The Beauty of Violence

The Beauty of Violence is Karl Lagerfeld´s portrait of his newest muse, the darkly handsome Italian fashion model Baptiste Giabiconi, whom Lagerfeld first spotted in French Vogue, clad only in a Chanel cardigan and a pair of shoes. For Lagerfeld´s lens, Giabiconi enacts an erotic seizure in myriad facial and corporeal expressions, and in various degrees of clothing. Well chosen as a portrait subject, Giabiconi is a theatrical chameleon: he confronts the camera with a provocative, sultry stare, or withdraws from it into a state of feigned self-absorption. Lagerfeld loves to engage such seductive subjects and to capture their bodily rhetoric of sexual aggression: The Beauty of Violence is the latest chapter in his love affair with the many incarnations of male Eros.