Cindy Sherman mimics fashion Instagram poseurs
'Who travels with hair and make up just to see their sister in LA?' she asks. 'They're not even selfies they're setups'
Do you never leave home without your own personal stylist? Are you the kind of person who'll pose in front of the Paris Metro, but not actually take the subway? Then Cindy Sherman might just have been looking at your Instagram account.
In a new shoot for the March edition of US fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, the artist lampoons the kind of faux-candid glamour and unchecked vanity displayed by some of the more fashionable site’s users.
“I was physically repulsed after looking at some of these accounts - thinking how this person travels with hair and makeup and a photographer and is just going to visit her sister in LA?” the artist told the magazine. “They’re not even selfies; they’re setups. Then some of them get paid to wear the clothes? I guess it makes sense - it’s business - but there’s just something dead about the whole thing. It’s so self-involved.”
With Harper’s help, Sherman set about recreating her own versions of these sorts of images, dressing up in the Fall-Winter 2016 collections from a few of the world’s most prominent fashion houses, including Marc Jacobs, Prada and Chanel.
She calls this new selection Project Twirl, nafter the kind of people who arrive at fashion week events and offer waiting photographers a twirl. “I just loved the description of these people,” she tells the magazine’s Laura Brown.
Although she names no names, the artist says she based the images quite closely on certain fashion-pack Instagrammers.
"For a lot of the faces, I was inspired by real people I found online," she says. "I didn't want it to be obvious, though. I'd change the hair color, style, something. But they still look like they're somebody - rather than just me with makeup on."
Five of the seven images Sherman created for this new series will grace the front page of a series of special editions of Harper’s Bazaar’s March edition, out next week. So, perhaps a few of those satirized by Sherman can console themselves with having made it onto the cover of a glossy magazine.
For greater insight into this artist’s life and work, buy a copy of our Phaidon Focus book dedicated to Sherman, here.