Bêtes De Mode

23 Jan 2010 1 Comment

by laurawalsh in Art, Fashion, Music Tags: Bêtes de mode, Burton, Clement Vauchez, Fashion Animals, Fashion Beasts, Gas, Heartkiller, Helmo, HIM, His Infernal Majesty, James Copeman, Linde, Mige, Screamworks: Love In Theory and Practice, Thomas Couderc, Valo Daily, Valo_Daily, Ville Valo

I was vaguely aware of the series of photos I am going to share with you and was pleasantly surprised by the contextual reference I found of them in a very recent music video.

Bêtes de Mode [Fashion Beasts/Animals] is a series of photographs by Thomas Couderc and Clément Vauchez of Helmo. The images were created as a sales campaign at Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris. Galeries Lafayette is home to a breathtakingly beautiful domed ceiling that Couderc and Vauchez certainly made the most of.

Galeries Lafayette at Christmas

Bêtes de Mode is a series of thirteen images. Each displays a fashion portrait in blue and an animal portrait in red. On the windows of the department store there were a series of red and blue gels. These gels allowed you to see the fashion shot when looking through the blue and the animal shot when looking through the red.

The photographs were also hung around the dome with a series of red and blue flood lights creating the same visual effect with the photos as in the windows.

So here are some of the Bêtes de Mode photographs

Bouquetin

Insecte

Loup

Lynx

Ours

Zebre

The visual impact of these photographs is stunning and I would have greatly loved the see them in situ with the gels taking effect. It was fantastic to see these photographs referenced in a music video by one of my favourite bands recently.

Finnish band HIM have released their video for the first single, Heartkiller,  from their new album [Screamworks: Love In Theory and Practice - Released March 2010]. Produced by James Copeman, the Heartkiller video reverses the colour usage with human in red and animal in blue. Copeman has cited his inspiration as this photo series.

I’m not much of a taxidermy fan, but there is a great artistic quality to this video, something which has come to be expected from Ville Valo [HIM frontman].  The last thirty seconds have some of the videos best human and animal combination shots.

I wish more videos had such an artistic slant, of course Valo takes his shirt off to satisfy many of his female fans, such as the wonderful women over at Valo_Daily, but this video has a lot more substance than your average music video, most of HIM’s videos do.

A Wildlife Photography lecturer once said, during a lecture on nature, that fashion was a pointless art with no ties to the worlds real roots – nature. I strongly disagree and shoots like this show just how effortlessly beautiful the combination of the two are.

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