Fashion Divorces Elitism
When Steven Klein turned Brad Pitt’s paparazzi-infested romantic life into a disquieting fine art fashion shoot, the Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie affair became iconic before it had officially even begun. The shoot, printed in W Magazine’s July 2005 issue and titled Domestic Bliss, channeled all the sultry onscreen chemistry the actors had in Mr. and Mrs. Smith while also pandering to the media hype surrounding the couple. Yet despite its intentional parallels to contemporary culture, the shoot’s premise—a glamorously unhappy early ‘60s marriage—only augmented the Pitt-Jolie bedlam.
Enigmatic celebrity fashion shoots are nothing new. They’ve just become more serial, less elitist, and less straightforward lately. In the ‘60s fashion world, when Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy used their iconic gracefulness to jumpstart designer Hubert de Givenchy’s career, celebrities added to the allure of a fashion spread because of their established popularity, not because of the psychological baggage they carried. Often, Richard Avedon only needed one sleek image, not an episodic series, to reach the pinnacle of glamour. When Audrey Hepburn posed for Avedon, her doe-like eyes and the surrounding couture finery dominated the image; the skeletons in her closet seemed far away. But now, fashion shoots tend to bring out the skeletons, even fabricating narrative baggage for the sake of fashion.
W contributor Christopher Bagley introduced Domestic Bliss with this vague explanation: “Sometime last year, Brad Pitt began giving a lot of thought to unhappy marriages.” According to Bagley, Pitt’s ponderings led him to revisit the idyllic façade of late ‘50s, early ‘60s marriages. “You don’t know what’s wrong,” Pitt had said, “because the marriage is everything you signed up for.” The actor teamed up with Klein, a dark visionary who once photographed a series of celebrities with artificially cut throats, to explore marriage’s sinister underside. Neither the shoot nor the text accompanying Domestic Bliss explicitly mentioned the tabloids or Pitt’s own marriage, but the bait dangled. No one could page through the spread without recalling the post Mr. and Mrs. Smith hype that dominated newsstands.
This isn’t the first time Klein has toyed with celebrities’ public images. His 2001 photos of a beaten-up Justin Timberlake merged boy band cuteness with heavy metal rage and his Fight Club era photos of Pitt made the actor seem more deranged and unpredictable than Tyler Durden. Explaining his relationship to his subjects, Klein says, “I feel the obsession with celebrities is for the most part based on a tired need to know oneself through the other, and perhaps the concept of knowing oneself at all is deluded. . . . And there lies the contradiction, for I am a private person not an exhibitionist.”
For decades, fashion photographers have been interested in bridging the gap between other and self, especially since successful marketing is about presenting something foreign enough to be desirable and familiar enough to be understandable. But, in the ‘90s, posing a famous figure in an exotic locale and surrounding her with glossy designer merchandise began to seem alienating and formulaic. The sleek singular images of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Helmut Newton gradually gave way to the convoluted narrative shoot. Today’s top photographers, those who have changed the way fashion interacts with the contemporary landscape, tend to tell visual stories with just enough cultural sagacity and just enough truth to play off of an audience’s curiosity. Once a shoot has caught a viewer’s attention, however, it becomes more about delusions and preconceptions than pop culture and celebrity news.
In one shot from Domestic Bliss, a pensive Angelina Jolie, dressed in an Alexander McQueen sweater and silk dress, stares off into space while Pitt, looking more assassin than ‘60s breadwinner, lurks behind her. Earlier, they’ve monitored their toddlers by the kiddie pool, Jolie’s Yves Saint Laurent cape billowing as she reaches awkwardly toward one of the boys, and they’ve also said pre-dinner prayers while sitting with their five fictional children in a vintage dining room.
A particularly striking group of images shows Jolie and Pitt lying in bed with a pistol. In one episode, Pitt gazes at the gun while Jolie lounges next to him, distractedly staring at his bared stomach. In another, he points the gun directly at his face, his eyes casually taunting Jolie, who is now expectantly sitting up beside him. In a third, she points the gun directly at the camera, her face too opaque to interpret.
When photographing Domestic Bliss, Klein let the actors do what they do best: act. He captured them on film as they moved through fictional scenes and the end result is a confounding collection of images in which Jolie and Pitt seem, on the one hand, to be acting out themselves and, on the other, to be lost in a film noir fairytale. Their self possession and deliberate recklessness fit’s with their suave, daring public image but the mechanical malaise appears fabricated. Or perhaps it’s the other way around—maybe the malaise is truthful while the recklessness is a façade.
The premise of Domestic Bliss seems straightforward enough: a glamorous couple dissatisfied with their marriage but not sure why. Yet the straightforwardness dissipates as the non-linear narrative of the images continues to complicate and contradict itself. Why, after they’ve said prayers with their five children, are Jolie and Pitt playing with firearms? Why has Jolie collapsed on the floor and why is she now standing alone in the hallway with a martini? What happened to the children? None of these questions have answers, nor should they. What Klein does best is tell stories that, while tied to the contemporary cultural landscape, ultimately broach intimate ideas about the way people perceive themselves.
Domestic Bliss and other shoots like it—among them Annie Leibovit’s Killers Kill, Dead Men Die, which ran in Vanity Fair’s 2007 Hollywood issue, and Corrinne Day’s mid-90s sequences of un-posed models in disheveled flats—access culturally fabricated stories. Richard Avedon’s exquisitely iconic shots used to make viewers feel like admirers and Helmut Newton’s S&M inspired nudes made viewers feel like voyeurs. Klein makes his viewers feel like participants, participants who may even be better able to finish the story than the photographs’ subjects, since it was the public and the media who initially made the implicit connections between gossip and news bits. In its own esoteric way, fashion is inviting viewers in, divorcing elitism and becoming accessible.
>Written by d/visible contributor Catherine Wagley.
