Beauty of Violence

The Beauty of Violence is Karl Lagerfeld’s portrait of his newest muse, the darkly handsome Italian fashionmodel Baptiste Giabiconi, whomLagerfeld first spotted in French Vogue, clad only in a Chanel cardigan and a pair of shoes. For Lagerfeld’s lens,Giabiconi enacts an erotic seizure inmyriad facial and corporeal expressions, and in various degrees of clothing.Well chosen as a portrait subject, Giabiconi is a theatrical chameleon: he confronts the camera with a provocative, sultry stare, or withdraws fromit into a state of feigned self-absorption. Lagerfeld loves to engage such seductive subjects and to capture their bodily rhetoric of sexual aggression: The Beauty of Violence is the latest chapter in his love affair with the many incarnations ofmale Eros.