When news broke last week that Hedi Slimane had cast Courtney Love, Marilyn Manson, Ariel Pink, and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon to star in a new “music project” campaign for Saint Laurent Paris, the Internet was rife with excitement and slight disbelief over the concept’s randomness. Slimane, an accomplished photographer and designer, shoots all of Saint Laurent’s campaigns in his signature black-and-white film. It makes the ads—typically designed as a diptych to include a photograph on one side, and the house’s sleek new logo set against a white background on the other—open to Internet-meme-type interpretation.
And this is exactly what fashion social-networking site VFiles has done with its series of Saint Laurent Paris spoofs that were unleashed onto the Internet just days after the “music project” announcement. Employing the help of Photoshop’s more rudimentary features, VFiles has turned photos of Lindsay Lohan, Raven Simone, Amanda Bynes, Jared Leto, Nas, Winona Ryder, and Paris Hilton into Slimane-worthy shots. (They even doctored a shot of Charlie Sheen that came from the pages of our very own Newsweek) The random assortment is not far off from the designer’s own disparate casting choices, making VFiles’s spoof that much more believable.
The people behind VFiles, which launched in September 2012 and garners around 1 million page views per month through approximately 130,000 unique visitors, say the Saint Laurent riff was just a logical expansion of their site’s central premise. “It just goes back to what VFiles is about—it’s a platform for fashion conversation,” founder Julie Anne Quay told The Daily Beast. “We thought ‘Hedi shot these people, so wouldn’t it be fun if he shot these [other] people.’ It’s just a simple conversation.” She emphasized, “We are huge fans of Hedi and worship at the altar of Saint Laurent, so this is totally a case of ‘imitation is the highest form of flattery.’”
The spoof has since spread to additional social-media platforms like Tumblr and Instagram, where Lohan’s mockup seems to have received the biggest reaction. On Tuesday, Lohan even responded to the spoof herself on Twitter when her friend and stylist J. Logan Horne tweeted the image at her saying, “This is where it’s at.” Lohan was ecstatic: “Omg I would die! So amazing!!! I love Hedi & shooting w/ him!” (Lohan has not been photographed by Slimane since 2009.)
Quay was thrilled with Lohan’s response. “You put things out there on to the Internet, and it feels like they go into the cosmic universe. I thought that was kind of cool. It’s just so great when people respond.”
Saint Laurent, however, did not respond to requests for comment.
