Karl Lagerfeld: A Portrait Of Dorian Gray

Rating:
Summary: An insult
Review: A friend showed me this book while visiting the local book mega store. It bears little resemblance to Oscar Wilde's actual classic novel, even symbolically, except on that symbolic level preferred by dilletantes today known as "superficiality." I have seen the work of many so-called "starving artists," men and women of low incomes yet rich in talent. It is almost heartbreaking, watching them try to break into the almost impenetrable world of fine-arts photography publishing. Karl Lagerfeld, on the other hand can buy his way into the art photography world. But he can not buy talent. There was once a time when women were portrayed as sexy and alluring, WITH curves, such as the legendary Alberto Vargas painted them. That's the problem with the fashion world today: Women are shorn of their femininity in order to please a warped minority, who'd rather they look like 13 year old boys.

Rating:
Summary: Not only Mr. Gray.......
Review: But also Mrs. Gray is in this book. She is played by topmodel Eva Herzigova. Beautiful pictures are in this book. There's a set of pictures where Mrs. Gray gets older and older. Or perhaps i should say, thinner and thinner. Or more anorexic that you could imagine. Pretty scary are these pictures of a topmodel that perhaps has suffered from this disease in real life...
But, it's still a beautiful book by the great Karl Lagerfeld.
A musthave!

Rating:
Summary: A Skillful Diversion
Review: Karl Lagerfeld finds other venues for his creative mind in this photomontage inspired by the Oscar Wilde story 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', and while there is nothing profound or earth shattering about this photographic foray, the book does hold its own as an art piece.

Lagerfeld has selected some beautiful models, arranged them in progressively extroverted and erotic moods, while always pulling focus to the young beautiful central man who is his Dorian Gray. As in the story, Dorian doesn't age: Dorian's portrait ages. But the whiling (perhaps wasting?) away of the golden years of youth are captured with great finesse by Lagerfeld. About two thirds of the way through this pictorial monograph Dorian and a female model begin to age in front of our eyes until the death of youth is explored in the wasting and wrinkling that is the burden of old age.

While there have been plays and movies drawn form Wilde's infamous adoration of everlasting youth, this use of the fashion camera has a real sting in that it comes from the mind of a man (and models) whose life depends on youthful appearances. That extra warning makes this book even more significant. Grady Harp, December 2004