Self-Service The Ads 1994-2022 Review
About twenty-five years of ads by Self-Service.
Images in high-exposure lightened like bleached eggwhites, flash-stained epidermis. Fragmented body parts, rarely does a figure come complete.
A good ad contracts the viewer’s entire essence into the body part that the ad satisfies. These are ads that make it quite natural on one’s part to desire to become only a leg for a shoe, or a wrist for a Phoebe-Philo-era Celine bag. Laments as complex as the angle to incline the light that’s to lave the piece of calfskin. One doesn’t want to be a thing but the thing that wears the thing, which relieves.
Helmut Langs by Mapplethorpe, limp falls of water and good boots.
Charlotte Rampling Louis XIV editorial shot by Juergen Teller. Charlotte Rampling gorging on banquets of berry fondant tarts. Juergen Teller dancing naked against white orchids. Charlotte Rampling pouting naked in a fox fur shawl.
Raf Simons s/s 09 and the inviolable magrittean jest of pairing an image with a non-corresponding word ever withstanding the dulling of repetition.
How much better silk-jersey drapes fall when in contiguity with a plate of deliquescing gelled shells.
Bare bodies blanking at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Interludes of American Apparel high-den tights.
Great book.