Mugler puts some muscle behind the new Aurora bag

For its latest handbag campaign, Mugler has stripped away the clothes, pairing its new structured Aurora bag with the chiseled, nude physique of bodybuilder Tatiana Horslaville. 

It is a direct nod to old-school Mugler. The sharp lines of her muscles match the  corners of the Aurora bag perfectly, a shape that looks like it came straight out of Manfred Thierry Mugler’s iconic 1980s “glamazon” era. The brand is pulling from the history books here, and you can see it in how the photos are shot. Chris Lensz uses high-contrast side-lighting that makes skin look like carved marble, a direct imitation of 19th-century studio sculpture. The stark, black and white framing and Horslaville’s athletic, hyper-defined poses are also a dead ringer for Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous early-eighties portraits of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, trading soft fashion poses for geometry.

Stripping away the clothes forces you to focus entirely on how the structured leather sits against the skin. They give the same treatment to the crescent-shaped Lua bag, another brand-new debut for the house that comes in a massive “Lua City” size. Both lines are the first handbags designed by Freitas, who named the rigid Aurora after his mother and banned exotic skins from the collection entirely.