Courtney Love: “Instagram filters are destroying our lives”

No trap or cardboard. This is how the American singer Courtney Love has wanted to present herself in the portrait that the photographer Juergen Teller has made for the latest campaign of the always transgressive British designer Vivienne Westwood. In that fashion campaign for the London firm’s autumn-winter 2022 collection, Westwood and Love appear, two icons – the first of the movement punk, and the second of grungy–, dressed in rigorous black and white. The singer has announced on her Instagram account that there have been “no obvious filters or retouching” in the images of her. “A great feminist researcher told me ‘The only true act of transgression that one can do is to be a woman who ages in public”, explained Love, who has criticized how that social network in which she transmitted this message is changing self-perception. «When I shook hands with Vivienne I was thinking about the photo of the ‘twins’ of Diane Arbus but also about holding the hand of a leader, someone who doesn’t care about anything, who would help me go to the next place, more beyond the Instagram filters that are destroying our lives,” he emphasized.

The leader of the Hole gang, one of the icons of the movement grungy that hatched in Seattle at the end of the eighties and triumphed in the nineties with bands like Nirvana (led by Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain), Soundgarden or Pearl Jam, has thus expressed his intention to show his face as it is at 57 year old. She has explained that she has long felt pressure about how she had to look in public and at photo shoots. «The excess of retouching [de imágenes] He has always tried to turn me into a small and delicate flower that I have never been, “he said. Love has thanked Westwood and her husband and partner Andreas Kronthaler for having her for this campaign photographed in the studio that the couple share in the London neighborhood of Battersea: “It was exciting and I am honored that these two outlaws asked me” .

Love, who made the slip dress an icon, had previously posed for Juergen Teller’s lens, during the 1990s, and had also dealt ironically with the issue of what others think about one’s own image on covers such as the album Live Through This, Hole’s milestone in 1994, in which the singer passed as the winner of a beauty contest and which included the popular theme Miss World.