Photography by Hedi Slimane, Styling by Panos Yiapanis
Issue 17
Autumn/Winter 2009
Kate Moss
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Panos Yiapanis
Issue 17
Autumn/Winter 2009
Katie Holmes
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Yanos Yiapanis
Issue 17
Autumn/Winter 2009
Natalie Portman
Photography by Hedi Slimane, Styling by Panos Yiapanis
Issue 16
Spring/Summer 2009
Tilda Swinton
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Panos Yiapanis
Issue 15
Autumn/Winter 2008
Scarlett Johansson
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Tabitha Simmons
Issue 14
Spring/Summer 2008
Uma Thurman
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Tabitha Simmons
Issue 13
Autumn/Winter 2007
Julianne Moore
Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Styling by Beat Bolliger
Issue 12
Spring/Summer 2007
Christina Ricci
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Tabitha Simmons
Issue 11
Autumn/Winter 2006
Kirsten Dunst
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Tabitha Simmons
Issue 10
Spring/Summer 2006
Winona Ryder
Photography by Mario Sorrenti, Styling by Katy England
Issue 09
Autumn/Winter 2005
Jodie Foster
Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Styling by Venetia Scott
Issue 08
Spring/Summer 2005
Drew Barrymore
Photography by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, Styling by Alister Mackie
Issue 07
Autumn/Winter 2004
Natalie Portman
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Tabitha Simmons
Issue 06
Spring/Summer 2004
Kate Moss
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Tabitha Simmons
Issue 05
Autumn/Winter 2003
Gwyneth Paltrow
Photography by Mario Sorrenti, Styling by Katy England
Issue 04
Spring/Summer 2003
Nicole Kidman
Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Tabitha Simmons
Issue 03
Autumn/Winter 2002
Pamela Anderson
Photography by Mario Sorrenti, Styling by Alister Mackie
Issue 02
Spring/Summer 2002
Seth and Jaclyn Hodes
Photography by Nick Knight, Styling by Katy England
Issue 01
Autumn/Winter 01
Zora and Olivier
Photography by Nick Knight, Styling by Katy England
12 Emerging Designers on How Vivienne Westwood Inspired Them
Speaking in AnOther Magazine Autumn/Winter 2021, a new generation of designers reflected on the mother of punk’s enormous impact on their work, from Charles Jeffrey to Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena
Before she began her career in fashion, half a century ago now, Vivienne Westwood trained as a primary school teacher. It’s a mindset that has informed her work from the outset – occasionally, she still describes herself as a teacher, and has always created clothes that reflect that – to communicate a theory, to educate. Great teachers inspire: through her unparalleled creativity Westwood has tutored entire generations. For more than a decade her focus has been to draw attention to the plight of the planet through her clothes, of course, and also powerful graphics that trace back to her work in the 1970s. Her latest is a pack of playing cards that lays out a strategy to save the world. Across these pages, pieces by Westwood and her former pupil Andreas Kronthaler – today her husband and the creative director of her top-line collection – are joined by a new group of designers whose garments echo her working methods and draw infinite inspiration from her.
“We are looking through the lens of a changing world. If the human race does not turn the telescope around we face mass extinction. Climate change will reach tipping point. I’ve been trying to save the world from climate change since the foundation of Climate Revolution 15 years ago, and now I’m up to Card 37 – back and front – I’m nearly there. I’ve got my message across. We’re already working on it! Follow me” – Vivienne Westwood
Andreas Kronthaler and Vivienne WestwoodPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Inheritance
A new generation of fashion designers on how Vivienne Westwood inspires.
CHARLES JEFFERY
“There’s no denying that Vivienne and Andreas have paved the way for me and my work. I feel like I’m from the same planet as them and have my own little island on it. Matty, too. It’s like we are sending smoke signals to each other and sending ships across the sea, with good tidings.”
MATTY BOVAN
“Growing up I saw the world a bit differently, and I believe Vivienne did too. She doesn’t believe in conformity, and she and Andreas like to push the idea of what is acceptable. That is a great, great thing to do and why their work speaks to so many people world-wide. Vivienne has taught me to truly believe in myself and to gain knowledge of how and where things are made. To question.”
JUNTAE KIM
“For me, her clothes liberate the body. When I first designed menswear, I used to come up against the limitations of what men’s clothes should be. But Vivienne has helped destroy these stereotypes, the idea that certain clothes are only for certain genders and classes. That means freedom.”
MARVIN DESROC
“I love Vivienne’s resilience. I can’t think of one time that she’s bent to the rules of the industry – even the word ‘industry’ can’t be associated with her. When we talk about Vivienne, we talk about art, emotion, design – that’s what I’ve always loved about her. She’s an artist, yet has been able to last in this business without ever compromising who she is. Meanwhile Andreas’s energy and spirit are out of this world. It’s so refreshing to see – I love unconventional men.”
Charley is wearing GARETH WRIGHTON, ATSUKO KUDO and ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOODPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Michaela is wearing MICHAELA STARKPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Tom is wearing ALINA ISPAS, VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS END, his own jewellery and VIVIENNE WESTWOODPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Nicola is wearing VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS END, CHOPOVA LOWENA, ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD and LAUREN PERRINPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
“I feel like I’m from the same planet as them and have my own little island on it. Matty, too. It’s like we are sending smoke signals to each other and sending ships across the sea, with good tidings” – Charles Jeffrey
Charley is wearing SS DALEY, FLINT J MCDONALD, PAULA MIHOVILOVIC and ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD. Tom is wearing FLINT J MCDONALD, ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, jewellery as before and VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS END.Photography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Charley is wearing HASEEB HASSAN, VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, ELISSA POPPY, LAUREN PERRIN and VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS END. Nicola is wearing MATTY BOVAN, PEBBLE LONDON and VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS ENDPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Kyra is wearing CECILY OPHELIA and her own jewelleryPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
B is wearing ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD and ATSUKO KUDO. Taira is wearing ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD.Photography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
CECILY OPHELIA
“Vivienne is the first fashion designer I remember remembering. When I was 16, I found the phone number for the Vivienne Westwood office and rang up, asking if I could come to the studio for a meeting about an internship. I went the next day. Attending fittings with Andreas taught me so much – he is unpredictable yet meticulous, a very good combination. And Vivienne has helped me to recognise the importance of craftsmanship and sustainability. Valuing the process of time serves both as a therapy and a protest against the voracious cycle of the fashion treadmill.”
