CANOODLING WITH JULIA — TESTINO, ROBERTS, AND THE ART OF PRESENCE
When Viktor & Rolf: Fashion Statements opens at the High Museum in Atlanta this October (running through February 2026), one image in the collection will evoke familiar astonishment: “Canoodling with Julia”, Mario Testino’s 1999 Vanity Fair portrait of Julia Roberts styled in Viktor & Rolf. It’s a photograph that holds its own in fashion lore, coy, luminous, and loaded with magnetism.
Styled by Lori Goldstein, with hair by Orlando Pita and makeup by Tom Pecheux, Roberts appears in the image with poised abandon. The clothes are Viktor & Rolf, theatrical but intimate, turning fashion into soft touch and gaze into dialogue. The title Canoodling with Julia suggests romance, yet the image holds a tension between proximity and distance, actor and object, presence and performance.
This isn’t just a fashion still. It is one of Testino’s great intersections of celebrity, high fashion, and art — a work that lives beyond the pages of Vanity Fair and into gallery halls and auction catalogues. Over the years, Canoodling with Julia has travelled the world: from the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2002, to exhibitions in Milan, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Tokyo, Mexico City, Lima, and later in Beijing, Shanghai, and Seoul. It has already traversed continents.
Now it returns to the foreground, entering the Viktor & Rolf narrative as both subject and statement. In the context of Fashion Statements, the image will be read not just as a historical piece, but as a living part of the continuum of fashion as art. It’s a rare moment when a celebrity portrait becomes a piece of institutional memory.
Why is this image compelling in 2025? Because in an era of infinite imagery, it reminds us that not everything needs to shout. Julia’s gaze, Testino’s quiet framing, and the subtle precision of styling all hold attention without spectacle. There is power in understatement.
Collectors should take note: this isn’t merely nostalgia. It is institutionalised imagery — the kind of photograph whose authority rests not in rarity alone, but in its curatorial pedigree. To own it is to possess a moment lodged between celebrity, couture, and cultural memory.
As the High Museum opens its doors on October 10, Canoodling with Julia enters a new stage. Viewers will see Julia Roberts not as a character or icon, but as a collaborator in stillness, a moment suspended by Testino’s lens, now reanimated in exhibition. The story continues.
