Mens Fashion Editorial – The Picture of Dorian Gray

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS:
Creative director/Style: Kseniya Rain @ksenyarain
Photographer: Panina Olga @twenvo_photo
Makeup Artist: Rybachuk Marina @rybachuk.makeup
Model: Oleg Gulida @_olewan_

Wardrobe credits:
Zara
Vintage

This fashion shoot is based on Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”.

“…Young and incredibly handsome Dorian Gray arrives in London and falls under the influence of adventurer Lord Wotton. He instills in the young man that the secret of Dorian’s success and happiness is in his beauty, because it will help him get all the pleasures in the world”.

Our shoot is a fantasy about what Dorian Gray is like today! It is a collective image of all those who, in the pursuit of the external, have lost their inner fullness. Mystical realism, a mixture of two eras, past and present. The plot of the novel is conveyed by metaphors through frames and symbolic details on them.⠀So, for example, modern Dorian Gray is not drawn, but photographed.⠀A series of shots of him walking in nature-the character revels in beauty, youth, pleasures, and himself. But he’s too superficial. And superficiality always brings only short-term satisfaction. The real is always within us and deep. The three mirrors that Dorian looks into emphasize the power of self-love. The flowers on his body are pinned with plasters, the remnants of the beauty that was in his soul, but has been irreparably damaged by his immoral actions.⠀

Further shots in the water and the hero becomes more and more brutal. It is his soul that has hardened. ⠀If you don’t take care of your soul, it goes bad. Instead of a head, only flowers are reflected in the mirror. It’s a hint that his personality is already fading.⠀He has destroyed himself. And at the end the symbolic death of the hero in the frame from the portrait. An allusion to the ending of “The Portrait of Dorian Gray”. The most moral law of being is not to elevate the visible to status the only significant one. If a person is beautiful, it does not mean that the soul corresponds shell.

Problems: narcissism, selfishness, vanity. As a sacrifice temporary beauty and success, for the sake of short-term pleasures is brought into sacrifice “intimate in the heart”, the inner man, true love. We raise the questions of what is true beauty. In these shots, I wanted to tell a whole story about a young man who was so carried away by narcissism and pleasure that he lost the main thing – his soul. Human vices and an ugly soul cannot be hidden under a beautiful exterior. It is necessary to fight against the very essence of vices, not to let self-love take possession of the soul.

With the development of social media, our whole life has become as if it were on display. Many of us fall into the trap of external approval. And that external noise distracts from what’s inside. From our own ideas, feelings and experiences.

Everything has accelerated. Quantity has become quality. We have stopped investigating, analyzing, wanting to know more and deeper. I compare it to fast food. It’s like eating it, but in the long run you’re going to have health problems. That’s how we put filters on it, pass it off as our own, and get quick approval in the form of likes, comments, and followers.

But it would be far better to create yourself and your life and your creativity in a fundamental way. To turn within ourselves. And that’s where true long-term happiness comes in. Real you, real life, books, hobbies, and real friends. And a quiet conscience. That’s what this film is about. After all, standards of beauty change, but the concept of morality and honor remain forever.