100 YOOXCOVER
Each month Alberto Biagetti and Alessandro Guerriero interpret the spirit of YOOX.COM with visionary images and conceptual representations, creating a visual fusion of clothing and the body: YOOXCOVER.
Just like the cover of a magazine, YOOXCOVER changes every month, telling a new story set between reality and fantasy: a hybrid concept of fashion and creativity that interacts with other forms of artistic expression.
YOOX.COM celebrates its 8th anniversary with the 100 covers that have been the hallmark of its home page ever since its inception. These symbolic images investigate the union between man and technology: a virtual world where there are no borders between fashion, art, design and architecture.
Alberto Biagetti, creative director of YOOX.COM, and Alessandro Guerriero, world-renowned designer, tell the project’s story.
What was the original idea behind the covers?
AB All of us have a hidden desire to see the imaginary, and the YOOXCOVERS are the realization of this desire. We wanted to dress the body with imagination.
AG More than idea, we started out with a vision. We looked at clothing as a complex design, like architecture housing the body. From there we imagined the rest… clothing became virtual and, as a consequence, without time or space.
The covers combine fashion, design, real space and the virtual world. What is your creative and working process when making these covers? What gives you the inspiration to re-create them every month?
AB Each month we create an imaginary space and design a surreal landscape for the body. The body may end up wearing the city, art, landscape, imagination, light…
AG We start out with an abstract idea that is then translated into a drawing using the body as the only criteria in terms of form, and finally a virtual model is made.
100 covers in 8 years is a great achievement: what do the first and last covers have in common? How has the concept evolved?
AB Each image tests the limits of the idea of the virtual outfit. A designer imagines a red dress as fire or designs flames around it; we create a dress of fire. Each cover, from the first to the last, is the realization of the impossible. The idea evolves with the mind: it adapts and changes with the times, our experience and the world’s.
AG The common denominator is that there is never static thinking but a constant evolution of thought in motion and that’s why the image evolves as well…
What’s the message of your images?
AB The covers embody contemporary man. For better and/or for worse, man is detached from reality, between the body and the world there’s technology, and technology sets specific limits and offers infinite spaces. One of these spaces is designated to intellectual creativity.
AG These images have a strong and powerful aesthetic impact, and yet each cover captures a transient idea hanging by a thread. As far as content is concerned, the only constant factor is its transformation and, as a consequence, the continual transformation of the cover.
