Animodels: Bridging Fashion & Nature
From Cosmetics to Kinship: A Poetics of Eco-Fashion Photography
In his essay “In Praise of Cosmetics” the 19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire likened makeup, jewelry, and fashion to spiritual tools — ways of achieving transcendence through natural materials: powder, metal, fabric. Fashion and cosmetics, he argued, lift us from brute nature into the divine. The ruffles of a dress caught by a moving ankle metamorphose the wearer into a dancing deity. Metal and precious stones scintillate with a light not merely of this earth. What is eyeliner, if not a spell to accentuate and frame the infinite within the female gaze?
Whereas Baudelaire’s engagement with fashion celebrated the escape from nature through ornament, eco-fashion photography — as I practice it — seeks a return to nature through these very tools. In juxtaposing styled models with animals in the wild, I explore how the contrast between artifice and instinct — a tension often at play in sustainable and ethical fashion — creates an unexpected resonance, with fashion models and wildlife speaking a shared aesthetic and symbolic language. This more animistic or shamanic vision — rooted in ancient cultures and in my own fieldwork — suggests that beauty, like nature, is never merely decorative: it’s relational, symbolic, and alive. Thus the fashion image becomes a site of re-enchantment, where a sequined dress or styled pose mirrors the textures, movements, and gestures of the animal world.
Model with purple Dior bag and lavender dress, mirrored by a hummingbird feeding on purple sage.
Wild Encounters: Why Fashion Belongs in the Natural World
It all started when I moved to California to pursue a PhD in French literature. Entranced by the wildlife that lived almost literally on my doorstep, I took up my camera to study these creatures, to gain intimate familiarity — to penetrate their essence. The many trips to the Berkeley Marina or to the Point Reyes National Seashore weren’t just casual outings. They became a counterpoint to the ivory tower, where disembodied ideas often floated free of any living, breathing context. In academia, nature often entered the room as a token: a nod to eco-criticisms meant to ease our conscience, while we remained ensconced in libraries, without the muddy boots that should accompany ecological thinking.
In contrast, I sought out the wilderness. I wanted to stand face to face with coyotes, bobcats, badgers… Their “uncivilizedness,” their just-being-in-their-wildness, soothed my system more than any theory. It was there, away from the voices of civilization — in that primal quiet — that I discovered a new visual language: one in which beauty and instinct converged in a way that would eventually inform my approach to fashion photography in nature.
Male model in oversized cream blazer, echoing the pose of an egret mid-flight.
Eco-Aesthetics and Nature’s Symbolic Gaze
Tracking animals through my viewfinder, I began to sense that what animated them wasn’t just instinct — it was aesthetic. Their gestures, colors, and rhythms seemed to speak a visual language rooted in their relationship with the land. This was no longer about documenting wildlife. It had become a kind of eco-fashion photography in its own right, weaving together symbols, correspondences, and resonant patterns. In this way, I found myself strangely aligned with Baudelaire (whose poetry I was immersed in while preparing for my qualifying exams), when he wrote:
“Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look back at him with familiar eyes.”
Those familiar eyes, uncanny in their othering of me… dissolved the boundary between animate and inanimate, organic and man-made. That burrowing owl looked like a jewelry box; those tule elk were walking hieroglyphs. In short: nature was speaking poetry — and I was beginning to see how this kind of animistic aesthetic could inform not only how I photograph wildlife, but how I approach fashion photography as well.
Two elk in an open field matched by a woman in beige tailoring, windblown in a green landscape.
Wearing the Wild: Sustainable Fashion as a Second Skin
It was this realization that made me invert Baudelaire’s idea of transcending nature. The variety of shapes and colors, the countless forms of grace in movement and physiognomy—if we humans try to approximate even a sliver of this natural beauty, we can only do so through artifice: face paint, reflective surfaces, textures…
This is why I believe that, in spite of the deeply entrenched problems surrounding consumerism and mass production, fashion and beauty are uniquely equipped to reconnect us with nature, to illuminate how deeply entwined we are with the living world that sustains us. Our choices in clothing, hair style, jewelry, cosmetics—in one word: ornament—have the capacity to reflect the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of relationship we want to cultivate with our planet. Whether through sustainable fashion, eco-conscious design, or the conceptual statements of high fashion, we wear our dependency and kinship with the natural world like a second skin.
California sea lion emerging from dark water alongside model with smeared face paint and wet-look hair.
Distant and Accurate: The Poetics of Kinship between Fashion and Nature
In juxtaposing wildlife imagery with fashion photography, I sought to tease out such affinities without resorting to the obvious. As the French poet Pierre Reverdy, quoted by André Breton in his Surrealist Manifesto, saw the laws that dictate the poetic image:
“An image is a pure creation of the spirit.
It cannot arise from a comparison, but from the rapprochement of two more or less distant realities.
The more distant and accurate the relationships between the two closely related realities, the stronger the image will be…”
“Distant and accurate”—this was my guiding thread. In choosing my compositions, the images chose to combine themselves, as if guided by their own internal cohesion. A white egret and a model in a white blazer tilting to the side, as if locked in the same dance. A vintage red blouse under a faux fur coat looked like a robin puffing its red chest. A ground squirrel offering a pink flower with the same allure as a fragrance campaign.
These “distant but accurate” resonances capture the essence of our kinship with nature — how we wear it, bottle it, cherish it against our skin, like a family heirloom resurrecting a forgotten memory of belonging.
California ground squirrel clutching a pink flower beside model in fuchsia makeup and blush-toned light.
Curious to explore more? Visit my full Animodels Gallery or browse my Editorial Work. I specialize in fine art fashion photography that bridges nature, style, and emotion.
Contact me to discuss how my work could elevate your eco-conscious brand, editorial, or creative collaboration.
