Givenchy - Spring/Summer 2011 Campaign

After having made the Puritans clench their teeth by placing the transsexual model, Lea T, in the center of the Givenchy fall/winter 2010-2011 campaign, Riccardo Tisci has once again put together an unusual cast by calling on the albino model Stephen Thompson. In doing so, he conferred on him a very particular aura, and solidified a bit more the image for the house that he serves.

Long time adept at creating unconventional advertisements (in which he mixes women and men or actresses and models where others content themselves with the latest model en vogue), Tisci has gone even further by associating his muses - e.g. carla Boscono, Daphne Groeneveld and Iris Strubegger - with unusual characters whose beauty is rarely reflected in the fashion world.

Before winning the support of Givenchy's creative director, Lea T could hardly call herself a top model. However, all Tisci had to do was make her the star of one of his campaigns for her to find herself offered a good number of shootings. It is as if Tisci has the power to transform the atypical beauties that finds fascinating from "bizarre" to "hype."

This season, Lea T gives up her place to a young man just as hypnotizing - Stephen Thompson. An albino, he possesses an extremely captivating photogenic quality. Photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, the white saturated image presents an unusual aesthetic, simultaneously sensual and virginal, in which Thompson literally radiates. This should be enough to give the fashion world the desire to know a little more about Tisci's latest find.

As for what inspired this campaign, Givenchy's AD confides to having been influenced by the photo of an alabaster bust placed on a leopard skin (Robert Mapplethorpe); but he has also always felt very close to albinos, making reference to the diaphanous color palette with which he regularly covers his collections.

The campaign will first be diffused in January's L'Uomo Vogue, then in Vogue Paris in February.