Vogue Italia dedicated their February issue to it, Love have been dabbling in it, and Eniko had an encounter with it in Tar. Surrealism, it seems, is having a fashionable moment.
Like fashion itself, the photo shoots which promote it move in trend cycles. Some social or cultural force, say, may collectively inspire a number of designers to follow a particular theme in a given season. The theme of the clothing in turn inspires those behind the camera.
Displaced objects, dreamscapes, realities juxtaposed over other realities… something about 2012′s fashions has caused a dream within a dream of surreal editorials. Perhaps it’s a current desire for fantasy conflicted with the equally strong need for reality.
While of course these concepts owe a debt of gratitude to the Surrealist movement, they’re not borrowing from the movement’s artists too literally. We’re seeing plenty of shoots pervaded by a dreamlike lack of sequence, and some that defy explanation, but it’s not about plastering melted clocks onto every backdrop.
One further case in point, as pictured above: two models in two different magazines inhabiting the same strange world – a Wonderland filled with giant toadstools and swing carousels. Thematic correlation or just convenient reuse of props?
View the shoot from Purple starring Milous van Groesen at that link (also at the thumbnails above), or Jamie Bochert in The Last Magazine at that one.
