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| Guy Bourdin for Charles Jourdan |
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| Aldo 2012 by Terry Richardson |
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| Louboutin AW16 campaign |
Guy Bourdin, the eternally imitated and never matched. The proof is in the pudding, Aldo hired Terry Richardson to do a Bourdin-style imitation campaign for 2012 and Louboutin is doing the same for the new campaign for the AW16 collection. Richardson is not match for Bourdin who - not only showed the shoes and made them the center point of the images (he is mostly associated to Charles Jourdan even if one of his iconic images goes to Roland Pierre shoes) - but created a sense of storytelling and mystique around his models which is unparalleled.
Louboutin has a new campaign which - without much doubt - echoes Bourdin, except it is more 80s in nature, less shielded and shrouded, and - much like Richardson's output for Aldo in 2012 (with Richardson often verging towards porn) - fails to replicate the extra je ne sais quoi Bourdin gave its images somewhere between reality and outlandsih territory.
Eventually, Bourdin might be replicated, imitated or copied, but the original will forever stand in a category of its own.
