By Ryan Steadman for The Observer - 14 March 2016
I’m not sure how boys on the wrong side of puberty deal these days, but for the rest of us, the crushing barrage of beautiful and impeccably styled women on Instagram, the Internet and newsstands, seems to have transformed what was once a collective voyeuristic pleasure into something closer to white noise. That poses an interesting problem for the fashion world: How do you present someone like Christy Turlington to the world for the hundred-millionth time?
Fortunately, artists are never short of new ideas (ok maybe a few of them are) and they’re always eager to help out their fellow aesthetes. More and more, the fashion world has begun tapping artists for collaborative projects, and Harper’s Bazaar is leading this charge.
In March, the venerable fashion mag collaborated with postmodern icon Cindy Sherman on a guffaw-inducing series of fashion parody covers. Now, they’ve lured the preeminent 1980’s Neo-expressionist painter Francesco Clemente into portraying six generations of models—Anna Ewers, Liya Kebede, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Iman—in his trademark style for a 10-page spread in the April issue, and the Observer was given an exclusive look.
