Now this pair really make me laugh.   Talk about parents!   Reminds me of Chau Kai-Bong and Brenda Bong who are the real deal in Hong Kong.   Check it out.   Admit it.   Haven't there been times that being with your parents made you want to cringe?   Its time to unload our baggage and get on with Life so you don't pass the same bad tricks on to the next generation - HELLO! Tai Tai

 In Louis Vuitton Photographed by Gotz Wrage    I n Thierry Mugler, Photographed by Michael Schwab "Sorry, can't let you near the celebrity couple..."

"In order to ensure that the paparazzi photo looked like a real one," says Thái-Công, "I first had to turn my parents into "famous movie stars." It was not difficult to pick out the right label. Sophia Loren travelled with Louis Vuitton luggage -- and even took it to jail with her after being sentenced for tax evasion.

Dress You Up in My Love
'My parents': A stylist crafts a book of couture fantasies - with his parents as the stars

Photographed by Leif Schmodde		In Yohji Yamamoto, Photographed by Peter Honnemann
Stylist Thái-Công's parents, ages 57 and 93, wearing Burberry		"'I look like a rice-farmer's wife,' my mother exclaimed"
		In Versace, Photographed by Werner Gritzbach In Christian Lacroix, Photographed by Esther Haase
		"At the Le Train Bleu restaurant at the St. Lazare railway station we recreated the atmosphere of Shanghai during the '30s between afternoon and evening dining hours. My parents' roles: the playboy and the showgirl on a spending spree."

In the fashion world -- a realm in which the hiking of a hemline or the discarding of shoulder pads is often, and earnestly, heralded as "revolutionary" -- it's unusual to come across something that's truly radical. It's even rarer to find something that's truly radical and fun as well. Yet, a new book of photos, My Parents: An Homage to Fashion, Photography and Life, by fashion stylist Thái Công, qualifies as both.

The premise is straightforward: Công assembled a number of successful fashion photographers, and paired each with clothes from a single designer for a photo shoot. He styled each shoot himself, to look like a typical fashion photo -- that is, a laboriously constructed tableau depicting a fantasy scenario. Each photo, however, contains one consistently anomalous detail: instead of leggy women or buff and sandblasted boys, the models are Công's parents -- his mother, age 57, and his father, age 93.

The result is a combination of family photo album, subversive prank and Take Your Parents to Work Day. Công is a fashion stylist -- that notoriously nebulous job title used to describe everyone from highly sought-after professionals to the fashion world's sundry hangers-on. In the introduction to My Parents, Công explains that one of his motivations for the project was simply to give his folks a firsthand look at what exactly it is that he does for a living. "They have always been curious about what my work as a fashion stylist really involves," he writes. "And now they know."

But rather than invite his parents to lurk on the sidelines of a fashion shoot, Công has plunked them smack-dab in the middle of the photos. In some of the shots, their wizened presence is so incongruous that they call to mind that old county-fair attraction where you could have your photo electronically inserted onto a souvenir cover of Time magazine. In others, his elderly progenitors, draped in garish haute-couture outfits, look like fashion-world Zeligs who've accidentally wandered into the middle of a Gucci ad campaign. And in others, his parents are simply the deserving beneficiaries of a photographer's formidable skills -- and the results are gorgeous and unironic photographic tributes.

Some of these images are whimsical, some farcical, and some earnest -- but all of them are affectionate. Công has created a loving tribute to his parents that's filled with humour and respect -- the ultimate Mother's and Father's Day card.

He's not content, however, to simply showcase his parents in fancy clothes. Công also lampoons just about every assumption we have about fashion imagery.

His basic switcheroo is obvious: When we see glossy photos of people outfitted in Gucci, those people are almost invariably young, thin and white. Here, we find two people who are old, weathered and Asian. (Công's father is Chinese and his mother from Vietnam.)

It's a gleeful injection of reality into the airbrushed fantasy of fashion. And, of course, these two models aren't just some elderly folk that Công selected at random: They are his parents. Their presence suggests cultural continuity -- a notion that's strikingly at odds with the ephemeral fashion images they inhabit.

Fashion is famously obsessed with youth -- bottling the essence of the young and selling it to the affluent aged. As such, it's a world fueled by the new, and the message is that what came before is wrong, and what's coming next is right.

By introducing his parents into this world of built-in obsolescence, Công makes you stop and consider how notions of permanence and continuity -- and the people who represent them -- are shunted to the shadows. People like Công's parents would never find their way into any fashion magazine, yet here they are thrust front-and-centre, in all their aged and imperfect glory. At first, they may seem like goofy interlopers, but it soon becomes clear that, in this book, they represent a valuable gravity, while their high-gloss surroundings are as ephemeral, and valueless, as perfumed air.

Though the book plays with weighty ideas, it's always just that -- playing. It's obvious that everyone involved approached the project with a sense of fun, most of all Công's parents themselves. And, while Công questions the assumptions that saturate the world of fashion, he's clearly of that world -- and happy to be a citizen. (For example, he jokes about the difficulty of fitting the clothes -- which were created for models who hover near six feet tall -- onto his parents, both of whom are closer to five feet in height. Suffice to say, a lot of safety pins were involved and, in once case, three rolls of packing paper.)

With this project, Công points out that fashion's fantasies are riddled with absurdities -- but that these are inherent, not fatal, flaws. More importantly, and ambitiously, he's showing us the fantastical elements present in the every-day world, embodied in the people to whom we're closest and most indebted.  - by Adam Sternbergh      Saturday Post    11 May 2002

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