JULIAN CERRO
“My favourite show is Spring/Summer 1994, Café Society. Kate Moss, topless, licking a Magnum ice cream, wearing the shortest skirt ever, with 18th-century make-up. What more could you want?”
HASEEB HASSAN
“Growing up in Pakistan, I wasn’t really aware of fashion, let alone the idea I could choose it as a career. Vivienne and Andreas have helped me open up and explore ideas while also being unapologetic about my background. For me, studying fashion is going against the grain – Vivienne and Andreas’s work taught me to be myself and to believe in what you do if you feel passionately about it.”
STEVEN STOKEY-DALEY
“Vivienne Westwood represents the characterful unpacking and subversion of the British wardrobe – the art of dressing, of reappropriating content within garments, of reinterpreting that into fashion.”
Sakeema is wearing VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS END, ALINA ISPAS and ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOODPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Nicola is wearing JUNTAE KIM and VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS END. Tom is wearing JUNTAE KIM, VIVIENNE WESTWOOD and jewellery as beforePhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Kyra is wearing ASAI, VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS END, ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, jewellery as before and MATTY BOVANPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
B is wearing JULIAN CERRO, VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS END and ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOODPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
“She paved the way for people like me – with courageous moves like opening a store with ‘SEX’ written out the front in giant pink letters. She helped open the door for provocative female designers” – Michaela Stark
Sakeema is wearing MARVIN DESROC, jewellery as before and VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS ENDPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Charley is wearing SINÉAD O’DWYER and CHOPOVA LOWENAPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Taira is wearing CHIE KAYAPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Taira is wearing SS DALEY, ASAI, ATSUKO KUDO and ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD. Sakeema is wearing JULIAN CERRO, ALINA ISPAS, CHOPOVA LOWENA, and VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WORLDS END. Charley is wearing GARETH WRIGHTON, ATSUKO KUDO and ASAIPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
A SAI TA
“What’s so special about Vivienne is her spirit, her attitude and the fact that she didn’t come from a traditional fashion-school education – you can see that she plays by her own rules. Vivienne taught me to do me, to speak my mind, to be brave and fearless. Education doesn’t only have to come from school – if anything, you must unlearn what education systems have taught and search wider.”
MICHAELA STARK
“It is, I’m sure, glaringly obvious how much Vivienne has influenced my practice as a designer. She paved the way for people like me – with courageous moves like opening a store with ‘SEX’ written out the front in giant pink letters. She helped open the door for provocative female designers.”
FLINT J MCDONALD
“It’s the appreciation of the past for me, how she translates that to the now. I’ve always been into history and historical garments – the construction and cut of those clothes is so interesting to dissect and play with. Westwood triumphs at that. Playing with British heritage as she and Andreas do is a real turn-on for me. And their appreciation of quality – I’m a sucker for a luscious fabric.”
EMMA CHOPOVA & LAURA LOWENA
“Westwood was a designer we always looked up to as kids. The combination of preferences, punk and historical dress has had a very strong impact on us and has shaped us so much as designers. The DIY attitude inspired us to get into fashion – to just try making stuff without the fear of everything [having to be] perfect.”
Photography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Hair: Eugene Souleiman at Streeters. Hair for portraits of Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler, and Michaela Stark: Kei Terada at Julian Watson Agency using OUAI. Make-up: Janeen Witherspoon at MA and Talent. Models: B at Idal, Charley Dean Sayers at Premier Model Management, Nicola Dinan at Xdirectn, Tom Goddard at Contact, Kyra Kaur and Taira at Storm Management and Sakeema Peng Crook at Crumb. Casting: Nicola Kast at Webber. Casting assistant: Julia Gilmour. Set design: Amy Stickland at Webber. Digital tech: Nic Bezzina. Digital tech for portraits: Sam Hearn. Photographic assistants: Matt Moran, Bradley Polkinghorne, Sean Morrow and Jack Storer. Styling assistants: Isabella Kavanagh, Ioana Ivan and Cari Lima. Hair assistants: Claire Moore, Massimo Di Stefano and Carlo Avena. Hair assistant for portraits: Takumi Horiwaki. Make-up assistant: Elizabeth Owen Perry. Set-design assistants: Harry Stayt and Molly Marot. Set-design assistant for portraits: Lizzy Gilbert. Production: Artistry.
This article appears in the Autumn/Winter 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale internationally from 7 October 2021. Pre-order a copy here.
Alasdair McLellan’s Teen Horror-Inspired Story for the New Issue of AnOther
For AnOther Magazine Autumn/Winter 2022, Alasdair McLellan and Marie Chaix capture Mila van Eeten and more in a story titled ‘The Geminis’
This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine:
Photography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Marie Chaix
Mila is wearing a leather bomber jacket by LOEWE. Turtleneck matt jersey bodysuit with integrated heels (underneath, throughout) and soft denim jeans (throughout) by BALENCIAGAPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Marie Chaix
Etienne is wearing a hooded denim jacket and coated denim jeans by BALENCIAGA. Long-sleeved vintage cotton top (throughout). And leather moccasins by JACQUEMUSPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Marie Chaix
From left: Rubuen is wearing a vintage cotton T-shirt (throughout). Etienne is wearing top as before. His own earrings (throughout)Photography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Marie Chaix
Mila is wearing a soft denim top by BALENCIAGA. Bodysuit and jeans as beforePhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Marie Chaix
Mila is wearing a leather dress by CHANEL. Bodysuit and jeans as beforePhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Marie Chaix
See the full story in the gallery above.
Hair: Anthony Turner at Streeters. Make-up: Lauren Parsons at Art Partner. Models: Mila van Eeten at Viva Model Management, Etienne Maclaine at Select Models and Rubuen Bilan-Carroll at Supa Model Management. Casting: Piergiorgio Del Moro DM Casting. Photographic assistants: Lex Kembery, Simon Mackinlay and Andrew Edwards. Styling assistants: Arnaud Buisson, Tamara Prince and Letizia Maria Allodi. Hair assistant: John Allan. Make-up assistant: Eddy Liu. Production: Art Partner. Production assistant: Abbie Cockerell
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale internationally now. Buy a copy here.
John Galliano on the Personal Meaning of Maison Margiela’s Cinema Inferno
In the new issue of AnOther Magazine, John Galliano talks to Susannah Frankel about returning to the stage with the Maison Margiela’s Autumn/Winter 2022 Artisanal collection – and the show of the season
Susannah Frankel: Why did you choose to show in this format? To stage a play?
