La Comédie 2000

Dazed & Confused, December 1999

Publication: Dazed & Confused, December 1999/January 2000

Photography: Andrea Giacobbe

Styling: Simon Robins

Special Make-Up Effects: Jean Christophe Spadaccini

Hair: Fabio Campina

Make-Up: Teitsi Nakamura

Props: Cedric Colonges, Marie-Camille Delaigu

Producer: Lee-Lisa Lesage

Andrea Giacobbe, an Italian neo-surrealist photographer based in Paris who had trained as an assistant to Paolo Roversi, built his reputation through portraiture that drew on 1950s culture, science fiction, and satirical absurdism. His portrait work with musicians including The Prodigy, Marilyn Manson, and The Chemical Brothers, alongside music videos for Garbage and Death in Vegas, operated in a space where commercial image-making and conceptual art overlapped without apology.

For the December 1999 issue of Dazed & Confused, he produced La Comédie 2000: a surrealist narrative featuring two characters, a man in a prosthetic old-age mask wearing a name badge reading “GOD,” and a young girl with devil horns wearing one reading “HUMANITY.” Together they move through a sequence of scenes, playing chess against chimpanzees, shopping in supermarkets, standing in bathtubs, hitchhiking on empty roads, that flatten the sacred and the mundane into the same visual register.

The editorial arrived at a very specific cultural threshold. December 1999 was saturated with millennial anxiety and manufactured optimism in almost equal measure: Y2K fears about technological collapse ran alongside utopian narratives about progress and reinvention. Dazed & Confused, co-founded by Jefferson Hack and Rankin in 1991 as a zine-inspired platform for emerging culture, had by this point become one of London’s most important editorial spaces for work that rejected conventional boundaries between fashion, art, and social commentary.

La Comédie 2000 fits that ethos precisely. It does not try to resolve the tension between apocalyptic dread and absurdist comedy. Instead, it stages existence itself as a kind of performance, where God and Humanity are equally lost, equally ordinary, and equally subject to the same world of consumer products, roads, and bathwater. The prosthetic mask and the devil horns are not disguises. They are name badges, and the editorial asks what it means when the most fundamental categories of meaning, the divine and the human, are reduced to introductions at a party no one fully understands.