Purple Magazine
— S/S 2011 issue 15

Edito

This issue might again look like a chic skin magazine. But Purple Fashion isn’t a sex magazine hiding behind the façade of fashion. We prefer to think of nudity as Roland Barthes did, that it’s the Degree Zero of style. Nudity imprints itself on time, along with architecture, fashion, music, and art.

We do explore nudity — not as a semi-pornographic tool, but as an indicator of fashion’s seasonal changes, as a barometer of its never-ending artistic evolution. The 19th century nude by the sculptor Aristide Maillol featured on our cover, and those by Auguste Rodin in the visual essay that closes this issue, incarnate their era, just as the dazzling beauty of Laetitia Casta embodies ours.

The frenetic, erotic tableaux of Les Krims encapsulate the ’70s just as accurately. And I believe that Terry Richardson’s topless models, the Japanese actress Sakura Ando wearing only Ligia Dias’s latest jewelry collection, and Ryan McGinley’s New York portraits capture the essence of the current season.

In our eyes aesthetic canons radically opened up in 2011 — in the Spring / Summer of this new decade — canons that can accommodate the perfect body of the Brazilian model shot by Inez Van Lamsweerde as easily as they can Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters. Hopefully in this new decade we’ll see a true shift in fashion toward diversity and inclusion.

We at Purple strive to push fashion in this direction.

— OLIVIER ZAHM

[Table of contents]

S/S 2011 issue 15

Table of contents

purple EDITO

purple NEWS

purple BEST of the SEASON

purple INTERVIEW

purple FASHION WOMEN

purple DOCUMENTS

purple BEAUTY

purple TRAVEL

purple NAKED

purple LOVE

purple NIGHT

purple SUMMER

purple VISUAL ESSAY

© Purple Institute

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