I wish they hadn’t advertised it as erotica, though, because there was absolutely no erotic writing lol… but Alexa Demie herself is erotica so I can’t complain. While Collins was mostly raised in the suburbs of Toronto, her mother fled Hungary in the 1980s, when it was still under Soviet rule.

Alexa Demie is an actor, musician, and multi-hyphenate talent who currently stars as Maddy in HBO's Euphoria. Fairy Tales’s cast of banshees and sprites and fallen angels may appear to have been tied up or subjugated by a villain, but look a little closer and you’ll notice that the mermaid has bound herself up in shibari ropes or the sirens are, in fact, sliding down stripper poles under the eerie spotlights of a seedy nightclub. Featuring illustrations by Evita Flores, deceivingly innocent, coloured-pencil drawings show butterflies in trees, witches and flying mice, a cottage in flames, and rope-wrapped mermaids accepting their fate.Vogue may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers.

Demie, who was raised in Los Angeles by her Mexican mother, grandmother, and aunts, had a similarly rich tradition of Hispanic folklore to draw on when it came to collaborating on these tales. The darker European folklorists, from Charles Perrault to Hans Christian Andersen, spun stories with little resemblance to the Disney-sanitized versions we grew up on: The queen in Snow White wished to devour the girl’s lungs and liver, for example, and the evil stepsisters in Cinderella cut off their toes with a knife to fit into the glass slipper. The soft focus and dreamy photography depict the truthful chaos and survival of mythical beings in a mortal world. As children, Petra and Alexa were both enamoured with fairy tales, which provided an escape from their own painful realities. Pre-release, it had already been solidified in pop-culture history with content creators mimicking the ethereal style on social media.

You approach them with innocence, and you revisit them as an adult and realize there’s more going on.

Initially bought for the photos, obviously, so I didnt expect there to be multiple stories, and they honestly exceeded my expectations. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to watch Disney, but I grew up on Hungarian folk tales,” she says.Once upon a time, there was a subversive fashion photographer who released her book this week…oh, wait! I think this book is a great signifier of the zeitgeist and the challenges womxn face today, particularly on social media and image-based communications. As children growing up with these stories, they can often be extremely sexualized, even if it’s surrealistic. love this book so so much i love alexa demie so much and the story is very short but that’s all i need. The photos combine elements of camp, prosthetics, and shibari in a surreal update to the imagery of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, and others.

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Both women collaborated on the text and the visuals, which star Demie as various elves, mermaids, fairies, and other make-believe creatures in surrealist sets that blend reality and fantasy. In my three years of being a die hard fan this has to be some of the most poignant work I’ve seen of hers. For Alexa and I, doing this book of fairy tales was almost the most accurate reflection of the world around us today.Indeed, the interplay of text and images throughout the book has less in common with engravings from a well-thumbed tome of old fairy tales than with something like Madonna’s infamous Fabien Baron–designed, Steven Meisel–lensed publication, Sex.