John Galliano: I was listening to my instinct, Susannah. Following the lockdown period, which pushed us all to investigate the possibilities of digital formats, I sensed a profound desire for physicality. But after everything we experienced during the pandemic – our collective discoveries and evolvements – it didn’t seem relevant to return to a runway. I wanted to create a proposal informed by the investigations made through our filmic work with Olivier Dahan and Nick Knight, a multidisciplinary format that would reflect the connectivity for which we all hanker, whether we’re on the front row of a show or watching it on a screen. Cinema Inferno was my way of embracing the cultures of fashion, performance and the virtual world through a construct at once digital and physical. It transcended the traditions of a play, but because geography required a space in central Paris, we chose to present it in a theatre.
SF: In some ways, a theatre with an audience is a more extreme return to physicality than a traditional runway show. Was the idea a reaction to not having shown physically for more than two years?
JG: If it were a reaction to the events of the past two years, it was a yearning to stay on the path of exploration that the lockdown period instigated. It didn’t feel natural to ignore those discoveries and return to what we once knew. Leave those runway glasses – those one-way glasses – at the door. Theatre played a part in that transition, but my intention wasn’t simply to stage a play. With Cinema Inferno I wanted to embrace and unite many different cultures and formats and propose a different way of seeing. It was narrative storytelling presented on a stage and captured in film but revealing – and integrating – all the makings and mechanics of theatre and filmmaking in a way true to the genetics of Maison Margiela.
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John Galliano
SF: Although at Margiela, on the runway, the theatre has principally been in the clothes. You have always been interested in a theatrical element and over the past two years you have worked with the narrative of film. Why does that interest you? Why, perhaps, is the traditional fashion-show format not enough?
JG: The two are in symbiosis. They have been intrinsically linked from the day I left school. More than a theatrical element, it is a narrative approach – a way of mapping out the soul of a collection to guide one’s clarity of vision. To me, it’s instinctive. Dressmaking is in dialogue with storytelling and the two invigorate each other. In the past, the narratives I’ve worked with have unfolded on the runway, but at this moment in time, I felt from my surroundings a longing for a greater connectivity.
SF: How did you decide to collaborate with the award-winning theatre company Imitating the Dog?
JG: Over the past year, Kevin Macdonald has been directing a documentary about me. During one of our conversations he mentioned Imitating the Dog. Shortly afterwards, Alexis [Roche, Galliano’s partner] and I found out that the troupe was staging Dracula in Schaffhausen [in northern Switzerland], so we immediately jumped on a plane to see it. I was taken by their approach, and shortly afterwards I met with [Imitating the Dog’s co-artistic director] Andrew Quick to discuss my early ideas for the Artisanal show. It evolved into nearly 12 months of development, with rehearsals in Leeds with the principal cast before we relocated to Paris with the full ensemble.
SF: People so often talk about a multidisciplinary approach to art and craft now. In some ways it characterises this age. How does the reach – and indeed any limitations – brought about by working in collaboration with artists from a different medium inspire you? Is it about employing a fresh approach to create something new?
JG: Fashion is driven by ideas and previously unexplored proposals, which are brought to life through collaborative efforts. Whether it’s the artisans in the ateliers, the muses, the hair and make-up teams, or the artists and craftspeople who help to build and frame those ideas, it is always inspiring to work with people with expertise different from your own.
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
“In my process, I tap into emotions to create memories. It generates an intrinsic link between dressmaking and storytelling, which becomes the foundation for my approach to haute couture” – John Galliano
SF: There is something very new, too, about the seamless fusion of the elite – the limited number of people attending a fashion show or play – with the democratic, in other words showing to anyone who would like to watch online at the same time. How and why does that interest you?
JG: You always hope that all your audiences will be able to connect with what you create. This is what shapes the community that surrounds the maison, whether they’re sitting on the physical or virtual rows. In the digital age, footage from fashion shows new and old has become accessible with the tap of a finger. This evolution opens the doors to so many possibilities when it comes to formats and presentations. It’s something that invigorates me.
SF: How much does the story dictate the clothes and vice versa? Should clothes always tell a story?
JG: The story never dictates the clothes. In my process, I tap into emotions to create memories. It generates an intrinsic link between dressmaking and storytelling, which becomes the foundation for my approach to haute couture.
SF: And what is the story here?
JG: It is a story centred around the abuse of power. We follow our two protagonists, Hen and Count, who are on the run from events that are revealed to the audience through flashbacks and cinematic dream sequences. Each of these scenes portrays a different depiction of the abuse of power in patriarchal society, while also touching on experiences, emotions and situations rooted in fundamental fears we all can relate to.
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
SF: There are so many echoes from the past in this performance – your professional past but also perhaps your personal past. Can you talk about that?
JG: As a dressmaker I am impacted by my own personal experiences, past and present, as well as the realities that unfold before my eyes. All these impressions are innately expressed in what I create, so if there are autobiographical elements to the story it’s because it’s driven by instinct.
SF: It feels all the more personal because of the reimagination of so many of your obsessions – Blanche DuBois, The Wizard of Oz, Cinderella, Pierrette, teddy boys, gunslingers, sailors, wicked stepmothers, zombies, nurses ... What is it about these characters that makes you want to revisit them?
JG: All these characters – these genres, these creations – exist within me. They are founded in memories and impressions that I express consciously or perhaps subconsciously. Sometimes they are communicated more heedfully than others, but they are always a part of my imagination.
SF: They are all, in entirely different ways, representative of otherness. Are you drawn to otherness?
JG: I am interested in spirituality and in finding ways of tapping into spirituality. It connects with ideas of instinctiveness and awareness, which are motivations and values I continue to draw on and express through my work at the maison.
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
“The muses – the super-muses – are deeply personal choices. Their characters feed into the narrative and make it come to life during the creative process as well as the unveiling” – John Galliano
SF: You have always put one look on one model – you are one of the few designers to do that – which of course directs the emphasis on to character. Do you know who will wear the clothes while you are designing them?
JG: Yes, imagining which muse will be wearing the expression you’re working on often feeds into the symbiosis between dressmaking and storytelling.
SF: Can we talk about the casting, the amazing mix of supermodels you have cast in the past and your current casting ...
