Andrej Pejic| Androgynous male model

“Since the fashion industry first began asking “Who’s the blonde girl?” at the Paris men’s shows in June (2010), 19-year- old Serbian Australian model Andrej Pejic has emerged as a poster boy for fashion androgyny.”

In January 2011, Andrej walked for Jean Paul Gaultier in his men’s show and for the January 2011 couture show, eventually appearing in the Spring/Summer 2011 JPG campaign with Karolina Kurkova. The same season, he appeared in the Marc by Marc Jacobs campaign.

 

 

Andy Gotts MBE| Photographer

Andy Gotts has been photographing celebrities for more than two decades, often in black and white, but always with imagination and an ability to bring out an aspect of the character of the sitter.

 

 

 

 

 

Dior| Lady Grey London

Jane Fonda| Barbarella Ordinary World

In an unspecified future, Barbarella is assigned by the President of Earth to retrieve Doctor Durand Durand from the Tau Ceti region. Durand Durand is the inventor of the Positronic Ray, a weapon that Earth leaders fear will fall into the wrong hands.

 

Jane Fonda, actress

 

Tim Walker| Renowned British photographer

Tim Walker is one of the most visually exciting and influential fashion photographers working today. Extravagant in scale and ambition and instantly recognisable for their eye-opening originality, Walker’s photographs dazzle with life, colour and humour.

 

 

 

Guy Bourdin| French Photographer 1928-1991

At the heart of Guy Bourdin’s fashion photographs is a confrontation with the very nature of commercial image making. While conventional fashion images make beauty and clothing their central elements, Bourdin’s photographs offer a radical alternative. Guy Bourdin presented fashion as the luxurious embellishment rather than the subject of his photographs. He magnified to centre stage dark fantasies of lust, consumption and desire. The fundamental significance of his photographs lies in Bourdin’s knowledge that it is not fashion but its image that seduces and fascinates us.

Guy Bourdin was at the height of his career from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s.

 

Helmut Newton|Photographer 1920 – 2004

Helmut Newton led the ultimate glamorous life. He lived in the Chateau Marmont in the winter months, to keep the cold and gloom at bay, befriending Billy Wilder, Dennis Hopper and Robert Evans. Newton arrived in Paris in a white Porsche, was hired immediately by French Vogue, commissioned by Playboy, had a heart attack at 50, and lived in Monte Carlo. Then in a final fling - or what Karl Lagerfeld poetically described as "his last picture, taken by himself", he crashed his Cadillac on Sunset Boulevard aged 83, on January 23 2004.

Provocative, sometimes shocking, Newton’s work tried to capture the beauty, eroticism, humour – and sometimes violence – that he sensed in the social interaction within the familiar worlds of fashion, luxury, money and power.

Nude or in a dinner jacket, Newton’s women are powerful, seductive and dominant – never icy but always impressive or even intimidating. They are liberated women who take full responsibility for the freedom of their bodies, timeless and unclassifiable, open to all fantasies.

 

Ryuichi Sakamoto – Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence

In this captivating, skewed World War II drama from Nagisa Oshima, David Bowie regally embodies Celliers, a British officer interned by the Japanese as a POW. Rock star Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also composed this film’s hypnotic score) plays the camp commander, obsessed with the mysterious blond major, while Tom Conti is the British lieutenant colonel Lawrence, who tries to bridge the emotional and language divides between captor and prisoner. Also featuring actor-director Takeshi Kitano in his first dramatic role, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is a multilayered, brutal, at times erotic tale of culture clash, and one of Oshima’s greatest successes. Film released 1983

 

The musical score is a haunting combination of Western Europeans’ idea Japanese culture and classical large orchestral arrangements. When I’m in right mood, it’s just bliss.

 

 

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Hedwig And The Angry Inch| The Origin Of Love

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a rock musical about a fictional rock and roll band fronted by an East German transgender singer. Film released 2001

 

I had heard about this film a long time before I first seen it. The subject seemed to be taboo, but it’s a great musical with a good heart. And so some of the songs just occasional resurface in my mind, making me smile.