Fashion: A summer palette

IT STARTED as a test shot and ended as a painting. When the powerful Paris model agency FAM decided to commission some pictures of a fledgling model named Anna Klevhag, they called Bertrand Marignac. Could the photographer, who had once specialised in fashion pictures for French glossy magazines, take a few photographs of their new discovery?

Marignac had given up fashion photography at the end of 1989 in order to concentrate on reportage pictures of the Romanian revolution. Then he turned to painting and sculpture. His studio is now stacked with cans of paint and a minimalist sculpture of a pole and a base which, he says, 'sounds pretentious, but to me represents the base and the summit of life'.

But bills have to be paid, so he agreed to photograph Anna. 'It sounds very pretentious,' he says again, 'but she came round and we tried very simple clothes and then the paint somehow got into it. She painted with her feet, which I found very primitive. Unfortunately she had a job the next morning and had to leave, otherwise I think we would have tried body painting.'

The clothes, which were borrowed, had to remain paint-free. They didn't, however, remain crease-free: those seen here fit into this summer's relaxed, crumpled look. The effect of clothes that appear to have been painted with bold brush strokes is one that elsewhere, designers are working to achieve. At CK, the latest New York show for Calvin Klein's diffusion line, out came paint-splattered jeans that looked as if they had spent the day up a decorator's ladder. Only available in the States - for dollars 120 ( pounds 80) a pair - they are presumably aimed at those with a taste for works of art rather than D I Y.

(Photograph omitted)