Photos of Brad Pitt in Dresses Photographed by Mark Seliger, 1999

In 1999 Mark Seliger was chief photographer for Rolling Stone – he held the position from 1992 to 2002 – and earlier this year Seliger and Pitt met in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. The two had worked together several times before, and Pitt, who is always very creatively involved on his work.

“Brad says, ‘I’ve got a real weird idea,’” Seliger recalled. “‘For this movie I’m doing, I’m going to have to be pretty big. I’m going to have chipped teeth and a nice shaved head. And I thought about shooting me in dresses, what do you think of that?’ And I say, ‘That sounds pretty funny.’ And he says, ‘But we’re not talking about me in drag; we’re talking about me coming from another planet.’”

“We wanted these photos to be conceptual,” said Seliger, “to convey Brad’s interest in architecture and design but to still have a sense of humor, and to be both revealing and shocking.”

At the time, Pitt had just finished filming David Fincher’s Fight Club, released in September of 1999 (the shoot was a month later), in which he plays the alter ego of Edward Norton’s character/protagonist, Tyler Darden. For the film, Pitt had worked a lot on his body – as had Norton – increasing its structure by practicing boxing, Taekwondo and wrestling, shaving his hair and having his incisors chipped on purpose by his dentist, to be more believable in the role. This look would have certainly made a fistfight with Pitt’s idea of wearing purely feminine clothes, and this pleased Seliger as well.

For the record, Seliger and Pitt chose the dresses themselves. “We picked things that we thought would be not particularly kitsch but extremely bold and weird,” added Seliger. “He was really enthusiastic, the perfect subject in that sense. With Brad, you can’t get strange enough. He loves that.”

“I know all these things are supposed to seem important to us – the car, the condo, our version of success – but if that’s the case,” Brad said, “why is the general feeling out there reflecting more impotence and isolation and desperation and loneliness? If you ask me, I say toss all this – we gotta find something else. Because all I know is that at this point in time, we are heading for a dead end, a numbing of the soul, a complete atrophy of the spiritual being. And I don’t want that.”

(Photos by © Mark Seliger)