s say cheesy. more than the orgasmatic poses i find styling very trashy. it’s in those pics that the ‘shana queen of the jungle’ explodes. despite backstage video images of 5/2 being simply breaktaking as you can see in the oxymoric eros page. not because she’s topless – i’m not that elementary and average -, but because imo that’s pure dramatic nudity, pure oxymoric eros that makes a perfect conjuncton of intellectual and sexual. no matter if she was aware of it or not: her body tells a story. and it’s a story of conflicts and subtle tensions. when you see her breast oscillating in her posing movements, there’s no heterosexist allure. there’s something deeply emotional, even hurting in her repeated cyclic movement. she looks concentrated and distant at the same time. too bad pic couldn’t catch that basic physicity.

i also love june and july pictures (6/1, 7/1, 7/2). they’re so different from typical calendars pictures. we are at the highest level of the cal. that’s because we are totally in daria’s calendar here. no fontana’s calendar or de paula’s calendar. no heterosexism. here it’s daria and her accomplices. and everything is reduced to pure elements. i prefer her marching with the elephant to her hugging the same elephant. there’s something more subtle and respectful. elephants’ symbolism is more convincing, their sense of lasting and surviving. and there’s something humble in daria’s beautiful body close to them. posing with the dead beard must have been though. it must have smelled. that was really a performance. too bad she wears that white glove. i wonder why they kept it. certainly the efficacy of the pic gets low. maybe the simply wanted to show artifice. that’s a bit contradictory: in some pics natives are removed and (ridicolous) hair extensions are added to increase fiction of wildness, then in other you see artfices of shooting.  the tension of her body is interesting though. i may guess symbolic reasons, but boscono and bela wearing high heels don’t satisfy me at all. i prefer almost naked daria with bare dirty feet. and boscono looks so overacting. and malgosia wears that unrelevant jungle lingerie… there’s a so big gap between them and daria, maybe it part of the symbolic message.

to be finished later

the chanel mystery

unidentified advertisement

before adding new parts to the pirelli romance, let’s enjoy this graceful unknown chanel advertisment that img uploaded in the renewed daria page. i saw it 2 days ago, but my intention was to solve the mystery before posting about it. now i see it was posted at tfs, so maybe a public appeal is better: does anyone know where and when it comes from?

this picture is very beautiful imo. there’s something classical and elegant that i honestly prefer to any pirelli pastiche. actually that’s the other side of daria’s work that i like: a genuine fashion modeling with no focus on sexiness. and please note the early 20th century reference, like a renewed modernism that recovers the origins of chanel myth.

and who’s behind such a perfect meeting of chanel and miss daria werbowy? karl lagerfeld?

[btw, how should we interpretate the new daria image chosen for the img entry page? why among all the beautiful recent shots did he agency just choose the one where she’s lying naked with segura? is segura an img model too? or did they want to make the gender daring – dark – ambiguous charme of our daria heterosexually reassuring? too bad that the image is cut on daria’s close up, so she’s so fierce and dominant there that she almost scares visitors. again, a clumsy strategy for the sake of money? in any case, again, body wins]

pirelli 2: a wasting of daring potential

so, time for the 2nd round of my pirelli review. make sure your read the first part below.

bird carcass is delivered

these days i have been reading a few comments about the cal. there was obviously a huge amount of articles about it in blogs and sites, but most of them just limit themselves to report the official statements from the presentation in berlin. only few have personal comments. i must say the drooling ones are less than i was expecting. in general acritical admirers are among those just repeating official words. maybe strict copyright also prevented the usual sexist spread of masturbatory fantasies (see W editorial by bruce weber). i’m sure that many bloggers didn’t even see the rest of the calendar. the same i wonder about detractors.
it’s interesting that some detractors have gender reasons, while others just miss the most direct erotic message of the 60s and the 70s. on one side i must say that, justifying or not the existence of erotic nudity, comparing pirelli to its derivide imitators spread over the world, it seems to me that it stays as the only calendar that still sticks to erotism more to soft porn. you may find the 2009 issue a failure or a succes, but it’s out of doubts that at least there’s the will to tell a story though the images. there’s a narrative plot that keeps the 2009 cal out of soft porn. that leads to the 2nd point, why ppl complain pics aren’t hot enough or – in different words – they don’t turn watchers on enough. the fragile bilancement between beauty and nature keeps the cal in a sort of nowhere: girls’ beauty is not ‘optimized’ enough, ecological message is not ‘optimized’ either.
other detractors complain about the extremisation of modeling. like models were humiliated. i really think it’s the opposit and not because i’m a sadist! from the backstage vid you get the feeling of a deep modeling performance, a sort of body art performance that unfortunately got mostly lost in the final result. there was a sort of *dirty* modeling compared to fashion asteptic sets that was really great to watch at. like models were playing not the humiliation of themselves as women, but the humiliation of their role as models, the humiliation by nature of the body business that makes their job. like topless daria holding that smelling carcass in front of her was playing the humiliation of her role as a model that has to pose nude to show the power of her agency in ‘the power house’ issue. you may say, she was paid in both cases, she’s always paid to get off her clothing, but the issue is not nudity, it’s how nudity is used.
unfortunately the sense of modeling performance you get from the backstage vid gets lost in most of the final pictures. i think that keeping models’ tears, faces, physical sufference would have been the right solution for a cal that dared to express a dramatic ecological message through erotism. and much more nudity: real dramatic nudity. instead, most of time we have a rather stereotyped imaginary, with naked women fighting in the mud, hugging elephants with orgasmatic expressions, running and screaming, wearing exotic ethnic clothes… unfortunately a lot of trash exotism overcomes ecologism. still, compared to other stuff around, it’s certainly higher level, but… what a lost opportunity!
in this wasting of potential i’d save… guess what and who? i’d save our beloved daria. she can’t fully escape trash either as we’ll see in the next post, but certainly her pics in the pond, her painful fierceness with the dead bird, her piece of living sculpture in the tree picture are moving. as i said last week: a pearl in the desert. and it’s always so emotional to watch her working. so concentrate and professional when posing, with that boysh underlying attitude that prevents her from any concession to heterosexism. there’s something zen in her effortless erotism.

from shooting to the calendar

btw, some were also complaining about the removal of natives from pictures. like it was something racist. i don’t think it is actually, i see more as a restiction of fiction. as i said, to me the problem is different. the problem is the removal of models’ performance.