DREAM IMAGES TO COLOR YOUR DREAMS!
Fashion gives us another way to dream. If you are a fashionista, you dream about it all the time, with every outfit -- dreaming about everything from clothes, to shoes, to accessories -- dreaming about hair and makeup -- dreaming about looks that inspire you as well as those you just have to own. It is a never-ending river of new designs, new combos, and new interpretations.
But even if you’re not, you likely enjoy the fashion dreams expressed in film, tv, videos, and magazines. Fashion helps to tell their stories. Fashion helps to tell your stories.
Some fashion pushes boundaries far into fantasy or dream worlds. Gorgeous dream-inspired images by three photographers, Miss Aniela, Madame Peripetie, & Jenna Martin, give us fashion fantasies set in breathtaking magical dreamscapes, each with her own unique style.
Color, texture, and shape stretch from soft romantic fairy tales to saturated edgy futuristic constructs. Would we wear these ourselves? Probably not, as is. But it is nice to dream. And elements of each give us ideas that we can incorporate into our real life wardrobes, if we are so moved.
Check them out below.
Miss Aniela’s Surreal Fashion collection is like portfolio of hyper-dreams, with vibrant imagery, focused on the smallest detail of each oddly juxtaposed element. Her imagination is boundless.
Often dreams patch together different places and times, combining them as if they are occurring in the same reality. That’s part of what gives them a surreal feel. Miss Aniela’s painterly images do the same, mixing details from a range of genres and periods -- from Flemish, to Baroque, to Romantic -- to create a unique, magical sense of place.
Miss Aniela weaves dark themes, often referencing mortality and nature, with both live and dead animals, masks, and paintings-within-paintings, lending a sense of mysticism. She is able to create, for the camera, what she sees when she closes her eyes and drifts into the Land of Nod.
With super-rich colors, glamourous materials, and often shocking compositions, Aniela draws from her own experiences, as well as visions she gathers from fairytales and even biblical parables, and she fuses them together with modern props. Throughout it all, the elegance of the clothing stands supreme.
Her works are sometimes conceived on the fly, creating serendipitously as she shoots and in post-production.
Polish photographer Sylwana Zybura (aka Madame Peripetie) creates stunning dreamlike imagery. Her surreal portraits of fashionably eccentric fictional characters are unlike the other composite works featured in this post.
Peripetie’s photos are all shot in-camera, with minimal post-production manipulation and retouching. They were produced using body paint, wigs, prosthetics, and incredible 3D makeup techniques to visually distort her subjects.
Her most recent series, Dream Sequence, is made up of 69 images. The project takes inspiration from movies and explores the concept of beauty philosophically. The series was inspired by Salvador Dali’s dream scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s film spellbound.
A special book of this series, also titled Dream Sequence, was published in May 2014 and is available here.
Photographer Jenna Martin pushes fashion photos to the far edges of fabricated realities. She uses Photoshop in ingenious ways to seamlessly combine photos, creating achingly beautiful, dreamlike vignettes.
Combining up to 20 photos in many of her shots, if only one of them is off -- if the angle is slightly wrong, or if she forgot to get a shot of the clean background -- she has to shoot the entire lot of them all over again.
Martin gathers most of her inspiration from film and stories. She loves to experiment with different photo techniques, sometimes employing ideas from other media, such as painting. She built her own underwater camera housing to take underwater photos. And eventually, she found a groove with composites.
Martin’s work is still in its beginning stages -- her photographer career only began in 2012. But she is well on her way. She usually spends at least 20 hours on each piece, with many of them taking as much as 80-100 hours.
Check out Martin’s dreamy shots in her “Surreal Fashion” collection.
Read more about Summer Dreams all this week on BeautifulNow, And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Wellness, Impact, Nature/Science, Food, Arts/Design, and Travel, Daily Fix posts.