Aline Weber Is 'Lady Dada' In Erik Madigan Heck Images For Harper's Bazaar UK November 2016
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Top model Aline Weber is styled by Charlie Harrington in an eclectic fashion mix 'Lady Dada'. Photographer Erik Madigan Heck is in the studio for Harper's Bazaar UK November 2016./ Hair by Kota Suizu; makeup by Polly Osmond
On the one hand, 'Lady Dada' is an innocent-looking, bohemian fashion mix. But as New York's MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) writes "The beginnings of Dada," poet Tristan Tzara recalled "were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust." Given the nationalist movements building worldwide, the reference to Dadism in a fashion editorial captures my attention.
Dada emerged amid the brutality of World War I (1914–18)—a conflict that claimed the lives of eight million military personnel and an estimated equal number of civilians. This unprecedented loss of human life was a result of trench warfare and technological advances in weaponry, communications, and transportation systems.
For the disillusioned artists of the Dada movement, the war merely confirmed the degradation of social structures that led to such violence: corrupt and nationalist politics, repressive social values, and unquestioning conformity of culture and thought. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, New York, Cologne, Hanover, and Paris declared an all-out assault against not only on conventional definitions of art, but on rational thought itself.
