← Back to portfolio

Toilet Paper Magazine for Packet Biweekly

Published on


What if instead of ‘this is what you would look like in your Christian Louboutin shoes and Prada dress on top of a taxi cab in Times Square’, it was ‘this is what you would look like if your Victorian couch suddenly magic-carpeted you into a different galaxy while you were watching TV’?
 
The latter is what fashion advertising would be like if Toilet Paper magazine founders, Pierpaolo Ferrari and Maurizio Cattelan, were in control. No stranger to commercial photography, Ferrari has been in the game since ’94 with contracts for consumer powerhouses such as Mercedes, Sony, and MTV.  While Cattelan is well known as the talented prankster of the contemporary art world, until 2011 when he announced retirement at his Guggenheim retrospective. In 2010, the two founded Toilet Paper, a picture-based magazine that challenges commercial photography by pairing familiar objects with surrealistic imagery. Although published for an art audience, the content within the magazine’s pages possesses references to the commercial world that makes the experience of flipping through Toilet Paper an eerie one as your brain attempts to process the deliciously perverse transformations of oddly familiar objects.
 
Ultimately Toilet Paper is not a direct product of either the art or commercial world; rather each issue’s series of images propose new methods of interpreting connections between the two. What if this approach were applied to fashion advertising?
 
The main objective of fashion advertising is to connect the potential consumer with the brand. First targeted, then persuaded – the consumer enters a landscape of both product and lifestyle decisions defined by the brand’s marketplace. Intended for wide distribution, adverts could be considered the most efficient and effective method of visual narration in contemporary society. Unless you’ve managed to get your hands a hold of the subliminal message decoding sunglasses found in John Carpenter’s Sci-Fi classic They Live. No matter how aware or educated, aren’t we all really just a bunch of suckers basking in product fetishism and lifestyle fantasies?

Whether or not this is true for all, it is undeniable the role that fashion advertising plays not only on the wallets of consumers, but our expectations and imagination towards personal style, income, class, and status.
 
Advertising doesn’t have to be an insult to our intellect or creative sensibilities. Yet the majority of what we flip through in the first thirty to fifty pages of a Vogue or Harpers Bazaar (the glossy publications that are supposedly the authorities on current news and aesthetics in fashion media) flash images that don’t challenge or encourage us to expand our expectations of luxury, but rather affirm branded definitions.
 
But what if creators like Cattelan and Ferrari were in control of editorial and high fashion season campaigns? What if Toilet Paper images, such as the previously stated couch-transportation scene, filled the introductory pages to glossy magazines, highway billboards, and subway posters? Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect an escape from the world of consumerism completely. After all, it drives economies and fashion brand loyalty makes a lot of people happy. However, interesting and thought-provoking content can still function beneficially from a fashion marketing approach. For example, if the image reads ‘this is what you would look like if your Victorian couch suddenly magic-carpeted you into a different galaxy while you were watching TV,' it could still imply that you will only be transported into a different galaxy if and when you are wearing your Coco Chanel robe covered by your Hudson Bay blanket. Everyone’s happy, right?
 
So, if we cannot escape perpetual interaction with campaigns on a daily basis, wouldn’t it be nice to at least be confronted with images that challenged the current economy of fashion representation? Images that are full of irrational juxtapositions with unrelated concepts bound together solely by the imaginative process of the brains and hands involved in the production.
 
Perhaps one of the most interesting elements of Toilet Paper’s spreads is the visual role of the hand. Often seen cropped into Toilet Paper images, the hand figures as a connector between the surrealist imagery and the reality of the scene’s construction. Whether it is seen placing slices of deli meat on a girl’s face, putting out cigarette butts in a bowl of ice cream, or measuring the length of a dildo, the hand is present as a reminder that someone else is the creationist of the scene, it functions as a symbol of art-making.
 
Such imagery fits well into the spirit of early surrealist art, familiar especially to the works of German artist, Max Ernst. For example, in Ernst’s painting Oedipus Rex (1922), an oversized hand extends from a brick wall, pierced by several contraptions. The fingers squeeze a nut while the remainder of the scene is filled out with the framed outlines of buildings, two bird heads, and a hot air balloon floating in the background. The flesh of the hand interrupts an otherwise very illusory scene – its presence suggests a bridging between the conscious and unconscious condition – a theme we are similarly confronted with upon viewing Toilet Paper’s visual landscape.
 
Whether or not Ferrari and Cattelan intend on making reference to specific surrealist works, conceptually their images practice a similar experience of object juxtaposition, which activates reactionary senses that are normally suppressed in commercial work.
 
So if the library of surrealistic visuals that interplay between ordinary and absurd, seen in the issues of Toilet Paper, were employed in fashion campaigns, where would that take us? Fortunately, some luxury labels have already picked up an interest in collaborating with the magazine’s founders. The Parisian fashion house, Kenzo, collaborated with Toilet Paper on their FW13 and current SS14 campaigns…and it’s a good thing they did because instead of staring at spring campaigns from Prada and Burberry, in which it looks like the models are posing for a team sport or most likely to marry rich yearbook photo (instead of an haute couture campaign shoot), now you can walk down the streets of Paris and see posters featuring Kenzo shoes in a plexiglass box of goldfish accompanied by hands with an excess of fingers advertising the spring jewelry collection, or Doctor Octopus-esque arms giving six thumbs up featuring the latest spring blouses. 
 
Other fashion houses like MSGM and CoSTUME NATIONAL have taken on advertising assistance by way of collaborative capsule collections from Toilet Paper as well. New York Magazine marks perhaps the most progressive step in the direction of reshaping fashion representation when they decided to employ the Toilet Paper team to capture a selection of SS14 styles. In this editorial, Ferrari and Cattelan successfully feature the season’s new styles while building satiric comments on luxury. One image displays a young woman ironing a sea of Benjamin Franklins in her Celiné top and Prada dress, while in another scene, just as much attention to style documentation is given to the protruding hand, sporting a Calvin Klein jacket, as the Miu Miu clad woman getting a sheet of glass smashed on her head.
 
Ultimately, if creative officials of the fashion world continue to recognize the need for change in fashion representation — a new visual language will emerge that can cater to both the subversive and material interest of the consumer. Really, wouldn’t we all rather picture ourselves in next season’s fashion with a mouthful of wieners (hot dogs)? Maybe not. But it is these intriguing, suggestive capabilities that make Toilet Paper’s compositions a beacon of light in an otherwise static world of fashion representation.



Published in Packet Biweekly's Fashion Edition Vol. 1 - April, 2014