Carravagio As Stylist and Fashion Role Model

A stunningly staged fashion editorial by the Spanish-British duo  Divers & Aguilar clearly shows that fashion, as well as art, is timeless. A series of photographs entitled “Chiaroscuro Caravaggio“, is a real work of art, for the most part due to the fact that the photographers “borrowed” almost all their visual inventory from the greatest and most important painter of the anti-Reformation Era, Michelangelo da Caravaggio. The editorial’s enormous success is due to its “models” themselves, nature buffs,  the homeless and motorists, who ideally embodied Caravaggio’s St. Matthew and St. Peter completely by accident. The result is an interesting entwinement of The Fight Club’s esthetics and anti-Reformation!

The editorial was created for the Riders Moda fashion house, and is included in the annual overview of the best photos in 2010 on the Creative Review website. The photographers ideally reconstructed Carravagio’s dramatic chiaroscuro by using contemporary cinema techniques, making it fleetingly seem as if his oil paintings suddenly come to life.

Mike Diver from Diver & Aguilar explains how he has always been fascinated by Caravaggio’s paintings precisely because of their filmesque quality, as well as the artist’s life story which is at once both mysterious and fascinating. Namely, Caravaggio was held in exceptionally high esteem and was quite sought-after by his clients, who were for the most part cardinals. However, prone to a whirlwind lifestyle and homosexual affairs, the painter was accused of murdering a young man, after which he escaped to Sicily, soon fell ill and died. It is interesting to note that his body was never found after his death.

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