QUINTESSENTIALLY ASIA - Spring 2012

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How do you feel? When was the last time you cried? Laughed? I am not being funny. We live in a world where the emotions are everywhere and nowhere, where more of our lives than ever are on public display through social networks, but where authentic emotions often seem rare and remote, like streetlights seen from the air: we know what they are but we can’t touch them, only when we land, and by then it’s too late. In this, the third edition of Quintessentially Asia, we explore the role of emotions in art, fashion, love and sport. It has become a nostrum of all luxury brands that they seek to make an emotional connection between their products and clients. There’s no surprise about this, as Donatella Versace once told me, “Why would anyone pay so much for a dress if it was just fabric? They want tears and thrills as well.” Indeed they do, which is why the luxury and art worlds have progressed beyond being kissing cousins and now lay entwined in a marital embrace that sometimes seems a little incestuous. Thus when we laid bare the empty canvass of this edition, we decided to paint it with stories about the succession crisis at Dior (where emotions have been at the heart of the drama), Polo, that most passionate of sports, which is enjoying extraordinary success in Mainland China, the harrowing hunt for a child that has driven many wealthy Chinese with fertility issues into the arms of surrogacy brokers, the forced marriage of rich hunters and battling conservationists on a mission to save China’s most beautiful wild places, Gilbert & George’s doll’s house dalliance and Biologique Recherche’s romance with human skin. At the core of this emotional outpouring is our fashion shoot, Dragoncholia Rising. Inspired by Lars Von Trier’s sumptuous Melancholia, starring Kirsten Dunst. This movie brought me tears and smiles when I first saw it, and I was inspired by its exploration of human emotion in the face of extinction. I re-imagined Von Trier’s killer blue planet as a red giant wreathed in dragon-shaped clouds with the power to bestow beauty upon any woman touched by its rosy glow. Gareth Brown and Dennis Chan, two genies with camera and CGI did the rest. The poetic images that were the end-result we offer as a silk wrap for those raw emotions that none of us quite know how to handle. So how do you feel now?