Meet Magnus Carlsen, Chess Grandmaster Turned Model
Our favorite moment of the movie Zoolander is when Fabio wins the “Slashie Award,” which recognizes him as “model-slash-actor, and not the other way around.” In modeling history, there are a lot of slashes — actor-slash-model and model-slash-clothing designer being the most popular among them. And while we’ve seen our fair share of socialites-slash-models and athletes-slash-models and even models-slash-politicians, we’ve got to say, we never expected to see a world’s-youngest-international-chess-champion-slash model.
But that changed today, when Norwegian news agency NRK posted photos and video of Magnus Carlsen, the youngest person ever to top the International Chess Federation’s rankings, shooting a campaign for G-Star Raw with Liv Tyler.
The 19 year old has been making international headlines and causing international headaches since he was a lad of 13, when he “beat former world champion Anatoli Karpov, pushed legendary chess champion Garry Kasparov to a draw and became a chess grandmaster,” Agence-France Presse reports.
Carlsen told NRK he wasn’t big into fashion — at least not before he shot the campaign.
“I think people will be surprised to see me like this. Surely just as surprised as I was when I was picked for this,” he said.
And while we’re surprised to see a chess grandmaster like this, too, we’ve got to admit that he did a pretty good job, perfectly embodying the concerned, angry look we’re used to seeing in ads from the Dutch denim company. You can see the rest of the photos from the shoot here, and behind the scenes video (with Liv Tyler!) here. For those of you who don’t speak Norwegian just click spill to watch the clip.
[Via Yahoo News]
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This is a brilliant move by G-Star. Rather than a mere model or some celebrity who is famous-for-being-famous, Magnus carries the utterly unique aura of his fantastic abilities and achievements. Chess may not be an arena that many people know in detail, but everybody knows enough to respect it. Ideas, terms and images from the game have long been presented in all media as proxies for intelligence, complexity, creative strategy and exacting performance under pressure. Compared to feeble chess imagery that we see so often in ads, those concepts are underscored so much more sharply by presenting the miraculously young world’s best player. G-Star may have been the first to leverage Magnus in this way, but they surely will not be the last.