Carolina Herrera unveils Zoom shots of Elizaveta Porodina’s dancers for her fall/winter 2020-2021 collection

To celebrate the Carolina Herrera Fall/Winter 2020-21 collection, creative director Wes Gordon tapped photographer Elizaveta Porodina and six ballet dancers to create a portfolio of mesmerizing images…shot via Zoom.

Last February in New York, the Carolina Herrera fall-winter 2020-2021 collection was unveiled: creations of a romantic and maximalist elegance whose architectural volumes are matched only by the powerful explosion of bright colors and immense floral patterns. Baroque lines and a fresh, colorful freshness, straight out of the imagination of creative director Wes Gordon – who has been at the helm of the New York house since 2018. But if, in February, the designer particularly cited Francisco de Zurbarán, a 17th-century Spanish painter, as his inspiration, his collection today finds its place within a much more recent art – but no less mystical – than the religious painting of the Counter-Reformation: the Zoom photographs of Elizaveta Porodina.

A hypnotic calm, an aged grain and spots of color of a nostalgic softness… Worthy heirs of the poetic abstraction of a Man Ray – in a recolored version – these surrealist photographs freeze, not without recalling the baroque aesthetic, the graceful movement of six ballet dancers as well as that of the Carolina Herrera dresses they wear. Here, the American soloist Natasha Diamond Walker seems to float between her red satin flounces against a backdrop of blue scrolls, there, the Japanese Ako Kondo defies gravity and merges with her orange drapery like her universe speckled with pink and blue, when Wendy Whelan, of the New York City Ballet, prints her royal profile in the heart of the folds of a dress stained with yellow and against the shimmering reflections of a blue satin. But if these astonishing shots carry such emotion, it is because they were taken, not in the four corners of the world, but in isolation: the Russian photographer – and former psychologist – Elizaveta Porodina takes them in the middle of different stages of quarantine thanks to the communication tool Zoom, and invents her own technique to transform the dancers’ studios and apartments into sets of colors. A tour de force that transforms a brutal reality into a gentle visual therapy, full of secrets and promises.