Imagine if all the world’s biggest fashion campaigns featured real life female super heroes, as opposed to supermodels? We don’t hate models or think fashion is evil, but there is a huge element of unrealistic expectations injected into the images we see in magazines and on billboards.
Gisele we love you, but we’re also looking for a bit more of the everyday woman in some of the high fashion campaigns we see because it is hard to aspire to your rocking body knowing that it is physically impossible. Variety, that’s what we need, Ok?
Picture this…actually wait, you don’t need to. Instead of trying to imagine what fashion campaigns would look like with real female heroes, one artist has laid it all out for us.
Miami-based designer Elisa Rodríguez-Vila has created a series of campaigns for Chanel, Versace, Louis Vuitton and more and used images of some amazing badass women instead of the anonymous size zero girls we normally see. She was inspired to create this awesome series after seeing the image of 80 year-old author Joan Didion featured in an ad for Celine.
She isn’t the first older woman to be featured in a fashion campaign. American Apparel, Debenhams, L’Oreal, Estee Lauder, NARS and Marc Jacobs have branched out in the name of diversity and hired older models to appeal to a wider audience. Hallelujah! It’s a start, but it is far from the norm.
Elisa, like many of us, was inspired by women in the world who are doing some amazing things and decided they deserved to be featured in these campaigns too. She told Huffington Post about her idea:
“I enjoy flipping through fashion magazines just as much as the next person, but I didn’t fully realize how bored I had become with fashion ads until I saw the Joan Didion Celine ad. I’ve never even been able to afford a pair of socks by Celine, but all of a sudden they had my attention on so many levels. This was a woman who was beautiful and stylish, but those characteristics were just footnotes to the amazing life she has led. It got me thinking how EASY it would be to recreate that feeling with in fashion ads.”
She also pointed out that she too doesn’t hate models or the modeling profession, but wishes fashion campaigns weren’t only limited to just models.
“This doesn’t mean I think models are completely void of intellect or live totally un-interesting lives, the point of creating these ‘dream fashion ads’ was simply to suggest an added diversity to the fashion world. Women who are older, or who don’t fit into the traditional standards of beauty and gender can make amazing models, and shouldn’t be excluded.”
She posted her re-created images on Fusion.net which includes women like feminist and activist Gloria Steinem, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, education activist Malala Yousafzai, Mo’ne Davis who is the first girl to pitch a game shutout in the Little League World Series, author and feminist Roxanne Gay and transgender spokeswomen and activists Laverne Cox and Janet Mock.
“A few weeks ago, the ever-so-chic brand Céline made headlines for casting renowned author and badass human Joan Didion to model sunglasses in an ad campaign. It was a breath of fresh air, a shock, and, most importantly, a massive hit,” she writes.
“Didion embodies characteristics that every woman can admire, and fashion brands are always trying to be just that: Something to aspire to. She’s a damn cool person to want to dress like. Since the fashion world is ringing in 2015 in a risk-taking mood, I thought it would be a perfect moment to make some model casting suggestions — women who aren’t Gisele or Kendall. Season after season, we see the same group of models and celebrities posing for brands over and over, in a fashion Groundhog Day. The crazy idea of casting women who don’t fit the supermodel mold — yet are super heroes in real life — is actually not that crazy at all. Choosing these women wouldn’t be a risk, it would be a sure-fire hit.”
Here is her list of some dream castings for major fashion ad campaigns:
