Arts Design

LOOKS LIKE A DREAM NOW

Fashion gives us another way to dream. Whether you are a fashionista dreaming about a dress or a pair of shoes, or you love the drama costumes add to a scene, wearables can elevate and alter perceptions and experiences. Check out these fashion images that feel like dreams, from some of the coolest surrealist photographers we found right now.

1. MISS ANIELA

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.

2. MADAME PERIPETIE

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.

3. JENNA MARTIN SURREAL FASHION

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 Beautiful Dreams, as they relate to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact including Building Dreams Now, Kepler’s Dream Beautifully Resurrected Now, and 10 Beautiful Ice Cream Dreams Now.

Enter your own images and ideas about Beautiful Dream in this week’s creative Photo Competition. Open for entries now until 11:59 p.m. PT on 09.07.14. If you are reading this after that date, check out the current BN Creative Competition, and enter!