JG: The muses – the super-muses – are deeply personal choices. Their characters feed into the narrative and make it come to life during the creative process as well as the unveiling. They carry the shapes and volumes with authority. You develop a shorthand with them, a silent tongue through which you can communicate a silhouette through body language and gestures. I was taken with the dedication and craft of Leon Dame and Lulu Tenney and all the other muses who took part in Cinema Inferno. And I was happy to invite back the muses who have been there for pivotal points in my career and who have, likewise, actively taken part in my creative processes. They embody the story and inspire me to create. They are our community. Let’s hear it for the super-muses!
SF: Why is the past important to inform the present and the future?
JG: The memory of something leaves a trace of information, of know-how, of knowledge. I think all those things are integral to building a maison, or anything else for that matter.
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
SF: Why did you choose to set the story in Southwestern US in the mid-Sixties? Why is that period interesting for you?
JG: The genre draws on literature and film related to the southern gothic style, which has its own associations when it comes to geography and time, but it isn’t about a specific period as much as it is a loop narrative that really transcends time. At the end of the story, Count and Hen realise they are stuck in an eternal loop, forever destined to relive the horrors of their past. Setting the story in the Arizona desert was a fragment of my own memory.
SF: Can we talk about the extraordinary sense of colour – canary yellow and violet, pale jade and blood red, coral and pistachio. Where does that come from, do you think? Is it something you are born with?
JG: The palette was informed by the work of Andrew Wyeth, a 20th-century realist who portrayed the American heartland. It triggered my own recollections of travelling through this dark, poetic scenery. In the flashbacks and dream sequences, of course, that changes. Those colours came from the realm of cinema.
SF: The guns, the blood, the sexual abuse, the alcohol ... In many ways it is all about taboos. We have talked before about the fact that there isn’t – and shouldn’t be – anything politically correct, or even political, about great fashion. Do you still believe that?
JG: This is make-believe, not reality. But to me these elements are not taboo. I believe we should have the ability to bring problems to the surface and face the world with consciousness and awareness. The imagery you mention is founded in concerns that are fundamentally challenging society today. The issue of gun violence has become a constant presence in our lives, and fashion is a reflection of our surroundings. Art evokes emotion. Only when things are brought to the surface can change begin to occur.
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
All clothing by Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
“It’s true that I always choose to amplify the truth in the matter. That’s important to me” – John Galliano
SF: Of course all the above is treated in a deliberately plastic way but still ... It feels brave in the current climate.
JG: I can only say that it comes from the heart, Susannah.
SF: You are so brave, always. Where do you get that from, do you think? And why is it important to be brave?
JG: It’s true that I always choose to amplify the truth in the matter. That’s important to me. But I wouldn’t relate the motifs of Cinema Inferno to taboo-breaking bravery because I don’t think they are, or should be, taboo. It’s a piece that reflects on patriarchal society’s many abuses of power through dressmaking and storytelling, amplifying – or highlighting – very real circumstances and conditions that affect us all. I think it’s important that we try to be conscious about these issues rather than labelling them as taboo.
SF: In the end, this performance is a love story. A romance. And the clothes are so, so romantic. Again, where does that come from?
JG: If the story is romantic, it’s a decidedly dark romance. I think the love story of Hen and Count is more a framework for the themes that play out within it – traumas of the past, the abuse of power, escape and the inescapable. Every motif is expressed within the garments and accessories themselves, in the power cut of the Spectral Cowboy looks – where I evoke the memory of Geneva bands [formal neckwear worn by lawyers and members of the clergy] – or the classic haute couture volumes imbued with the grammar of surgical scrubs, or different techniques applied to the prom and communal looks – such as essorage ageing and splicing – to evoke a sense of the unsettling. Where does it come from? From a desire to connect with the consciousness.
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
All clothing Maison Margiela Artisanal designed by John GallianoPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Show creative director: John Galliano. Show artistic director: Alexis Roche. Adapted for stage by Imitating the Dog. Hair: Eugene Souleiman at Streeters. Make-up: Dame Pat McGrath. Manicure: Elsa Deslandes at Majeureprod Agency. Muses: Konrad Bauer, Malick Bodian, Jan Krivdic and Thomas Riguelle at Success Models, Frederic Bittner, Peter Frackowiak and Moritz Thoma at Tomorrow Is Another Day, Kit Butler at Bananas Models, Valentine Charrasse, Anna Cleveland and Olga Sherer at Select Models, Elise Crombez, Karlie Kloss and Mona Tougaard at Elite Models, Leon Dame at Viva London, Karen Elson at CAA Fashion, Beauise Ferwerda at Platform Agency, Mateen Ismail at The Claw Models, Kate McNamara at Premium Models, Hannah Motler, Puck Schrover, Lulu Tenney and Caroline Trentini at Ford Models, Sherry Shi at IMG Models, Adrians Smats at The Bro Models and Amber Valletta at Women Management. Casting: Jess Hallett at Streeters. Photographic assistant: Romain Dubus. Post-production: Stéphane Virlogeux
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale internationally now. Buy a copy here.
Rei Kawakubo on Black Roses and the Importance of Freedom
The Comme des Garçons designer talks to Susannah Frankel about her Autumn/Winter 2022 collection and wanting her clothes to speak for themselves
Susannah Frankel: Why did you choose to reference black roses in this collection?
Rei Kawakubo: As a symbol of freedom.
SF: Is there any significance to the fact that, in nature, true black roses don’t exist?
RK: The strength of the symbol lies in the very fact of its non-existence.
SF: Black roses are a symbol of mourning but also of anarchy. These are two recurrent themes in your work. Why?
RK: Always in an unreasonable world I feel anger at life.
Mica is wearing a long waisted polyester and wool jacket, nylon lace dress and polyester wig by COMME DES GARÇONS. Polyurethane and fabric headpiece by GARY CARD for COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
SF: You have always been so passionate about freedom. Can you explain why?
RK: I need freedom to be myself.
SF: Do you feel that you would look at the notion of freedom differently if you were a man?
RK: Don’t understand the question.
SF: Do you feel that things have changed for women, that they are more free now?
RK: Don’t understand the question.
Photography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Rachel is wearing a voluminous wool jacket, nylon leggings and polyester wig by COMME DES GARÇONS. Polyurethane and fabric headpiece by GARY CARD for COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Photography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Mica is wearing a multilayered polyurethane and polyester jacket, polyester wig and synthetic logo socks by COMME DES GARÇONS. Polyurethane headpiece by GARY CARD for COMME DES GARÇONS. And synthetic platform trainers by SALOMON X COMME DES GARÇONPhotography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
SF: A fashion show can be banal, it can also be an expression of extreme emotion, provoking equally extreme reactions in the people watching it. Is it important to you to provoke, to express emotion and to cause an emotional reaction in others? Is that why a live show is important to you?
