David Luraschi’s strikingly simple new campaign for fashion brand Jacquemus

French American image-maker David Luraschi has stamped his seal across the fashion industry time and time again. Famed for lensing his subjects from behind using the humblest of tools — his iPhone — David’s ability to capture the characters he spots all around him is much famed and often copied.

Since we wrote about his ability to covertly capture a moment in time by using the click of the volume button of his headphones to trigger his phone’s shutter button, David’s work has expanded to fill snowballing demand for an expanding roster of commercial clients. In 2016, David shot a deck of softly lit headshots featuring young women for fashion brand Jacquemus. He returned to work for the brand the following season, for his first campaign, FW16’s La Reconstruction created in collaboration with artist Willy Dorner, a tangle of barely distinguishable limbs and bodies. Jacquemus editorials for Jalouse and Stylist magazines followed, and then a second campaign for the brand’s SS17 collection. Les Santons de Provence created dolls of its female sitters, picturing them standing like statues, clutching symbols of traditional provence: stalks of straw, huge loaves of bread, clay pots strapped to the body.

This week, David’s third campaign for Jacquemus arrived. Captured in a single shot, L’Amour d’un Gitan shows a heterosexual couple captured in black and white perched on a kitchen chair half-sinking into wet sand. Her thigh arches over his, her arms wrap around his back and neck. A battered beach umbrella bursts from the sand backgrounding them, completing a strikingly simple image which bridges the real with the surreal. But what of the cryptic decision to run a fashion campaign featuring naked subjects? Did someone say emperor’s new clothes?