Miss Nicki Minaj just graced the cover of W magazine. The Cash Money artist posed for a series of classic photos for the Magazine's November Art and Design Issue. Nicki was dressed in both Versace and Dior for her picture perfect portrait, done by Francesco Vezzoli. In in an interview, Vezzoli spoke on his interest to work with Nicki and how he transformed her for the pictures.
On working with Nicki Minaj
I wanted to play with the image of a female hip-hop star. During my entire career, I have always been fascinated by powerful women in history. I have spent a lot of time researching the ways they were represented in art and how their images were used to mold the public imagination-and to convey aesthetic and philosophical ideas about beauty and sexual desire. My main interest has been to link the historical artistic approach to female representation to contemporary icons of the media era.
On how he transformed Nicki into the 18th century courtesan
In her performances, Minaj makes very explicit and challenging use of her beauty and her body, so I thought of comparing her some to some of the most famous courtesans in history: the Marquise de Montespan, Comtesse du Barry, Madame de Pompadour, and Madame Rimsky-Korsakov. My idea was to reproduce four iconic portraits of some of the most fascinating females of the past in a series starring an American pop-culture role model. We tried to re-create those original portraits using similar furniture, props, and clothing, a la Visconti. Luckily enough, the result came out as surreal as it could, just as I wished.
