Crash #103: The Supernatural Issue

When it comes to fashion imagery, some would say that it’s a simulacrum, since it’s all about representing a garment. But that’s without taking into account what these images convey about our times. In issue 103, which, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Surrealism, questions our relationship with reality and the imaginary today, master Bruce Gilden goes to Brighton Beach, a seaside suburb of Manhattan and home to people from Russia and Eastern Europe, bursting into a world where everyone speaks Russian. The emergence in the images of characters who are very real, but seem to have come straight out of a Scorcese film, adds to the confusion. When reality is more fiction than fiction. When Charles Fréger, accustomed to photographing tribes and traditional clothing, is plunged into a cave with a model dressed in Fendi, what hap- pens? Reto Schmid is transported to Montreuil in futuristic architecture to photograph Chanel’s new autumn-winter collection, while the mythical Sarah Moon resides in a huge mansion in Saint-Germain des Prés to capture Prada’s autumn-winter collection. Each fashion story is an adventure, a reflection, an attempt to create situations and, quite simply, to create its own reality, its own simulacra.