Fairytales: Petra Collins and Alexa Demie

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Once upon a time, there was a subversive fashion photographer who released her book this week…oh, wait!

Once upon a time, in the far-off kingdom of Los Angeles in the summer of 2020, photographer Petra Collins and Euphoria star Alexa Demie found love at first sight. The handwritten text is harder to follow; I’d recommend treating them as poems and re-reading the book to grasp the intensity of the stories told. This trope recurs throughout the book, challenging ideas of empowerment and restriction, symbolic of the patriarchy and our power to repurpose oppressive devices. Demie represents womxn through different lenses, all with outcomes of alienation and objectification.

I wish they hadn’t advertised it as erotica, though, because there was absolutely no erotic writing lol… but Alexa Demie herself is erotica so I can’t complain. the quality and look of the pictures is gorgeous, and everything about the sets, make up, costumes, etc.

The project] wasn’t necessarily meant for a book, but it’s rare to take so many images and then find you love a lot of them,” Collins explains of its final manifestation. This book is for lovers of dystopian tales, for anyone interested in modern interpretations of folklore, femxle representation and hyperfeminine aesthetics. Could it indeed be that these dark, twisted fantasies are a little more true to life than they seem? Retelling childhood stories, Petra Collins and Alexa Demie play with juxtaposition: dark and light, violence and kindness, delicacy and tension. Fairy Tales is] a collaboration with the photographer Petra Collins -- a body of work that reimagines the female creatures who inhabit folk- and fairy-tales, who are often cast as one-dimensional monsters or temptresses.I absolutely loved the artistic direction, set design, alexa’s modeling, and of course the graphic design. Fairytales is an erotic folklore collection of Petra Collins and Alexa Demie s illustrated short stories. Petra and Alexa s chapters of elves, mermaids, sirens, water sprites, fallen angels, fairies, witches, and banshees blend their own stories with retold fairy tales. Approaching it as women, it’s very interesting to play these mythical creatures that don’t necessarily have much agency and give them more agency. Collins has created a style that will go down in history as one that people can only hope to try to recreate.

Demie, who was raised in Los Angeles by her Mexican mother, grandmother, and aunts, had a similarly rich tradition of Hispanic folklore to draw on when it came to collaborating on these tales. It explores the femininity and sexuality of mythological beings, but in the context of very human spaces, such as teenage bedrooms, medical facilities, parking lots and exotic dancing clubs. The stories by themselves are quite one-dimensional, but completely come to life with the photography.I was excited for some fairy tales gone rogue, especially being that i didn’t grow up with the originals, but the text is pretty much useless. For Alexa and I, doing this book of fairy tales was almost the most accurate reflection of the world around us today. Instead of glimpsing each other across a crowded room, they connected as any good millennials with a mutual admiration of each other’s work would: through a DM on Instagram. One photo shoot and a pair of prosthetic elf ears later, the pair decided to push the project further, eventually crafting nine individual fables with a touch of something both sinister and seductive.