Artwork Details
Medium: Digital Fashion Illustration
Subject: The back view of a short-haired woman in a black dress
Theme: The empowering statement of a woman’s back and 360-degree awareness
Artist: Visual Story Artist Kazue Shima
The Story
She knew it. She knew exactly how beautiful she must have looked.
She sensed the way his breath caught as he froze in place, and she heard, unmistakably, the sound of his footsteps coming to a stop. She knew, too, that there was no correct angle for the line of her bare back except this one — nothing about it needed decoration.
The only question was when to let him see it. The timing could not be wrong.
She timed the moment of removing her coat so precisely that he never saw her face — because if they’d been face to face, he surely would have caught the scent of her intention. There had been some impatience in him leading up to that moment, she’d felt it.
But she knew this — this back — would quiet him, the way a tide pulls back from the shore. Even the sound of that retreating tide felt good to her.
A back wrapped in black is the most powerful sight in the world. It is a statement, a demand, and a future all at once.
This commanding beauty lives on the back cover of Footnotes of Dialogue.
Materiality & Context
In terms of form, this piece is very simple. Only two colors are used in this drawing: the color of skin, and the black of the dress.
I limited it to these two colors intentionally.
The hairstyle is short too — nothing obscures the line of the body or the back of the dress.
Judging one’s own appearance from all 360 degrees comes from my experience as a runway model. Women know the single most beautiful “place” from which to show their back.
It depends on the scene, on who is watching, on the feeling of the moment — and every element of it, down to the position of the hands, the angle of the neck, is something a woman knows completely.
