Bjork wears Syren Catsuit on her Latest Album Cover
No matter how much passion and imagination we put into designing and manufacturing the clothes at Syren, there’s an even greater thrill for us: Seeing how other people use our clothing to bring their own fantasies and visions to life once they’re out in the world.
We got one of those thrills earlier this year when Icelandic pop artist Björk released her ninth studio album, Vulnicura. The cover art features a magnificent shot of Björk in one of our black latex catsuits wearing a headpiece by Japanese designer Maiko Takeda who has a history of creating such pieces. The image was a collaboration between Björk and the photographic duo Inez and Vinooodh, who have worked with Björk for over 16 years on various projects. Inez explained their process and intention in an interview about the Museum of Modern Art’s 20-year retrospective on the imagery that’s made the singer’s career so memorable and groundbreaking :
Björk sent a beautiful video of a spider molting out of its own skin and becoming translucent, and then filling up with color again. For her, that was really the basis of the imagery around this album, this transformation and soft, waxy, yellow-pink coloring—and again, the idea of having emotions circling around her. She said she wanted to have a wound on her body, on her heart area, in an abstract way. From there, we worked with our stylist Mel Ottenberg on the character, and that’s when he found this black latex suit and the headpiece by a Japanese designer [Maiko Takeda], which she’d already worn once on stage. We constructed her persona with her on set—imagine you’re Mata Hari, a seductress, but you’re wounded, and there is an incredibly alluring softness around you.
Inez’s words are an exceptional description not only of the picture itself, but of what’s so appealing about latex itself. That sense of transformation is really a huge part of why latex captures the imagination and the passions of so many; its smooth, shiny textures can project the impression of strength, even invulnerability, while still preserving that “incredibly alluring softness,” as Inez puts it. We love this cover because it brings out so much of what we love about the latex clothes we make and what they inspire in people.