ABSTRACT
In the June 2007 issue of Vogue magazine, actress Keira Knightly appeared in a photographic fashion editorial titled, “The Chronicles of Keira.” The shoot was styled by Grace Coddington and photographed on location by Arthur Elgort at Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp in Kenya near the border with Tanzania. In the opening photograph of the editorial Knightly stands atop a rock overlooking the Masai Mara Game Reserve. The caption explains that the reserve is named for the Masai who serve as its “stewards,” but does not mention the Masai men that stand and sit in casual groups below Knightly. 1 She occupies most of the right-hand page of the spread in her billowing parachute skirt, and the eight Masai men occupy the left-hand page. Knightly appears in clothes that according to the magazine “exuded colonial chic.” 2 And, indeed, photographs like this seem to exude a rather disturbing imperialist nostalgia. A British starlet surveys the former British colony of Kenya from above, towering over its native population. She is called an “adverturess” in the article’s tagline and she documents her trip in a Louis Vuitton journal, as any good explorer would. Louis Vuitton, who outfitted the nineteenth-century colonizers of Africa with trunks and luggage, also supplies a blanket worn by a baby elephant fed a bottle by Knightley in one of the most controversial and decadent images in the shoot. 3 The spread plays out several colonial fantasies, putting Knightly on the grasslands of Kenya in a bustle skirt, in a corset-style bathing suit on a bed in a fully outfitted colonial tent, or leaning up against a propeller plane, camera at the ready.
