How Rihanna’s Footwear Designer Created the Creepiest Lookbook of the Year
How Rihanna’s Footwear Designer Created the Creepiest Lookbook of the Year
Italian designer Gio Forbice is a rising force in the footwear world. He is Rihanna’s sassy cobbler, designing the platform-tastic shoes for Fenty x Puma; has collaborated with Hood By Air; and has boasted his own labels, Forfex and Darkdron. This season, he’s ventured into churning out a full ready-to-wear collection with his new label, For the Memory of a Lifetime, and a lookbook shot by photographer Jordan Hemingway in London. The scenes are eerie, as if plucked from Google Street View, and show hiccups in human behavior, as well as technical glitches that are accidental but often seen on that mapping feature. “[Google Street View] captures people with ‘weirdo’ behaviors on the street,” Forbice tells Vogue. “They don’t know they got shot, and basically they are victims.”
Images range from the banal, such as a woman dropping papers, to others resembling a screenshot from WorldStar, like catfighting couples. In one brawl, a woman wears a pair of Forbice’s signature Mad Max sandy-hued combat boots and drags a woman in pink tights across the street. In another, two women are seen in a phone booth passionately kissing. It’s worth noting that their matching metallic heels artfully pick up light.
Forbice isn’t the first designer to delve into the paparazzi–meets–Big Brother visual realm. Back in January, Yeezy released its long lens–shot Kim Kardashian West–off-duty clone campaign, while Balenciaga also used real paps to shoot models. But Forbice’s version of the trend is more voyeuristic, as it taps into capturing the mishaps of everyday people. “I had some crazy references of people fighting in the street or just on the ground drunk,” he says. And what Forbice’s street view catches can be downright disturbing: One woman, wearing a simple bubblegum pink button-down, snaps a photo of a woman in a dress splayed out on the sidewalk who is presumably drunk or maybe dead. (In the following photo, the woman inches closer to the body with her phone.) It’s a bizarre, meta look into how technology has lead to numbness, which is, well, captured by none other than technology.
And while much of the lookbook is dominated by well-dressed, badly behaved humans, the tech mistakes of Google Street View are part of the twisted fun, too. In one instance, Forbice shows six shots of the same woman, sometimes in a state of undress, walking across the street in a quiet suburban neighborhood. (It’s similar to a Matrix-warped image of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road.) Another still focuses on only body parts and shows three sets of limbs: one in coquettish white boots, one in slick green tights, and one in lace tights and heels.
While most of the images are captured from far away and feel anonymous, one familiar face makes an appearance: A crown-wearing Shayne Oliver crosses the street in a cleavage-baring printed shirt and cowboy boots. In another scene, he goes bare-chested and carries a sweatshirt with a horse emblazoned on the chest. And though the faces and clothes might not be completely clear in the lookbook, the actual details of the collection, as the online shop reveals, are meticulous. Black lace pumps come with a bent heel and a pom-pom ruffle, and what appears from afar to be a floral is actually a hodgepodge of digitally printed photographs of cars. The message? There’s more to life than meets the surveillance camera’s eye.
