Staging Desire: Hermès, Orientalism, and the Queer Male Fantasy in Fashion Imagery

Magazine Photography Project: A 20-page special cover story in collaboration with the French luxury brand Hermès, May 2024, magazine cover + pp. 98-117, Numéro Berlin. The series of images offers a re-interpretation of Hermès' S/S 2024 menswear collection. The visual narrative simulates the semi-Orientalist atmosphere often present in Hermès’ fashion and advertising imagery, drawing inspiration from North African locales—particularly Tangier—as historic sites of queer male fantasy and artistic fascination.

By evoking the aesthetics of these geographies, the project interrogates the ways in which masculinity is both idealised and othered within luxury fashion’s visual lexicon. Tangier, with its long-standing associations with European writers, artists, and travellers who sought both sexual and creative liberation, becomes a key reference point. The project examines how the constructed image of the exoticised male figure operates as a site of projection, fantasy, and desire, reflecting broader questions about masculinity’s role in the production of escapist luxury narratives. Through a critical lens, the series challenges the persistence of these tropes in contemporary fashion photography, recontextualising them to explore new possibilities of representation.

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