There is a specific mass event in Germany that I find very irritating. For a long time it wasn’t even on my radar, but nowadays the Oktoberfest has become hard to avoid. I don’t now if it is because of the tumblrs of guys puking or the fashion blogger girls starting to wear a dirndl and showing their cleavage or the gay guys showing their ass in leather shorts but the high resonance in social media was very annoying to me. So I am glad to be free from all that for at least a year.
In all the omnipresence there was one fashion shoot that impressed me, regardless of my dislike for the Bavarian tradition. The Berlin-based photographer Claudio Oliverio created an Oktoberfest-themed fashion shoot that is beautiful and provoking at the same time. It tells the story of a couple, of a blond girl and a black guy, going together to Oktoberfest. The 60s styling of the shoot somehow brings the viewer back to a time where relationships between black and white folks were not accepted. And to be honest, I can imagine that in rural parts of Bavaria this would be a problematic commitment even still. What I like about the shoot is that even though it is meant to be provoking the couple looks effortlessly beautiful and their emotions towards each other honest and real. Their confident attitude gives me somehow the innocent and probably naiv hope that one day we won’t be able to see anything controversial in these pictures anymore. See more of the shoot after the jump.
