From Elle Magazine sometime in the year 2000
I found this among my huge collection of tear sheets from magazines I’ve collected over the years. I’m preparing the visuals for my dream board making this Sunday. I don’t know what month this was published in Elle Magazine but being its slant is on the new millennium, I can guess January 2000. I’ll research and try to get the exact time but the wisdom is timeless, thus such information would only serve as a credited reference.
What it says:
…feel some kind of emotion, a sensitivity. Being indifferent is the ultimate kiss of death,” he insists. Lutens describes his second series of images for Elle as “sexy and sophisticated interwined with lace ans serpents.” He loves snakes — the fake ones, that is. “I’ve collected them for years, they fascinate me,” he says with the authority of a veteran artificer. “The real ones frighten me.”
Snakes, he reminds us, are erotic and, in certain belief systems, were considered symbols of female power. Inpreclassic Aegean civilizations they were considered immortal because they were believed to renew themselves indefinitely by shedding old skins. And Lutens maintains that for the year 2000 this could be a perfect theme: “People are waiting, looking over their shoulder to catch a glimpse of what will happen in the new millenium. Perhaps the shedding of old skins for new is an omen. One thing is certain, people must stop following each other blindly like robots looking for trends. They must try to be more confident, less insecure, and ready to take a stand.”
Perhaps, after all, Serge Lutens is completely right. The shedding of old skins, the molting of our tired millennium, may just herald the start of something entirely different. After all, the most infamous serpent ever to have crossed our path convinced Eve to eat the forbidden apple and thereby provided her with the essential knowledge that made human beings human. Now that’s not saying that her life was a bowl of cherries following her folly…but it was a new beginning.”
