DOUTZEN - ALLURE, AND THE ART OF BEAUTY

In 2008, in the quiet pulse of New York City, Mario Testino photographed Doutzen Kroes for Allure’s Best of Beauty issue. The result was a portrait series that distilled beauty to its simplest form: light, skin, and stillness. Styled by Paul Cavaco, the story was both classic and fresh, balancing restraint with a quiet confidence that felt unmistakably modern.

The Allure series holds a special place in Testino’s archive. It captures the moment when commercial beauty and fine art photography began to overlap. While much of his work at the time embraced the drama of fashion, with elaborate sets, layers of texture, and movement, these images took another path. Here, beauty is architectural. The geometry of New York, the fall of light, the unspoken presence of Kroes, all work in harmony.

These photographs have since moved beyond the pages of Allure. They have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including Extremes at Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris (2014), and In Your Face at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2013), which later travelled to Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Berlin. Among the most exhibited of them, Doutzen Kroes, New York, Allure, 2008 remains a collector favourite, a limited-edition C-type print represented by Holden Luntz Gallery and published on Artsy.

What makes these images enduring is their quiet confidence. In an era of bold statements and louder fashion, Testino chose stillness. The light feels alive, the styling unforced, the emotion subtle but clear. In 2025, that restraint reads as contemporary, a reminder that true beauty does not compete for attention, it commands it through simplicity.

For Doutzen Kroes, this moment marked a turning point, a shift from commercial stardom to editorial presence. Testino saw that balance and framed it with precision. She appears poised, grounded, aware of her own power, but never performing it.

What stands out in these photographs, and the Allure stories that became almost ritual, is how little they need to say. They invite stillness in a world of speed. They ask the viewer to stop and look, to notice how light touches the skin, how presence fills a frame. That is the kind of beauty Testino has always understood, not the fleeting kind, but the one that lingers.