Fashion & Art: Hermès meets Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hermès has announced its latest limited edition scarf collaboration, it will be with Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.
The partnership is in honor of the third edition of the luxury label's Hermès Editeur project 'Pocket Squares as Works of Art' which combines the world of fine arts and crafts with the realm of textiles.
Sugimoto's limited edition silk scarves have been inspired by his "Colors of Shadow" project, and will be presented at the Art Basel contemporary art fair from 12 to 21 June 2012.

In his “Color of Shadows” project, Sugimoto showed his mastery of light by using a prism to catch the light from the sun and project it onto a white wall creating beautiful color gradations. Capturing the images with a Polaroid camera, they have become the inspiration of the collaboration with Hermès. Hermès creative director, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, chose 20 of the light images to create the limited edition silk scarves. And only seven copies of each design will be produced.

Pierre-Alexis Dumas called this project a perfect example of 'luxury arts', the marrying between luxury goods and contemporary art.

Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for his extreme technical skills and has presented some interesting projects.

In his Portraits (begun in 1999), commissioned by the German Guggenheim, Sugimoto rekindles the dialogue between painting and the medium of mechanical reproduction. Sugimoto isolated wax figures from staged vignettes in waxworks museums, posed them in three-quarter-length view, and illuminated them to create haunting Rembrandt-esque portraits of historical figures, such as Elisabeth, Henry VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte, Fidel Castro, and Princess Diana. His painterly renditions, lush with detail, recall the various paintings from which the wax figures were originally drawn. Through layers of reproduction—from subject to painting to wax statue to photograph—these images most consciously convey the collapsing of time and the retelling of history.