03-12 IN AND OUT OF FASHION
PHOTOGRAOHS BY VIVIANE SASSEN
13-22 VOGUE
MILEY CYRUS’S IS AN ARCHIVAL FASHION DREAM
BY CHRISTIAN ALLAIRE
In and Out of Fashion
Award-winning Dutch artist and fashion photographer, Viviane Sassen, has injected new energy and a sense of everyday celebration into the field. Listen to an exclu sive 5- minute interview on LensCulture.
Photographs by Viviane Sassen
Inthe Netherlands and abroad, Viviane Sassen is known foremost as an artist, whose somewhat surreal, colorful photographs of Africa won her the Prix de Rome in 2007.
Alongside her independent work, however, she has long worked as a fashion photographer. Her fashion work is held in high regard, and she has carved out her own unmistakable style. Huis Marseille is exhibiting a retrospective of her fashion oeuvre over the last 17 years.
The retrospective shows images built up like paintings or collages, and which arise in free association and creativity. These are not generally prominent aspects in the cautious climate of today’s largely commercially driven fashion photography, but they are typical of Viviane Sassen’s fashion photography.
Over the last 17 years, Sassen has developed a personal language that is sometimes surreal – with intertwined bodies, sculptural compositions and abstract forms – and on occasion perhaps bewildering, but it is always fascinating and full of energy.
Both innovative strength and a surrealistic beauty mark Sassen’s fashion photography. In contrast to her renowned independent work, Sassen’s fashion photography is commissioned work that is created in close collaboration with a team of stylists, art directors, models and make-up artists.
This means Sassen can treat fashion photography as the ultimate playground; somewhere she can work quickly and intuitively while enjoying the additional benefits of having a professional team on hand to facilitate her experiments. She calls this her ‘Laboratory’.
Viviane Sassen’s
fashion photography
idiom developed from 2000 onwards partly in close and experimental collaboration with Emmeline de Mooij, with whom she produced photographic series for magazines such as Purple, Re-Magazine and Dazed & Confused.
The exhibition in Huis Marseille includes the series Nudes. A Journey, which includes early nude photos by Sassen and De Mooij that were based on simple ideas that had strange and surprising effects. Bodies became part of a sculptural investigation, were linked to extensions in the form of objects and clothing, and were turned into an amorphous tangle.
The exhibition also includes images from the now iconic series she made for the magazine Kutt in 2002, an ironic comment on an advertising campaign Sassen had shot for the Italian fashion house Miu Miu the previous year. The models’ bodies are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to say what belongs where.
According to De Mooij they had worked “in a sort of dream world”, working by free association. Sassen has remained strongly attached to this spontaneity, and her work is correspondingly free from the fashion world’s prevailing codes and conventions.
The Early Work.
A WORLD OF INDEPENDENT CREATIVITY.
The Huis Marseille exhibition will be showing a selection of more than 300 photos taken from advertising campaigns created for Carven, M-Missoni, Stella McCartney/Adidas and Levi’s, and from editorials for magazines such as Pop, Wallpaper, Numéro, AnOther Magazine, Purple, and Dazed & Confused, projected in a special way.
The fact that Sassen’s fashion images generally arise in the course of an unobstructed creative flow is particularly clear in this second category, in which the exciting, experimental, creative, modern character of contemporary fashion can be found. This is where Sassen’s idiom can develop unhindered. Here Sassen can carry out a modernist research into form that has much in common with the formal experiments of cubism, surrealism and minimalism.
Sassen can blithely cut out her models’ limbs and have them fly away into the background, add areas of color to her images to stimulate the viewer’s imagination, or rotate her pictures to free them from the constraints of gravity.
The exhibition also contains a section called Foreplay, with images she makes just before or right after a shoot, revealing the serendipities of the photographic process. This series forms perhaps the most intriguing new genre in Viviane Sassen’s oeuvre, with images marked by an extraordinarily beautiful abstraction.
BODY AND FORM
Sassen works with natural resources like bright sunlight, shadows, mirrors and reflection, but her images are also constructed using colors, forms and textures, in a kind of joint alchemy with stylists and models.
The exhibition shows many beautiful examples of this, including her collaboration with Dutch top model Anna de Rijk, and a special series – 36 portraits of the French stylist Roxane Danset –, which is being exhibited at Huis Marseille in its entirety.
