Viviane Sassen | In And Out Of Fashion

Lauded for her imaginative images, Viviane Sassen is redefining contemporary photography with her fusion of fine art, fashion and photography. Sassen’s rise to fame is largely attributed to her inventive photo-series of Africa for which she won the Prix de Rome in 2007. The success behind her work lies in her creative ability to alter the lens through which viewers perceive the world. While Africa is often photographed within the frames of hunger, violence, and suffering, Sassen’s imagery birthed a new vision of Africa as a dream-like fantasy. Her effortless mix of fine art and fashion is an inventive shift in the evocation of fashion and its relationship with art. Melding art and fashion into a coherent album is a difficult task, but In And Out Of Fashion is a striking performance of the seduction of fine art fashion photography.

Image: © Viviane Sassen

In And Out Of Fashion is the summation of 17 years worth of work for some of fashion’s most honoured brands. Sassen’s images brush through the shelves of powerhouses like Stella McCartney, Adidas and Levi’s and onto the pages of Pop, AnOther Magazine, Purple, and Dazed & Confused. The book illustrates the visual aesthetic of Sassen’s photography as her models transform into fine art sculptures and their fashions become the threads of colour covering an artwork. Sassen portraits her subjects in unusual poses that simultaneously induce movement and the statuesque ambience of moulded sculptural art. Landscapes play as much a role in Sassen’s photography as her models, as she juxtaposes the colours and motion of her models against the shapes and hues of the backdrop. Ultimately Sassen’s work is an invigorating peek into the way in which art can re-envision fashion. Although she claims that fashion and art belong to different ends of the creative world, Sassen has seamlessly pieced together the parts of her fantastical puzzle: