Perimeter's curated Reading Capsules aim to explore some of the store's key points of interest and enquiry. Each capsule, focusing on various themes, mediums and contexts in art and design publishing, features titles available for individual purchase or as a specially priced bundle.
Capsule seven, Expanding Fashion, showcases artists and photographers who bring an editorial visual language into an artistic space. From the aspirational photography of 1980s hair studios to IMG-signed rodeo riders, these titles tell a range of stories through the lens of fashion.
Each of these titles are available for individual purchase through the web store, or as a specially priced bundle ($599 with free domestic shipping).
Purple Fashion is the avant-garde reference for fashion, style, and contemporary culture with the usual big names. The 'Brain' issue explores how the brain functions, the power of artificial intelligence, the nature of the artistic brain, and the voice of kids with a radical new state of mind. With contributions by, among others, Leah Kelly, Joshua Decter, Mark Alizart, Beau Friedlander, Bruno Verjus, Inge Grognard, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brad Phillips, Paul Mccarthy and Gus van Sant. With Purple News insert by Juergen Teller. (Purple Institute – Paris)
American photographer Collier Schorr’s 8 Women presents work spanning from the mid-90s to the present. Schorr’s earliest works utilised appropriated adverts from fashion magazines to address issues of authorship and desire; the works introduced a female gaze into the debate about female representation. Appropriation was Schorr’s first medium and in some sense she returns to it, taking her own commissioned fashion images and folding them into a dialogue with other works. (MACK – London)
Bec Parsons has built an international career around her sensitive negotiations of the ever-elusive space between photographer and muse. Chiefly known for her work in fashion, the photographer’s output radiates with a rare collaborative dynamic. Both her photographs and her subjects share agency and voice; their underpinning is one of connection, subtlety and spontaneity.
Shifting her gaze to young model and champion equestrienne Lauren Devaney, Parsons joined Devaney and her family on their biannual pilgrimage from their home in Arizona to the Music Meadows ranch in Westcliffe, Colorado. Spanning summer and winter – fast-paced rodeo competition and lonely ranch work amidst the dramatic Colorado landscape – the series sidles both joy and tragedy, as Parsons’s soft gaze renders Devaney, her wider family, their horses and the uniquely American landscapes their lives occupy. (Perimeter Editions – Melbourne)
Vincent Ferrané – Iconography: Figures of Jeanne Damas
In the expression 'aesthetic canon' which structures the standard of beauty, the term 'canon' refers to the idea of rule. These rules, however, inscribed nowhere, enact in a changing way the representation of the beauty in its dimensions certainly aesthetic but also cultural and social. Jeanne Damas is a so-called successful 'It girl-model-businesswoman' who embodies many modern facets of a feminine ideal.
The idea behind this series was to let Jeanne Damas re-play against a neutral background; to recreate gestures, postures, and to put back in scene elements and iconic tools that cement this public conception acclaimed by her fans and by the media. The result is a study, a kind of investigation or quest for proof into the representation of the body, an enigmatic puzzle of flesh, objects and tools, which in the manner of a cadavre exquis brings into play the expression of these aesthetic tacit rules. (Libraryman – Antwerp/Stockholm)
GAECHTER+CLAHSEN – Fünf Finger Föhn Frisur
A person’s hair may be likened to the top of a mountain. But while mountaintops are often shrouded from our eyes by clouds around them, a person’s top is almost always visible—especially in latitudes that have given up the daily use of bonnets, hats and headscarves. Hence the understandably heavy pressure on people’s heads—to get the hair just right. Over the course of several decades, photographer Peter Gaechter shot a wide array of hairdos for Zürich hairdresser Elsässer Pour Dames, tracking the changes in—and revivals of —hairstyles in late 20th-century Switzerland. The present publication brings together a selection of his photographs from the catalogues on display at these upmarket salons, showing the latest hairstyle trends from the 1970s to the 1990s. These sculpturesque cuts and coiffures, which were to be reproduced à l’identique on the customers’ heads, were also telltale signs of the times. Whether a punk or 'Cold War Kids' cut, a 'five-finger' blow-dry, feathery 'Charlie’s Angels' wings or 'Old Hollywood' coiffure – the multifarious hairstyles of local beauties, 'It Girls' and actresses featured in this book reflect the 'why not?' whateverism of liberal consumer culture as well as concrete changes in society, e.g. in the sudden apparition of a clunky cell phone included in the picture frame as a pixie cut accessory. (Edition Patrick Frey – Zurich)
Kelly Beeman – Window Shopping
In exotic gardens and cool swimming pools, at picnics, countryhouse and cocktail parties, at home on the sofa in moments of domestic intimacy or having tea with girlfriends – Kelly Beeman‘s elegant, long-limbed figures lead their lives in dream apparel. But her beauties are not just models for the latest creations of big-name fashion designers. They are the protagonists of Beeman’s profuse fantasy world brimming with childhood memories of Oklahoma and subtle nods interior design, architecture, music and literature. Beeman’s sources of inspiration are lookbooks and catwalk shots. An autodidact, even as a child Beeman drew and painted and played piano with a passion, hence the recurrent sheet music and piano amongst the profusion of details in her pictures. After studying sociology at Hunter College in New York, Beeman worked for several years in Bolivia and Argentina. Her background in sociology informs how she thinks about her artwork: it’s about the relationship between culture and fashion. “Dressing” her subjects is a way for Beeman to create characters, stories and cultural context and explore their significance in a world of self-display. She doesn’t see herself as a social critic, however, but as both artist and fashion illustrator. (Edition Patrick Frey – Zurich)
Camille Vivier met Sophie through a casting agent around four years ago. 'I was looking for a very athletic woman for a photoshoot,' she recounts. 'When I met Sophie, I was not only fascinated by her powerful, sculptural body but I was also drawn to her face which is sweet, feminine and tender. I felt that Sophie had a lot to say through her bodybuilding practice – it is, or at the time was, a reconstruction of herself in both an allegorical and a physical sense.'
Sophie embodies many of the qualities that the photographer seeks to convey through her work: the architectural nature of the bodybuilder’s form encapsulates both the subject and object dynamic that so intrigues Vivier, while simultaneously blurring the boundaries between preconceived notions of femininity and masculinity. 'I felt that by reshaping herself with a very intimate, strong and personal motivation to feel good and comfortable with her own image, Sophie was reshaping the criteria of what the feminine body is supposed to be.' (Art Paper Editions – Ghent)