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A Beautiful World: the new project conceived and created by Mario Testino, one of the most internationally renowned contemporary photographers. Inspired by the Peruvian photographer Martín Chambi Jiménez and his early 20th-century portraits of Peruvian women in Cusco wearing traditional dress, Testino revisited the subject in colour and in his own way to make a record of the continuing richness of the traditions of costume in Peru, evolving over centuries rather than seasons.
The result was an exhibition called“ Alta Moda”, a play on the difference between high fashion – the couture collections that he was recording in his fashion pictures – and the clothes worn consistently by the inhabitants of the high sierras of the Andes. At a time when global dressing is defined by the T-shirt, the sweatpants, the baseball cap, the sneakers and the hoodie, a globalised conformity of sportswear has blotted out individuality and unique traditions across the world. Testino has sought to record the extraordinary richness of the culture of dress that exists in gradual evolution, alongside this wholesale ubiquity which is to be found – albeit in iterations rich and poor – on every person in every place and every continent, obliterating identities and communities.
Since 2017, Testino has navigated more than 30 countries searching for people who embody the values he pursued. The result is“ A Beautiful World”, Testino’ s magical and nuanced testament to the complexities and contrasts of our many ways of belonging: defining individuality and conformity, community and exile, rituals, ideas of self, notions of the other, of identity beyond canons of genre, symbols of cultural difference and icons of systems of belief.
© Mario Testino, A Woman of the Rabari, Rajasthan India 2018