“I wanted long necks, big eyes, a good profile,” says the artist Mark Leckey, talking about the models in this story, his first fashion project for a magazine. He was searching for the kinds of faces that might have fit into paintings from one of his favorite historical periods, “just before the Renaissance,” when Italian artists such as Giotto were, he says, “moving from Byzantine icons to sort of early realism.” Giotto lived in Florence in the late Middle Ages, and Leckey is excited to note that one of the models is Florentine too. “He looks like a kind of angel,” he says. “I always had this expectation that models were not going to be that luminous in real life, but they are. It’s like, the closer you get to them, the more impossible looking they become.”

Working in mediums including f

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