Who run the world? With a woman at its head, Courrèges — a label founded on miniskirts and PVC during a very different era is today repositioning within an industry interrogating its own gender politics and history of exploitation. From the #metoo movement, which has questioned how men have long abused their long-held positions of power, to the perspective-shifting female gaze that changed how your favourite fashion images are created, we’ve seen welcome changes in recent years but there’s still so much we can improve on as an industry.
“We can no longer take female care and love for granted,” Courrèges’s artistic director Yolanda Zobel tells us, “we all need to be more loving and caring.” So she turned to a photographer who continually challenges and mesmerises with her vision of womanhood; Harley Weir.
For Yolanda — 18 months into her renovation of the Space Age fashion house — self-determination is the core value of the Courrèges woman today and any world in which the future is female.
After collaborating on an autumn/winter 19 teaser campaign, Yolanda and Harley Weir took their creative coming together to the next level for the house’s pre-spring/summer 20 visuals. “We wanted this campaign to be real and Harley’s a self-determined female,” the designer tells us over email as she shares a few exclusive images from the shoot.
Titled Herself, the pre-spring/summer 20 campaign is the first of its kind as no models were photographed. Rather than project the idea of the Courrèges woman on a new face putting on an imagined persona, Yolanda and Harley take centre stage as they embody the Courrèges woman.
Eschewing regular casting, the pick of the collection was sent to Harley’s London home where she posed and photographed herself. Through a combination of mirror selfies and edited live laptop video feeds, the familiar Weir-isms — the intimacy, the provocative poses, the dream-like filter – filled shoot takes the viewer on a behind-the-lens, through the keyhole journey inside the photographer’s world. Selfies, but make it fashion.
“I hope viewers take away the campaign’s honesty, its sense of empowerment, freedom and again the ability of self determination,” Yolanda adds.
