Photography courtesy of Steven Meisel
Creative: Edward Quarmby
Styling: Lotta Volkova
In a continuing championing of historic female creatives channelled through Miu Miu campaigns, inspiration is drawn from the stylized work of the pioneering British interwar photographer Yevonde. A feminist and suffragette, Yevonde’s career emblematizes freedom and independence – opening her own studio aged just 21 at a time when professions for women were limited, if permitted at all, she signed her work using only her first name, asserting both her personal authorship and identity as a woman.
Yevonde’s work of the 1930s is ground-breaking for its use of delicately nuanced and considered color, creating surreally perfect arrangements of models and high society elites within utopian scopes of unreal props, drapery and foliage. Here, those images are echoed in a respectful homage – we find a similar composure in crafting the image, the same saturated hues set against porcelain-delicate dégradé pastel, yet with the spontaneous spirit of now.
This campaign extols Yevonde’s hallmark fractured colortones, in instinctive and joyful contrasts – an idea echoed through the new colorways of the Arcadie and Wander, where classic caramel and cognac hues are joined with bright orange and soleil. The contemplative poise of each image – fallen petals, a carefully-gestured hand, bags hugged, cradled, held – evokes that bygone age, yet Meisel’s images are injected with the bold attitudes of today.
Gigi herself – halfway between fashion model and cultural figure, as with the sitters Yevonde captured – is the perfect conduit, for this re-awakening of past lives and timeless tribute to pure beauty.