Having started as a kind of performance, with Danset as a “white Grace Jones, obviously without the singing”, this exercise led to strange and unexpected forms that Danset herself describes as “creature-esque”.
Viviane Sassen’s spontaneous, non-commercial, and characteristically individual approach has ensured that her fashion photography goes far beyond the usual confines of this medium. The fashion domain affords her the space to carry out experiments that generate a reservoir of material with which to develop the language of her independent work.
The exhibition also furnishes convincing proof that Sassen is developing a visual vocabulary for the fashion photography Wof the future.
Miley Cyrus’s New Visual Album Is an Archival Fashion Dream
By Christian Allaire
March 31, 2025
Miley Cyrus
fans, set your calendar alerts: The singer is releasing her new album, Something Beautiful, on May 30th. Her ninth studio album will feature 13 original new tracks—as well as a visual film directed by Cyrus, Jacob Bixenman, and Brendan Walter, with additional cinematography by Benoît Debie.
Working with her longtime stylist Bradley Kenneth, Cyrus’s forthcoming visual album will also usher in a new fashion era for the superstar, who has always used clothing as a visual extension of her music. This time around, they wanted to fuse a classic and contemporary aesthetic. “The fashion direction is always inspired by Miley and the music,” Kenneth tells Vogue. “This era has a richness and depth that feels both modern and timeless. The looks reflect that same energy. For me, it was about translating the music through the styling into something visual and elevated.”
Kenneth says the fashion moodboarding for the visual album began back when Cyrus was still in the recording studio. “I’ll sometimes go with her, just to listen while she’s recording, and that’s when I start imagining and dreaming up the looks,” he says. Something Beautiful had a clear cinematic focus, so Cyrus and Kenneth then zeroed in on archival fashions—pulling vintage designs from labels such as Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Bob Mackie to play up the album’s ethereal and otherworldly feel.
“The looks in this project span such a wide range of fashion history,” says Kenneth. “We pulled from designers who’ve been part of Miley’s style story throughout the decade I’ve been working closely with her. Whether it’s Mackie’s drama or Mugler’s powerful silhouettes, these influences have always been there, just evolving with her.”
Aspecial component of the project was working with the team at Mugler: Cyrus and Kenneth pulled a variety of archival looks from the iconic French designer. “We actually hold the record for the largest collection of Mugler archives ever sent to a single individual, which is still surreal to say,” says Kenneth. On the album cover, for one, Cyrus sports Thierry Mugler’s “Spider” look from his spring 1997 couture “Les Insects” collection. “Manfred was inspired by the way morning dew glistens on a spiderweb,” says Kenneth. “It’s a piece that marries fragility and strength in such a beautiful way, which felt perfect for this project.”
Other Mugler looks in the film include vampy, dark-yet-romantic looks from his fall 1998 collection. “These iconic pieces play a major role in the visual storytelling of the film and album packaging, offering a rare window into fashion history,” says Kenneth. “The theatricality of Mugler’s runway shows the drama, the power, and the glamour felt like the perfect match for the scale and emotion of this film.”
It’s not just priceless throwback pieces, either: Cyrus sports custom creations in the film, too. In addition to looks by Alaïa, the singer wears a custom Alexander McQueen dress designed by Seán McGirr in a Hollywood Walk of Fame-theme scene. “[It was] inspired by the raw spirit of one of Lee McQueen’s tattered Savage Beauty designs,” says Kenneth. “Every look was a true labor of love, with each detail carefully considered.”
While getting to play dress up in some of the most prestigious designer archives in the world was certainly a highlight for both Cyrus and Kenneth, the stylist says his favorite part of outfitting the project was seeing all of the vintage gems revived in a whole new way. “What stands out most is seeing the clothes come to life on Miley. It’s always the most fulfilling part, watching her embody these pieces in a way that’s powerful and entirely her,” says Kenneth. “Miley isn’t just wearing fashion history—she’s giving it new life. These looks transcend trends, and their impact will continue to inspire and shape the future, much like Miley herself.”
Asfor what you can expect once Cyrus debuts the film and (hopefully) takes some live performances to the stage? Well, there will certainly be many more fabulous fashions to come. “You can expect to keep being c ompletely gagged,” Kenneth says of the era ahead. “Trust me!”
THANK YOU