RK: The point of the live show is for people to see the clothes in real life. It is part of the business.
SF: Why is fashion important?
RK: It’s one way to express oneself.
SF: It is only recently that Comme des Garçons has started sending out notes immediately following collections. Is that to stop people like me sending you questions like these? Are you interested in talking about your work?
RK: I thought it was helpful to tell the theme to a few select journalists. And as you know, I don’t like talking about my work. I want people only to look at the clothes and feel something.
Luke is wearing a polyester headpiece by GARY CARD for COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Luke is wearing a long shaped wool and polyester jacket and polyester wig by COMME DES GARÇONS. Polyester headpiece by GARY CARD for COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Photography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
SF: Our issue theme this time is Obsessed/Possessed. There’s a fine line between the two words. What are your obsessions and what does the word ‘possessed’ mean to you?
RK: I don’t have obsessions and don’t feel possessed. I just have never changed my sense of values about how I make clothes.
SF: You work in an essentially commercial industry, where possessions – with a slightly different meaning – are central. But how important are material possessions to you?
RK: I am not interested in owning anything.
SF: You have had huge influence – over other fashion designers and, more broadly, over what people wear. Do you feel a sense of pride, or if you don’t like the word ‘pride’, at least achievement?
RK: I cannot answer because it is not true.
Mica is wearing a multilayered polyurethane and polyester jacket and polyester wig by COMME DES GARÇONS. Polyurethane headpiece by GARY CARD for COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Luke is wearing a long shaped wool and polyester jacket and polyester wig by COMME DES GARÇONS. Polyester headpiece by GARY CARD for COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Jules is wearing a long wool jacket with tubes, wool dress and polyester wig by COMME DES GARÇONS. Polyester headpiece by GARY CARD for COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Photography by Harley Weir, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Hair: Shiori Takahashi at Streeters using WELLA PROFESSIONALS. Make-up: Thomas de Kluyver at Art Partner using GUCCI BEAUTY. Models: Jules Volfu at XDirectn, Mina Serrano at The Hive Management, Mica Kendall at Milk Management and Rachael Carruthers and Luke Clod at Storm Management. Casting: Julia Lange at Artistry. Set design: Alice Kirkpatrick at Streeters. Manicure: Lauren Michelle Pires at Future Rep. Digital tech: Jeanne Buchi. Lighting: Alexa Horgan. Laser operator: Mark Randall. Photographic assistants: Joe Reddy, Charlotte Ellis and Tamibé Bourdanné. Styling assistants: Isabella Damazio and Roshni Rai. Hair assistants: Yuri Kato and Cher Savoy. Make-up assistants: Abbie Nourse and Josh Bart. Manicure assistant: Amy Thomas. Casting assistant: Anna Pkhakadze. Set build: Tommy Aitcheson, Toby Morrison and Tris King. Set-design assistants: Columbia Williams and Sophia Wilcox. Printing: Sarah England. Production: Partner Films. Post-production: Output.
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale internationally now. Buy a copy here.
Collier Schorr Captures a Diverse Cast of New York Figures
In AnOther Magazine Autumn/Winter 2022, Collier Schorr presents a portfolio of artists, students, families and friends wearing jewellery by Tiffany & Co
This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine:
Owen Ley, 21, model and studentOwen is wearing a Tiffany Lock bangle in gold, Return to Tiffany wide cuff in sterling silver and Elsa Peretti mesh scarf necklace in sterling silver by TIFFANY & CO. Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Katie Burnett
Parker Kit Hill, 26, artist. Parker is wearing his own clothing. Tiffany HardWear link earring in sterling silver, Tiffany HardWear graduated link earring in sterling silver and Tiffany HardWear wrap necklace in sterling silver by TIFFANY & COPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Katie Burnett
Aya Brown, 26, painter. Aya is wearing her own T-shirt. Tiffany HardWear wrap bracelet in sterling silver, Tiffany T T1 ring in white gold with diamonds, Tiffany HardWear graduated link earring in sterling silver and Elsa Peretti Aegean necklace insterling silver by TIFFANY & CO. Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Katie Burnett
Dara Allen, 30, stylist and model. Dara is wearing stylist’s own shirt, tie and belt. Leather trousers by HELMUT LANG. And Tiffany HardWear wrap bracelet in sterling silver, Tiffany HardWear link bracelet in 18-carat white gold with diamonds andTiffany Lock bangle in gold with diamonds by TIFFANY & CO. Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Katie Burnett
Angel Zinovieff, 39, artist. Angel is wearing her own clothing. Tiffany HardWear graduated link necklace in sterling silver by TIFFANY & COPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Katie Burnett
Capri Jones, 24, model. Main: Capri is wearing stylist’s own track pants. Inset: Tiffany T T1 hoop earring in white gold with diamonds and Return to Tiffany heart tag necklace in sterling silver by Tiffany & Co.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Katie Burnett
Hair: Mustafa Yanaz at Art and Commerce using ORIBE. Make-up: Yumi Lee at Streeters using CHANEL. Models: Dara Allen at Heroes Models, Aya Brown, George and Nicole Eisenman, Arta Gee at APM Models, Vas Halastaras at Stetts Model Management, Parker Kit Hill at IMG Models, Capri Jones, Joaquin and Santiago Knepp, Owen Ley at Ricky Michiels, Dede Mansro at Next Models New York, Bako Seville, Orion Sun and Angel Zinovieff. Casting: Nicola Kast. Digital tech: Jarrod Turner. Lighting: Ari Sadok. Photographic assistant: Dylan Garcia. Video: Steven Rico. Styling assistants: Shant Alvandyan, Alex Hall and Sage Johnson. Hair assistant: Karen Zamor. Make-up assistant: Yui Sakamoto. Production: Jemma Hinkly at Artist Commissions. Post-production: Two Three Two.
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale internationally now. Buy a copy here.
How Ana de Armas Became the Most Famous Woman in the World
In an interview with Hannah Lack, de Armas discusses playing Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s much anticipated adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, alongside her own fractious relationship with celebrity
The deluge of doorstop biographies, tell-all memoirs, rumour and conspiracy theory dedicated to the riddle of Marilyn Monroe’s life has never conclusively solved it.
