For its fourth annual Art Issue, W magazine’s creative director, Dennis Freedman, did something uncommon for a fashion magazine: He commissioned several works of art. From the Varieties of Women by R. Crumb to haunting images by Stephen Shearer, the issue reads like a two-dimensional gallery, or at least the apartment of an in-the-know art collector. “In the end, I try to choose artists who in one way or another deal with female iconography and gender issues,” Freedman told The Daily Beast. For the issue’s cover, Freedman chose Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan—most famous for his highly political sculptures—to design and direct a shoot. “Over the course of many discussions, we landed on an idea that in some sort of not literal way had to do with the effects and ramifications of the (for lack of a better word) economic meltdown,” Freedman said of working with Cattelan. “But it wasn’t just economic, of course. And there were no literal discussions about how we were going to do that. But we did eventually land on the idea that there would be a woman, and that she would be the vehicle for saying something.”
After the theme of the shoot was decided, the subject was easy. Linda Evangelista was a classic model who had, after all, once uttered the words: “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.” Putting her into a series of mises en scènes about economic decay, therefore, made sense. “Linda represented everything,” Freedman said. “She was clearly the ultimate subject. First of all, Linda comes from—and was part of—a group of models who in many ways typified the years of excess.”
Although the issue took six months to plan, shooting for the cover took place over one grueling week in the middle of August. In one elaborate shot staged in New York’s Little Italy, Evangelista was transformed into a religious symbol of the early Renaissance. She stands atop a float at the head of a carefully choreographed procession.
Evangelista resembles an early Christian icon in a Chanel silk dress and an Ellen Christine Couture Millinery headpiece, which Freedman says was based on a couture piece from Christian Lacroix’s final collection. As Freedman is describing the piece, he realizes how relevant this is to the overall theme of financial crisis in the shoot: “Linda is wearing a kind of knockoff—a much less expensive version of the couture piece from the very last house of Lacroix,” he says. “I have to tell Maurizio.”
It may resemble the inside of Versailles, but Freedman says this shot—of Evangelista crawling on all fours—was really staged at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. The scene takes place in an administrative building that looked like a “soulless Beaux Arts pile,” where set designers prepared the room and assembled a cardboard wall. Cattelan carefully tailored each scene to represent the overall theme of the shoot, rather than the clothes. “It is a little dispiriting to see that so much of what is around us is sales photographs,” Freedman said. “I think what’s sad about it is that it reduces the women in the pictures. If anything, they objectify women, fashion magazines.”
In the basement of a building on the Monmouth University campus, the team built long clothing racks. Evangelista curled up on a fur blanket on the linoleum floor below. It is, effectively, a vast closet without any clothes. “She’s in a fetal position, almost praying,” Freedman says. “On a cloud of fur. That’s what she has left.” Because there are, well, no clothes, the image strikes an atypical note for a glossy magazine. “I always believed that the only way for us to have a unique voice was to approach imagery in a very different way,” Freedman continues, explaining that his focus was always “first and foremost on the photograph. Photographs had to live on their own. They didn’t live or die on what the person was wearing. That was important—and was certainly a huge factor—but we had to give our readers something else.” In the Art Issue, Freedman explains, he was simply “hoping celebrate the real power of photography.”
