Parallel to the olfactory story of OBSESSED, runs a visual one…
In 1993, OBSESSION truly attained its iconic status when Kate Moss became the fragrance’s face. She was 18 years old when her then boyfriend, Mario Sorrenti, aged 20, shot her for the campaign.
Sorrenti already displayed prodigious talent as a photographer, while Moss was fast becoming not just a model, but a star. Calvin Klein himself, having been shown some of Sorrenti’s informal holiday photography of Moss by the art director Fabien Baron, sent the couple away alone, to the Virgin Islands.
They were asked to replicate the intimacy and informality of the earlier photography for OBSESSION; there was no photographic team, no hair and makeup crew and no art directors present.
The groundbreaking and provocative imagery that ensued reflected the couple’s real love story; besides portraying a mutual flourishing of first love, the images also reveal an obsession with both a subject and a medium by the photographer. As the legendary campaign approaches its 25th anniversary, OBSESSED utilizes never-before-seen imagery from that time and personal biography to further explore and evoke the idea of memory, past love and present iconography.
Transforming some of the additional and unseen prints—there are more than 250 in total—into still life compositions, Mario Sorrenti himself revisits his own history. Further to these iconic arrangements are the never-before-seen films and diary entries made by the photographer. It is here that Sorrenti provides the voice-over with his personal recollections of that time for the moving imagery.
Utilizing additional layers of depth, warmth, intimacy and reverie, the OBSESSED campaign further unfurls the true love story behind a photographic and fragrance milestone. In its limpid, black and white simplicity, its equation and evocation of scent with memory at once reflects the past and the present.
OBSESSED 2017
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