February 24 Issue
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The Birth
of Style
This Issue's theme was "Opus Odyssey", focussing on fine art and how we can take inspiration from it. Botticelli's, The Birth of Venus painting, has always stood out as one of my favorites. I grew up fascinated by Greek and Roman history, gravitating towards their religious beliefs. Lets just say, I have an Aphrodite mug.
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I wanted to pay an homage to a favorite work of art and write something that could incorporate the styling of this piece, with a twist. Rather than merely replicating the depiction, I wanted to use it as a way to communicate a message. The idea that Venus would be born without a natural "style", and then be bombarded by peer pressured trends and opinions.
When writing the article, I wanted to focus around a subject I could relate to my styling inspiration on the Birth of Venus painting by Botticelli. I try to have my articles feature current events in the fashion industry, and thus decided to use the determentaly fast paced trend cycles as my muze.
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When styling the shoot, 2 of my three models became unavailable at the last minute while I was out of town. This was a very stressful complication, so as soon I was back, I had the shoot the following day as planned with my main model in 4 different outfits. I had intended on using the photo studio on campus but the professor did not get back to me in time due to illness. It is safe to say I was working under pressure with this particular shoot and was beginning to rely heavily on photoshop later on. In the end, with some portable lights and a white sheet backdrop in my own home, the photoshoot was complete.
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When the photos came back to me, I had a lot of work to do. I selected which ones to use, then carefully cut them out to layer together on one backdrop photo to replicate the original painting. In the end, I really liked how it was all the same person because one could perceive this as her own dialogue telling her what to believe based on society's standards. Since the cover picture took up an entire spread and we were limited to 4 pages on this issue, I wasn't left with very much room for creativity on pages 3-4. My main focus was the cover picture, so anything else was just bonus filler to make the article more appealing.