Nicki Minaj Covers W: Transforms Into An 18th Century Courtesan

Weeks after being spotted sitting next to W Magazine EIC Stefani Tonchi during New York Fashion Week, Nicki Minaj is gracing the cover of W magazine’s Art and Fashion issue. She’s also featured within it’s pages in an artistic regal series by famed artist Francesco Vezzoli. Vezzoli states that he has always been fascinated with female hip hop stars and wanted to turn Nicki into an “18th-century courtesan” [a paid sexual partner or escorts for royal, noble and wealthy men ]

“I wanted to play with the public image of a female hip-hop star. During my entire career, I have always been fascinated by powerful women in history. I have spent a lot of time researching the ways they were represented in art and how their images were used to mold the public imagination—and to convey aesthetic and philosophical ideas about beauty and sexual desire. My main interest has been to link the historical artistic approach to female representation to contemporary icons of the media era.”

For W, I wanted to turn the lovely Nicki Minaj into a powdered 18th-century courtesan.”

“In her performances, Minaj makes very explicit and ­challenging use of her beauty and her body, so I thought of comparing her to some of the most famous courtesans in history: the Marquise de ­Montespan, Comtesse du Barry, Madame de Pompadour, and ­Madame Rimsky-­Korsakov. My idea was to reproduce four iconic portraits of some of the most fascinating females of the past in a series starring an American pop-culture role model. We tried to re-create those original portraits using similar furniture, props, and clothing, à la Visconti. Luckily enough, the result came out as surreal as it could be, just as I wished.”