But we know where it ends: in Brentwood, Los Angeles, on 4 August 1962, in a scantily furnished hideaway with a kidney-shaped pool, a clutter of pill bottles in the bedroom and listening devices planted in the walls. The star was buried in a peppermint-green Emilio Pucci dress four days later, and today her marble crypt is regularly covered in lipstick kisses from fans born long after her premature death. Ana de Armas made a pilgrimage to this quiet corner of Westwood Village Memorial Park on the day she began shooting Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s visceral, heart wrenching fictionalisation of the screen idol’s turbulent life. “We got this big card and everyone in the crew wrote a message to her,” de Armas says as we find a table in the restaurant of a downtown Manhattan hotel on a washed-blue summer morning. “Then we went to the cemetery and put it on her grave. We were asking for permission in a way. Everyone felt a huge responsibility, and we were very aware of the side of the story we were going to tell – the story of Norma Jeane, the person behind this character, Marilyn Monroe. Who was she really?”
For more than 15 years, de Armas has sought roles that swerve the domestic and push her outside her comfort zone.The 34-year-old Cuban-Spanish actor has played intrepid spies and femme fatales, a Dominican sex worker fighting for her life, even a hologram glowing in a neon-drenched, smog-choked dystopia. But it’s hard to imagine a more demanding role than the one Dominik offered her in 2018 – on Valentine’s Day, as it happened. Five years on from the #MeToo watershed, Blonde is an entirely 21st-century take on a 20th-century icon, a confrontational reckoning with the pitch-black stories of Monroe’s treatment by the Hollywood meat grinder. In many ways de Armas’s task was to play not one person but two: the clunkily named Norma Jeane Mortensen, the product of a traumatic and rootless childhood in multiple foster homes across the sprawl of Los Angeles County, and her alter ego Marilyn Monroe, the siren with the ingeniously murmurous moniker who swallowed her up.
Never mind the daunting logistics of stepping into the teetering Ferragamos of Hollywood’s still-undimmed goddess, whose grip on our collective dreamlife – and continued bankability – reached another apex this year when a Warhol portrait of her sold for $195 million. The hours of experimenting with fire engine-red lipsticks and wigs in platinum shades, the months studying Monroe’s swaying walk and megawatt smile might not have amounted to much without one, impossible-to-fake ingredient that happily de Armas has in abundance: the kind of charisma that changes the weather of a scene when she steps into it. Monroe’s own, strange, mercurial talent was legendary, rendering directors infuriated by her pathological lateness and inability to memorise lines awestruck by the alchemy she could work on camera. (Her acting coach Lee Strasberg named only Marlon Brando as having equal gifts.) De Armas’s indefatigable work ethic has little in common with the reported chaos of Monroe’s, but that internal light bulb is something they share. There is an electrifying moment in Blonde when a panic-stricken Norma Jeane is painted and powdered by her make-up artist to coax her bombshell persona from hiding. When the icon emerges from the depths of a dressing-room mirror – heavy-lidded eyes, candy floss hair, jingle-bell laugh – it’s like a match being struck. “She would shine from within,” says de Armas, who is looking pretty luminescent herself today, in a vanilla-coloured dress and loafers, her usually dark hair long and blonde, her eyes an impossible-to-pinpoint shade of both honey and green. Over the next two hours, as waiters come and go with grapefruit juice and coffee, it becomes clear that the months she spent inhabiting Monroe’s cryptic, interlocking selves still deeply affect her. “The more famous Marilyn became, the more invisible Norma Jeane became – Norma was this person no one ever actually met,” she begins. “And Marilyn was someone even she herself talked about in the third person. In some ways Marilyn saved her, gave her a life, but at the same time she became her prison.”
That cavernous split between public and private self is the focus of Blonde – “The story of an unloved and unwanted child who became the world’s most wanted woman,” as Dominik has put it. The director is known for layered explorations into male violence and its consequences, plumbing the psychological waters of gangsters, murderers and outlaws. His 2007 feature, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, shattered the myth of the Wild West and its cartoonish stereotypes, showing bloodshed that was blunt, grisly and inglorious. James was something of a celebrity too – the subject of breathless newspaper headlines and dime-store novels, who, like Monroe, was described as stopping time when he walked into a room. If that film questioned America’s preference for legend over history, Dominik’s latest, produced by Brad Pitt’s company Plan B, puts the myth of the screen goddess in its sights, peeling back its glittering surface to reveal the unspeakable truths that might lurk beneath. “It’s about the things we haven’t seen, the moments when the cameras aren’t flashing or rolling, when Marilyn is not ‘on’,” de Armas says. “It’s fiction. We don’t have proof this happened. But it fills the gaps in the things we already know with a version of events that we should at least consider.”
Traditional biopics might chronicle dates and milestones, but they can fall flat in capturing the messy, nebulous texture of internal lives. Based closely on Joyce Carol Oates’s masterful, Pulitzer-nominated novel of the same name, which imagined Monroe’s life as a macabre fairy tale of cursed princesses and gold-spinning Rumpelstiltskins, Blonde is more spectacular hallucination than faithful record. It mixes pieces of undisputed fact with hearsay to conjure a disorientating hall of mirrors. Much like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, it drills into its protagonist’s subconscious and into the psyche of the City of Angels, digging beneath the chromed convertibles and plush leather booths to reveal a nightmarish underworld of reptilian moguls, carnivorous press and vampiric doctors all too generous with their prescriptions. “A place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul,” as Monroe herself once said. The story unfolds like a fever dream, from a childhood gripped by her mother’s frightening mental illness (a film-negative cutter on the fringes of Hollywood, Gladys was committed to an asylum when Monroe was eight; she never knew her father) to her insomniac final years, thoughts muddied by a glossary of chemical substances. Telephones shriek, flashbulbs splinter, the mouths of ghost eyed paparazzi stretch to monstrous proportions and a febrile soundtrack courtesy of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis only deepens the gnawing sense of dread. “So, this is a horror movie, right?” de Armas said, only half-joking, the first time she met Dominik to discuss the role.
