Fairytales: Petra Collins and Alexa Demie

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In 2021, the Fairy Tales photo teasers featured almost empty diners, bedrooms and hospitals; readers blending fact and fiction could imagine these scenarios coming to life in front of them. Fairy Tales is a picture book about mystical creatures, accompanied with short stories about each one of them. You approach them with innocence, and you revisit them as an adult and realize there’s more going on. 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. Hungary as a nation was dealing with being under a Soviet regime, so a lot of that work came out of collective trauma.

When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to watch Disney, but I grew up on Hungarian folk tales,” she says. 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. I remember a few years ago when I shifted to more surrealist work and someone was like, ‘Why aren’t you doing documentary photos anymore?This book is for lovers of dystopian tales, for anyone interested in modern interpretations of folklore, femxle representation and hyperfeminine aesthetics. Created in collaboration with Euphoria star and muse Alexa Demie, Collins has just dropped "Fairy Tales," her latest book in the form of nine erotic short stories based on works by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and more. 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. The photos combine elements of camp, prosthetics, and shibari in a surreal update to the imagery of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Charles Perrault, and others.

Subconsciously, those kinds of scary folk tales and the magical, sweet fairy tales that I grew up reading meshed together on this project, which was so perfect with Petra—she loves that aesthetic of blending something beautiful with something a little ugly or sexy or even terrifying. Fairytales is an erotic folklore collection of Petra Collins and Alexa Demie s illustrated short stories.

While Collins was mostly raised in the suburbs of Toronto, her mother fled Hungary in the 1980s, when it was still under Soviet rule. It felt half-baked, stories obviously being made up afterwards in an attempt to form some sort of narrative for each photo series in each chapter. For both Collins and Demie, the project was rooted in the darker corners of the fairy tales that they grew up with.

Vogue may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Fairytales is an erotic folklore collection of Petra Collins and Alexa Demie's illustrated short stories.honestly 4/5 stars still for the absolutely ethereal and fantastical photography but 0/5 for any words written on any page in this “erotic” book. Featuring illustrations by Evita Flores, deceivingly innocent, coloured-pencil drawings show butterflies in trees, witches and flying mice, a cottage in flames, and rope-wrapped mermaids accepting their fate. Petra posted a photograph of a fairy, and I wrote to her and said, ‘I want to be a fairy,’ and she was like, ‘Well, let’s make you a fairy,’” Demie says of the origins of their friendship, laughing.

Initially bought for the photos, obviously, so I didnt expect there to be multiple stories, and they honestly exceeded my expectations. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

Indeed, the interplay of text and images throughout the book has less in common with engravings from a well-thumbed tome of old fairy tales than with something like Madonna’s infamous Fabien Baron–designed, Steven Meisel–lensed publication, Sex. Petra Collins is a multi-talented artist and director whose photography set the stylistic tone for much of the 2010s.