All Business
Kim Kardashian body-painted into the clothes by Thibaut Grevet for Re-Edition
Publication: Re-Edition Magazine, Issue 24, A/W 2025–26
Photography: Thibaut Grevet
Creative Direction & Styling: Ashlee Walker
Body Painting: Athena Paginton
Cover Subject: Kim Kardashian
Thibaut Grevet is a Paris-based photographer and director who came up through the French independent film scene and has built a distinctive body of work around motion blur, dissolving figures, and long exposures that turn bodies into traces of themselves. His portfolio including A$AP Rocky, NYC Ballet, campaigns for Nike, Adidas, Mercedes x Moncler, sits consistently at the more experimental end of commercial image-making, and his editorial commissions tend to treat fashion photography as something closer to painting than documentation. For the cover and lead story of Re-Edition Issue 24 (A/W 2025–26), editor-in-chief Jo Barker paired him with Kim Kardashian, and the result is the most conceptually committed cover story the London-based biannual has published to date.
The editorial is titled All Business, and the concept is a genuine provocation: London-based body-paint artist Athena Paginton, who has been painting bodies since the age of thirteen and has built a practice that sits between fashion, activism, and fine art, has painted the garments directly onto Kardashian's skin. The Gucci jacket on the cover, complete with distressed denim wash, ruffled collar, and stitching detail, is trompe-l'oeil bodywork. The leather textures, the buckles, the zips are all pigment. In other frames, real pieces from Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, Maison Margiela by John Galliano, and Givenchy by Sarah Burton sit alongside the painted illusions, and Ashlee Walker's creative direction treats both registers as equal, so the viewer is always studying the image, looking for the seam, trying to determine where cloth ends and skin begins.
Kim K wears a cropped pixie wig throughout, which transforms her into a more unfamiliar, more sculptural presence stripped back to face and body, serving the concept with the discipline and stillness of a fitting model. What makes the editorial interesting beyond its visual trick is the question it poses about the celebrity fashion cover in 2025: Kardashian is arguably the most photographed woman of the past decade, and here the most recognisable body in fashion is used to ask whether the garment even needs to be physically present, or whether the image of it, painted, performed, projected onto skin, already carries the same authority. Grevet, whose instinct is always to push an image toward abstraction, found in Paginton's bodywork a collaborator who works from the opposite direction, hyper-realistic detail, forensic precision and the tension between those two approaches is what gives the story its energy.
