Bodies in pieces. Clothes as collage. Nothing quite where it should be.
Dada is the closer relative here, more than fashion ever was. A hundred years ago, Eadweard Muybridge was already breaking the body into pieces. His 19th-century motion studies chopped a single gesture into a grid of frames, a woman walking or bending shown as a sequence of near-identical, slightly uncanny repetitions. Artists like Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann picked up that same instinct decades later, cutting photographs out of magazines and newspapers and reassembling them into monsters, limbs floating with no logical anatomy.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp was working the same territory, treating the moving body as something you could abstract, double, or turn into a still object. It was a reaction to a world that had just watched itself fall apart in a war, nothing made sense, so why should the pictures. Hans Bellmer took it further still, dismantling and reassembling figures into bodies built like living puzzles.
There’s also the exquisite corpse game the Surrealists loved, where one person draws a head, folds the paper, hands it to the next person to draw a body without seeing what came before, and you end up with body parts stitched into one character. Dusty Shadow borrows that same essence.
It came together in two stages. First, the shoot: Andrea Farley Shimota moving through poses that lean more Pina Bausch than Vogue. Then the floor: Odie and Noa surrounded by the printed contact sheets, scissors, tape, dried flowers, ribbon, cutting the images apart and reassembling them the way the Dadaists once did, treating the photographs as not precious, just material.
Clothing in this story stops being clothing and starts being material too. A suit becomes a hiding place. A dress becomes armor. A stack of hats becomes a joke that got a little out of hand.
None of it is meant to look finished. It’s meant to look like it’s still being figured out, scraps and all. – Odie Senesh
Credits:
Creative Direction, MUH, Styling & Collage by Odie Senesh @odie_senesh
Photography & Collage: Noa Griffel @noagriffel
Model: Andrea Farley Shimota @afarleyshimota
Featured brands: Comme des Garçons, Miu Miu, Burberry, Barcelino, Tory Burch, Le Ballet Fou, and selected vintage pieces.
