To celebrate the 8th anniversary of the upscale online designer fashion and home boutique, YOOX.COM, they have compiled their last 100 covers and are selling them as limited edition prints. Like a magazine, the site has a new 'cover' on its homepage each month created by YOOX Creative Director, Alberto Biagetti and designer Alessandro Guerriero.
Each image features a photographic and illustrated composite of beauty and fashion exemplified with a model clad in futuristic objects and imagery (many of them Memphis-style). Produced as prints on glossy paper, YOOX is selling 100 signed and numbered editions of each, measuring 27.3" x 19.5"
As much as I like YOOX, they made the navigation to view the covers very difficult. It's not easy to view them all (you have to continually return to the gallery to choose the next) or to get a good look at the prints and see the illustrative quality of some of them, as in the detail shown below:
That said, I've compiled many of the covers and composed them alongside some close-ups so you can get a good look at some of the more interesting details and images. And all without clicking back and forth.
This is a long ass post, you'd better be comfy.
Some covers and close-ups, in no particular order (click to enlarge):
Some Full Covers- the following images do NOT enlarge:
Alberto Biagetti, creative director of YOOX.COM, and Alessandro Guerriero, world-renowned designer, tells the project’s story (interview courtesy of the The NewYooxer.com):
What was the original idea behind the covers?
AB: All of us have a hidden desire to see the imaginary, and the YOOXCOVERS are the realization of this desire. We wanted to dress the body with imagination.
AG: More than idea, we started out with a vision. We looked at clothing as a complex design, like architecture housing the body. From there we imagined the rest… clothing became virtual and, as a consequence, without time or space.
The covers combine fashion, design, real space and the virtual world. What is your creative and working process when making these covers? What gives you the inspiration to re-create them every month?
AB: Each month we create an imaginary space and design a surreal landscape for the body. The body may end up wearing the city, art, landscape, imagination, light…
AG: We start out with an abstract idea that is then translated into a drawing using the body as the only criteria in terms of form, and finally a virtual model is made.
100 covers in 8 years is a great achievement: what do the first and last covers have in common? How has the concept evolved?
AB: Each image tests the limits of the idea of the virtual outfit. A designer imagines a red dress as fire or designs flames around it; we create a dress of fire. Each cover, from the first to the last, is the realization of the impossible. The idea evolves with the mind: it adapts and changes with the times, our experience and the world’s.
AG: The common denominator is that there is never static thinking but a constant evolution of thought in motion and that’s why the image evolves as well…
What’s the message of your images?
AB: The covers embody contemporary man. For better and/or for worse, man is detached from reality, between the body and the world there’s technology, and technology sets specific limits and offers infinite spaces. One of these spaces is designated to intellectual creativity.
AG: These images have a strong and powerful aesthetic impact, and yet each cover captures a transient idea hanging by a thread. As far as content is concerned, the only constant factor is its transformation and, as a consequence, the continual transformation of the cover.
All 100 (click to enlarge):
Buy the limited edition prints of the covers here.
