Their association with inanimate objects makes them as ornamental as the artworks themselves: catalogued objects of acquisition, more frozen than inspired.Īya Nakamura x Corine. The campaign praises beauty as a ‘living art’ yet the models feel like shadows of the wit and lively personalities they are known and loved for. Ancient Mediterranean cultures used pigments, and not engaging with a more diverse chromatic palette reinforces whiteness – and does little to dethrone an iconography that often inserted subjects of colour to compliment the status of white subjects. Their black dresses contrast with the pale marble, a simplistic creative choice that ignores the boundless possibilities of colour. The models are mostly reduced to immobile face shots of their faraway gazes. Yet the sameness of the images stiffens the models’ individualities, especially incongruous for women who constantly reinvent themselves and their limits as action heroes, comedians, drama leads, storytellers and more. Corresponding characters and alter egos are presented to us in flesh and stone. The composition of the Louvre campaign images, in its compare-and-contrast collages that evoke diptychs, signals an equation. In this industry wave, beauty is a human constellation of indiscriminate qualities, not an ideal. Their inclusion is hardly disruptive, considering the beauty industry’s shift towards a greater representation of men, gender nonconforming models, textured hair and skin, senior and neurodiverse models and models of different sizes in the recent years. These four women are four avatars of stereotypical female attractiveness – polished, professionally accomplished, photoshopped, uniformly styled. Yet for all its women-empowerment-coded visuals and messages, the campaign merely superimposes conventional portrayals of aesthetically pleasing beauty that ignore power as well as more complex forms of representation. In the campaign’s press release, Laurence des Cars, the first woman president-director of the Louvre, who took the job in 2021, hails the collaboration as an illustration of ‘diversity of forms of beauty found in the Louvre collections, where cultures and civilisations dialogue beyond time and geography’. Old icons, new icons, and the Louvre as a commercial stage. The campaign claims to celebrate a pluralistic take on an evolving canon of beauty, a breezy genealogy which take us from the imposing grace of antique marbles to the ethnically diverse women at the forefront of culture in film, fashion and music today. The model He Cong poses to the camera in a three-quarter turn which seemingly ignores the Venus of Milo just to her right. Amanda Seyfried is matched with a Tiberian-era sculpture representing Diane, the fierce and independent goddess of the moon and hunters, excavated near Rome in 1792. Another photograph juxtaposes the profiles of Aya Nakamura with Edme-François-Étienne Gois’s nineteenth-century marble bust of Greek poetess Corine (also Corinna), in a nod to Nakamura’s own song-writing. A split photograph of Zendaya’s profile converging with a Roman sculpture, the Venus of Arles, excavated in France in the seventeenth century. Other images show the models and their associated Louvre sculptures side by side. The sculpture stands behind her and though Zendaya’s body seemingly completes the marble fragment, her position also obscures the Hellenistic monument from sight. Her movement emulates the dynamism of The Winged Victory of Samothrace, which towers over the Louvre’s main staircase. Zendaya, in a Little Black Dress, flaps the side of a diaphanous black cape in the air. We’re in the higher spheres of good looks. The recent collaboration between cosmetic brand Lancôme and the Louvre Museum saturates us with visual cues about beauty: beauty ambassadors Zendaya, Amanda Seyfried, Aya Nakamura and He Cong are paired with beautiful artworks to promote beauty-enhancing products. A new partnership between Lancôme and the Louvre shows something less than beautifulįour famous late-Gen Z and millennial women, the most visited museum in the world and make-up.
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