Marc Jacobs’ tour-de-force ending for Paris Fashion Week, featuring handcuffs, elevators, and some obsessive ladies, almost made everyone forget about the Galliano debacle. The image now engraved in everyone’s mind is that of Kate Moss closing the Night Porter-style show, cigarette in mouth. But however powerful it was to see it live, somehow this image had already been floating in collective consciousness…

“Kate” by René Habermacher for Numéro Paris, Make-up by Linda Cantello.

Before he became a photographer, René Habermacher was as an illustrator — who was already a bit of a photographer. Numéro Paris, under the helm of Babeth Djian and Thomas Lenthal, frequently commissioned him fashion and beauty series made up entirely of photorealistic illustrations, “unreal” photos.

“Unreal” because there was no shooting, no camera. Only René, an idea, dozens of image references, hundreds of hours of drawing and airbrushing, and in this case, the advice of master make-up artist Linda Cantello, of Roxy Music fame.

So for this 2003 beauty series, René imagined Kate Moss as heir to Charlotte Rampling’s SS-cap-wearing and cigarette-smoking character from the 1974 film The Night Porter.

Where it gets interesting is that these images then found their way into the work of Terry Richardson (NSFW below), who thought that Kate was missing something else in her mouth…

Photography by Terry Richardson, using “Kate” by René Habermacher. Published in “Terryworld” by TASCHEN.

So did Marc see these images at some point and wished to see them come to life?
Who cares.  The question is rather, where will this image pop-up next? Who knows, at Kate’s wedding perhaps…