For the director, Blonde has been a decade-long obsession: he began writing the script in 2008. Since then, potential Marilyns have come and gone – Jessica Chastain and Naomi Watts included – but when financing finally aligned with Dominik’s vision, it was de Armas he wanted, no matter her Cuban accent. “It was pretty surreal I even got asked to audition, but that just shows how progressive Andrew is,” she says of the slice of history she’s making as a Latinx actor playing the most all-American of idols. “I grew up watching everything from Titanic to The Terminator, but I always knew that reality was so far from my reality. Kids in the US, they believe they can be princesses because you can buy a princess dress and a princess crown and become one. I never had that. I didn’t even know what an apple tasted like. Cuban actors were more relatable to me – Daisy Granados, Isabel Santos, Verónica Lynn – those were the actors I looked up to. I thought I’d be doing that, not Marilyn. But of course I went for it, because I love challenges, and I knew that emotionally I could get there. I didn’t know if the hair, the make-up would, but I understood what we were trying to say. Andrew called me after the audition and said, ‘It’s you. It has to be you.’ But then we had to convince everybody else.”
Ana is wearing an acetate and viscose pompom top by JW ANDERSON. Nylon tights by WOLFORDPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Convincing everybody else translated to months of work with a dialogue coach to capture Monroe’s breathy, marshmallowy voice, itself a creation by the star to overcome a stammer. “It just wasn’t working when I tried to imitate the sound or the pitch,” de Armas says. “Marilyn’s voice, her expressions, were a consequence of the speech classes she took herself, of her insecurities, of her not having any boundaries and letting people in, of playing this part of having to be rescued all the time. So I had to know what she was thinking and feeling every time. Because the way she rounded her lips for the ‘O’s, or how much of her lower teeth she would show, what her eyebrows were doing, all these expressions were a consequence of Marilyn in survival mode. They were tricks that she was pulling in desperate circumstances.”
“The whole [acting] process was overwhelming for me. Most of the time I thought I was doing it wrong. I was thinking, what are these American actors thinking of me?” – Ana de Armas
To climb inside her character’s head, de Armas devoured a cornucopia of written material: Oates’s immense novel, of course, each page read and reread two or three times, but also anything that offered a glimpse of Monroe’s energy off-duty – a favourite was Truman Capote’s gossipy jewel of a story, A Beautiful Child. Meanwhile, Dominik created a 750-page bible of Monroe photographs that mapped every emotion he wanted to conjure, scene by scene. Blonde is built on a trove of that iconography, much of it burned into our collective imaginations, stretching from early cheesecake pin-ups to Life magazine spreads to paparazzi shots – all while hypothesising what it might have felt like to be the mortal woman behind that mythical projection. “Almost the entire movie exists in photographs we were either recreating or referencing,” de Armas says.
“Almost every scene starts or ends exactly like an existing photograph.” The recreations are breathtaking, switching formats or from monochrome to colour depending on the source. Dominik was fetishistic about the minutiae, commissioning exact reproductions of Monroe’s outfits – more than 100 wardrobe changes – tailored to the last stitch. “It gave me goosebumps,” de Armas says, “and changed everything about the way I moved and felt. Andrew never stopped filming, so he dressed the sound person, the prop guy, my dialect coach, all in period costume too, so the camera could follow me anywhere. And anywhere I turned was ready to be filmed because we were shooting in her real houses.” Those homes include the peeling apartment block a young Norma Jeane lived in for a time with her mother; the orphanage on North El Centro Avenue with its fabled view of RKO studio’s lightning-bolt sign, which flashed through the night like a siren song during her two years there; and the final, hacienda-style home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, the modest and only house Monroe bought, at a time when studio magnates filled their gabled mansions with shrieking peacocks and priceless art. “It was a full immersion in her world, in LA, in those studios – spooky and beautiful,” de Armas says. “Andrew loves actors to improvise, so a lot of the time he was on his knees beside me and I was just reacting to what was happening around me.”
Moulded leather dress by LOEWEPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
When it came to replicating some of Monroe’s most indelible performances, though – including the moment a Manhattan subway breeze meets her white cocktail dress in The Seven Year Itch, and a snippet from Some Like It Hot – there was no straying from the script. De Armas is chillingly good in scenes that left her nowhere to hide. “Andrew had two monitors, the real Marilyn in the scene and me. And everything, every angle, had to be exactly the same. So that was me watching these films hundreds and hundreds of times.” In each recreation, the screen fantasy is stripped away to imagine its fallout. We see Joe DiMaggio’s violent rage, fuelled by the leering crowd who gather to watch his wife’s white dress fly into film history (the couple divorced soon after). And, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ effervescent musical number Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, a take is cut short by Monroe’s screams of anguish – she’s hustled into a dressing room and subdued with a needle. It’s well documented the actor suffered from paralysing stage fright during the making of that Howard Hawks film; on the set of Blonde, de Armas faced down her own spectres of self doubt. “I experienced a lot of fear and insecurity,” she says. “I felt in a very vulnerable position. Not just in specific difficult scenes – the whole process was overwhelming for me. Most of the time I thought I was doing it wrong. I was thinking, what are these American actors thinking of me? They know this person better than me, they’ve grown up with her. What are they thinking about my accent? Andrew could sense that discomfort and right away he told me, ‘That’s how she felt. Embrace it.’ She was feeling insecure and unprepared and judged and undervalued all the time. So I had to trust my emotions were adding to the layers.”
This year, a DNA test of a strand of Monroe’s hair indicated her father was Charles Stanley Gifford, her mother’s colleague at Consolidated Film Industries in Los Angeles. But during Monroe’s lifetime he was a blank space that bequeathed her a bottomless well of unfulfilled need. At first, de Armas struggled with Monroe’s inability to set boundaries between herself and others, finding her own instincts racing in the opposite direction. “In some early scenes I played it way too strong,” she says. “I got defensive and angry and Andrew said, ‘You’re not allowed to get angry. Ever. Anger is not something Norma can afford.’ Well, can you imagine what that does to a person? At its heart the movie is about her looking for an absent father. Part of the reason I think she became Marilyn Monroe was to be so visible there’s no way he could not find her. You see how a childhood of feeling unloved and unwanted led her to need love, attention, need someone with her always. So I thought, OK, if I can’t get angry, what are my options? How else can I survive? And I started to explore all these other feelings.”
