Artistic ambition with a surreal AW13 campaign

Kenzo meets Toilet Paper
By Lars Byrresen Petersen | Fashion | 16 July 2013

Remember your secondary school biology class where you got to dissect a frog? Well, Carol Lim and Humberto Leon do, having taken inspiration from what we can only suspect is their high school past. A key image from Kenzo’s Autumn Winter campaign features models pinned to a board next to bugs of all colours and sizes, tweezers carefully lifting off their clothes as if trying to avoid harming their inner organs.

One of seven images in the series including a tiger dog and a shoe ready to eat banana skin, the campaign was realised by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s Toilet Paper magazine, a picture based art title. These aren’t the first eye-catching pictures the design duo, also founders of the store and clothing line Opening Ceremony (duh), have come up with for the Paris label since their take-over in 2011. SS13’s campaign by legendary photographer Jean Paul Goude featured two models posing in an ‘X’ silhouette (one was upright, the other upside down. But which?). Ponder all you like, there’s something bigger to recognise: how Lim and Leon have turned Kenzo into hot commodity thanks to their ‘off’ but spot-on viewpoint.

Kenzo meet Toilet Paper for their AW13 campaign

Kenzo meet Toilet Paper for their AW13 campaign

Kenzo meet Toilet Paper for their AW13 campaign

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