Fairytales: Petra Collins and Alexa Demie

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The project] wasn’t necessarily meant for a book, but it’s rare to take so many images and then find you love a lot of them,” Collins explains of its final manifestation. Fairy Tales’s cast of banshees and sprites and fallen angels may appear to have been tied up or subjugated by a villain, but look a little closer and you’ll notice that the mermaid has bound herself up in shibari ropes or the sirens are, in fact, sliding down stripper poles under the eerie spotlights of a seedy nightclub. That heritage has always played a part in Collins’s photography—right down to shooting a Gucci campaign back in her grandmother’s Budapest living room. Before the project had coalesced as a full storybook, images of Demie in elf ears, shibari rope, and garments from Collins’s clothing line, I’m Sorry, had been floating around their respective Instagram accounts throughout early autumn 2020.

Fairy Tales: Petra Collins and Alexa Demie’s Darkly

For photographer Petra Collins, fairy tales opened her mind to new realms far beyond the scope of her everyday life while growing up in the suburbs of Toronto during the 1990s and 2000s. Collected in the new book, Fairy Tales (Rizzoli), Collins and Demie proffer a series of fabulous fables that are equal parts sensual, playful, and poignant. Sirens enchanted all who came near them,” the story reveals in a mischievous text, handwritten by artist Evita Flores, who also created illustrations for the book.

Alexa Demie is an actor, musician, and multi-hyphenate talent who currently stars as Maddy in HBO’s Euphoria. Petra Collins is a multitalented artist and director whose photography set the stylistic tone for much of the 2010s. The nine, nonlinear stories in “Fairy Tales” stem as much from their imaginations, as their traumas and the tales they told themselves. We see the faces and stories of so many ordinary young girls that grew up reading folklore in the faces and stories of the magical creatures of Fairy Tales. Demie wears impressive prosthetics by FX makeup artist Malina Stearns and is set in ordinary environments, it is easy to see the book’s goal of presenting mythological settings as if they were everyday occurrences.

Fairy Tales - Google Books Fairy Tales - Google Books

Hungary as a nation was dealing with being under a Soviet regime, so a lot of that work came out of collective trauma. Fairy Tales is a collection of stories that uses the outlandish myths that many girls grew up reading to reveal an unspoken truth about being a woman in a world that aims to control her.As girls, we swallow the sugar-coated pill of society’s gender norms when we read about the magical romanticization of prince charming, kingdoms, dresses, and dances. The prose itself is never overtly sexual, but aware of its sensual impact on the female’s perspective. Hailing from Los Angeles, Demie grew up surrounded by the Mexican folklore of her mother, grandmother, and aunts, mesmerised by the lyrical, haunting tales of secret realms. Petra Collins is a multi-talented artist and director whose photography set the stylistic tone for much of the 2010s.

Fairytales - Issuu

Subconsciously, those kinds of scary folk tales and the magical, sweet fairy tales that I grew up reading meshed together on this project, which was so perfect with Petra—she loves that aesthetic of blending something beautiful with something a little ugly or sexy or even terrifying. Working with the sculptor Sarah Sitkin, Collins creates moulds of her body as well as her sisters to gain ownership, in a world where our bodies live in multiple realities.Instead of glimpsing each other across a crowded room, they connected as any good millennials with a mutual admiration of each other’s work would: through a DM on Instagram. For Alexa and I, doing this book of fairy tales was almost the most accurate reflection of the world around us today. The darker European folklorists, from Charles Perrault to Hans Christian Andersen, spun stories with little resemblance to the Disney-sanitized versions we grew up on: The queen in Snow White wished to devour the girl’s lungs and liver, for example, and the evil stepsisters in Cinderella cut off their toes with a knife to fit into the glass slipper.