At this stage, it’s like a soap opera: Zara’s move upmarket never ends. Each season – or even several times a season – the Spanish firm offers a new episode of its “gentrification”. Further proof that it equals luxury houses in terms of communication. On September 18, Zara will therefore offer the Steven Meisel New York collection, the fruit of its collaboration with the immense photographer who remains one of the most prestigious names in the sector.
He is notably the one through whom the phenomenon of supermodels arrived. His name still resonates like a sesame, nearly forty years after his debut. Its prices, which are said to be astronomical, make it rare. Offering yourself Meisel for an advertising campaign always gives rise to press releases with triumphant accents. Afford Meisel, Zara has ample means.
The first step was obviously to entrust him with some of the dozens of campaigns that the company produces each season. For around ten years, Zara has been employing all the industry’s hottest in terms of models, photographers, artistic directors, stylists, etc. The sector has fallen under the spell of the elegant Marta Ortega Pérez – today at the head of the empire founded by her father and strategist of this high-end shift –, her perfect mastery of fashion and her means colossal. So that the original perception of Zara – “Spanish fast fashion that copies designers” – has become obsolete.
Autobiographical pieces
Master Meisel, too, let himself be seduced. From November 2022 to May 2023, he was at the center of a major retrospective in La Coruña, Spain, where Inditex, Zara’s parent company, is headquartered. The exhibition “Steven Meisel 1993 A Year in Photographs”, worthy of the greatest photo museums, was organized by the MOP Foundation of Marta Ortega Pérez. The inauguration dinner also offered a gathering of first-rate professionals. Designers like John Galliano, artistic director of Maison Margiela, or Pieter Mulier, that of Alaïa, had made the trip. The only one absent was Steven Meisel, who has not appeared in public since the early 2000s. In the industry, everyone talks about these photo sessions that he directs behind a screen, addressing the models and teams through the through his assistants. This stunningly handsome man couldn’t bear to grow old and watch the passing of time.
For this collaboration with Zara, Steven Meisel inspired and supervised the collection, but he also went behind the lens. He thus shows a wardrobe characteristic of his personal style when he was still willing to show himself: a bandana to hold back his long hair, his dust coat, his faux fur chapka, his construction shoes… With, in addition, pieces described as “autobiographical”: a Scottish shirt in reference to grunge that he has “documented” a lot, or a faux fur overcoat that he imagines to be that of a rocker from the 1960s and 1970s, his favorite decade .
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