Bernadette Corporation: The Complete Poem

The idea of the book is to present these two elements poem and fashion shoot in a single package, as one complex object. This combination of original literature and commissioned fashion photography undermines the traditional autonomy of literary and visual genres. The book itself is a conceptual gesture: the display of a mediation, or the presentation of a redistribution.

The Bernadette Corporation was formed in a Manhattan nightclub in 1994, and began organizing social events that evolved into unofficial art carnivals in SoHo parking lots. From 1995 to 1997, the collective worked under the guise of an underground fashion label, later issuing the magazine Made in USA and authoring the collective novel Reena Spaulings. For this unique amalgam of poetry and fashion shoot, the Corporation alternates fashion photographer David Vasiljevic's 38 photographs of six male and female models with an epic poem structured on various formal constraints, such as (in one section) the inclusion of words beginning with the letters B and C in each line.