fashionable gore

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Jul 17 15:03:05 PDT 2000


Inside.com's Daily Dope - July 17, 2000

Of bad taste, legendary fashion diva Diana Vreeland once said it's like ''a nice splash of paprika.'' But we're sure the late Vogue editor would never have signed off on the 18-page fashion spread in the August issue of the British men's magazine Arena, which features military-style clothing on a collection of blood-encrusted corpses. The photo series, entitled ''Fashion is Hell: This Season, Khaki is the Colour to Die For,'' starts off with dogtag-wearing models sporting CK and automatic weapons -- and it gets much, much gorier from there. The ersatz soldiers trek through the forest in Dolce & Gabbana. They tend to a gruesome leg wound in outfits from the Gap. Finally, they end up in a vaguely Vietnam-like jungle clearing littered with bloody bodies, all of which are decked out in clothing supplied by Polo Jeans Co. Photographer Carter Smith -- also a contributor to Vogue and W -- gets a blurb on Arena's ''Contributors'' page in which he discusses his gore-splattered shoot, which apparently took six months to complete and happened on location in ''Sannibel Island, off the west coast of California.'' (Is there another coast to California? And doesn't he mean Sanibel Island in Florida?) Smith goes on to recount the harrowing dangers of doing fashion photography on an island resort: ''It was mating season, so the alligators were particularly vicious,'' he is quoted as saying. But think of what nice handbags they'd make.



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