British fashion photographer Tim Walker transports his audience into a fairytale set in a misty and desolate landscape with model Kristen McMenamy as his muse and main protagonist of his editorial. The first photograph of Tim Walker’s 16-page fashion story “Dame of Thrones,” published in the September 2012 issue of W Magazine, interweaves various pieces from different runway collections of the upcoming season into an idyllic reflection of the Middle Age. The photograph evidently borrows from common medieval motifs such as knights and fairytales.
Walker’s vision of the distant medieval world is an intricate dialogue between these motifs and contemporary fashion. Out of touch with both present and medieval reality, Walker’s photograph calls…show more content… The landscape, although desolate, glimmers with optimism––characteristic of fairytales––produced by the evident blue sky opening up in the background and the rays of sunlight piercing through the thick fog. The bottom half of the landscape is crowded by the rocky hills. The top half and the background of the landscape, on the other hand, opens up blue skies and an infinitely receding landscape obscured by the rising fog. This photograph, as the first chapter of a 16-page fairytale, establishes Walker’s fairytale by introducing McMenamy as well as the world that her character inhabits and explores to the viewers. The fog billowing outwards from between the crevices of the rocks directs the viewer’s attention to the foreground of the photograph and emphasizes on the main protagonist of Walker’s dreamscape. The landscape transcends time, because it neither belongs to the past nor present, but one that can potentially exist in both time periods since it is seemingly devoid of human intervention and presence. This emptied out dreamscape doubles as a black canvas for Walker’s artistic imagination, granting him the ability to create an immersive world unconstrained by logic and…show more content… In the context of Walker’s editorial, medieval clothing involves a sense of heaviness, and raw materials such as metal and leather. Walker conflates contemporary fashion with familiar visual symbols of the medieval knight. McMenamy’s attire appears as a single and cohesive suit of armor, rather than four separate articles of clothing from four different fashion designers. The black Valentino leather jumpsuit blends with the Haider Ackerman corset and Karl Marks vegetable leather armor. Walker’s stylist Jacob K. is attentive to how these articles of clothing engage with their environment and each other to support Walker’s fairytale. The clothes all share a common leathery appearance. The vegetable leather armor, when reflected by the sunlight, takes on the appearance of polished black metal. The custom headpiece created by Julien d’Ys references a knight’s helmet. It frames McMenamy’s face, while also introducing an anachronistic element to the image of the medieval knight—amalgamating the contemporary and the medieval. Walker does not particularly draw the viewer’s eye towards the clothes, since they are primarily enveloped by the shadows. In creating this medieval fantasy, he continually distances the viewer from the purpose of the editorial––to advertise and sell expensive designer clothes, making