If it was her childhood that set Monroe up for destruction, Hollywood swiftly saw to the rest. Both Oates’s book and Dominik’s film chart her vertiginous ascent as coming with an obligation to the casting couch. “I met them all,” Monroe wrote in her unfinished memoir, My Story. “Phoniness and failure were all over them. Some were vicious and crooked. But they were as near to the movies as you could get. So you sat with them, listening to their lies and schemes. And you saw Hollywood with their eyes – an overcrowded brothel, a merry-go-round with beds for horses.” In Blonde, men treat her like a sexual party favour: there are harrowing scenes of assault by a sadistic tycoon and a certain doomed president. Those scenes, and a torturous abortion (it’s never been established she had one), are evidently the cause of tussles over the film’s edit, and its eventual NC-17 rating. De Armas is unflinching in her defence of them: “We tried to show the fight she had to put up, not just to be successful, but to survive,” she says. “What she went through was dark. So dark. When you know that, fuck, I love her more. So the whole point is not bringing down the myth, the point is humanising this icon and making her real, a real woman going through all these different kinds of abuses and situations. And as a woman today I can easily understand how you could find yourself in that situation. So, yes, there are scenes that are hard to watch. But I don’t think this movie has anything sensational or exploitative or gratuitous in it. In many of the scenes people are talking about, you don’t actually see anything. You just know what is happening and that it’s coming from a place of zero love. I do think the audience will feel uncomfortable – because she is uncomfortable. When she feels dirty, you feel that the scene is dirty. It’s all in the way it makes you feel.”
Halterneck washed viscose dress and leather pumps by BOTTEGA VENETA. Necklace in platinum and 18-carat gold with diamonds by TIFFANY & COPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
When Oates’s novel was published in 2000, it was feted for its rich imagining of Monroe’s inner world and its excoriation of the patriarchal society that snuffed her out. It also drew antipathy from those who saw it as another exploitation of a woman who has become more property than person. (See Kim Kardashian’s controversial Met Gala photo opportunity in the crystal-scattered nude dress Monroe wore to serenade JFK.) Blonde the film might prove as divisive as the book, but post #MeToo, its unvarnished take feels more relevant than the kind of melancholy tristesse so often attached to tellings of Monroe’s story. For her part, Oates has championed the film, describing it as “… startling, brilliant, very disturbing and [perhaps most surprisingly] an utterly ‘feminist’ interpretation … ”
“I was thinking of her so much, some days I would go home and have dinner and as I was washing the dishes I would just start sobbing, crying and crying, because I had this terrible feeling” – Ana de Armas
“And absolutely, I agree with her,” de Armas nods. “Inspiration is a very different thing from taking. If there’s a reason she’s still not resting, it’s that she’s been taken from so much. I knew as soon as I met Andrew that he was going to take care of her. So for the film to go places like the point of view of the abortion, a depressed mother and how a child deals with that, the desire of all these men over Marilyn, the way they look at her like meat – like a room service delivery – and, yes, the way she allows herself to fall in love and be disappointed again, it’s unapologetic and brave and feminist. Andrew shows pain and nudity and vulnerability and he doesn’t sugar-coat it. I’ve been told by people, oh my gosh this scene is so long! And I think, well, yes, and now you can imagine what she was feeling.”
De Armas isn’t a method actor, but grappling with that darkness inevitably spilled into her life off set; the experience still seems raw. “Don’t get me wrong, I had so much fun. I wasn’t by any means in character for nine weeks, not between takes, not in my lunch break. I was Ana,” she says. “But emotionally? The weight of it stayed with me for sure. There was no way to unplug because I’d get home and study for the next day and then Andrew was on the phone until midnight. I would go to sleep and dream I had long conversations with her, or little things – like once we were choosing which colour vase we’d put flowers in. I don’t want it to seem like I’m saying, ‘Marilyn and I were connected’ – not at all. But I was thinking of her so much, some days I would go home and have dinner and as I was washing the dishes I would just start sobbing, crying and crying, because I had this terrible feeling – I knew I couldn’t fix it.”
Ribbed wool crew-neck jumper by LOUIS VUITTON. Tiffany Victoria mixed cluster drop earrings in platinum with diamonds and Tiffany & Co Schlumberger Fleurage Stitches bracelet in platinum and 18-carat gold with diamonds by TIFFANY & CO. And polyamideand elastane mesh suspender belt and stockings (both worn throughout) by MAISON CLOSE. Photography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Stretch denim dress with sequin embroidery by RICK OWENS. Metallic leather stilettos by GIANVITO ROSSIPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Paloma, the deceptively wide-eyed CIA agent de Armas played in last year’s No Time to Die, the film that closed the era on Daniel Craig’s brilliantly disgruntled take on James Bond. De Armas went straight from shooting Blonde under the stars on Santa Monica beach onto a red-eye, arriving at London’s Pinewood Studios to break more ground as the first Cuban actor to play a leading Bond woman. Her first takes, though, came out in Monroe’s whispery flutter. “I wasn’t ready to let her go,” she says. “In my heart I wish I’d had a few more days to say goodbye.” Still, she went on to deliver a firework of a performance, dispatching at least ten Spectre villains in the space of 12 minutes on a lavish replica set of Havana, Cuba.
De Armas, of course, was born in the real Havana, Cuba, in 1988, before moving aged three to Santa Cruz del Norte, a small, palm-filled town on the country’s northern coast where her father worked in a government office. Minus internet and social media, her childhood played out in the street. “You’re in a country where you don’t have much contact with the world, you’re kind of in a bubble,” she says. “But in some ways that makes you focus on life and friendships instead of all the noise. I grew up barefoot, running on the rocks by the beach, swimming. Me and my friends performed plays for the neighbours. I had a thing for climbing lamp posts and trees, and I was obsessed with rescuing cats and dogs from the street – every day I’d come back with a new animal and drive my mom crazy.”
When she was ten the family returned to Havana, a move that alerted her to the capital’s prestigious, and rigorous, National Theatre School, an arts complex with soaring architecture. De Armas badgered her parents to let her audition, but they tried to dissuade her at first from a dream with such slim chances of success. “Big mistake!” she says with a laugh. “I became determined.” After six long days of improvisation-based auditions she was among the handful of candidates who won a place, enrolling at 14 and often hitchhiking to get there each day. By 16 she had landed a lead role as a teenager longing to escape pre-revolutionary Cuba in the feature Una rosa de Francia – much to the irritation of her school, who disapproved of their students juggling acting studies with acting jobs. “But I didn’t care,” she shrugs. “In my opinion there was no better school than a movie set. So I did both – I would often fall asleep in class but I would catch up with what I missed.” Even at that age, her ambitions were reaching beyond the shores of her homeland; a few months before graduating, she made the decision to uproot her life and relocate to Madrid alone, courtesy of a Spanish passport through her maternal grandparents. It was a tactical move – had she graduated, she would have faced several years of national social service while watching her career stall. “My heart belongs to Cuba but I knew I had to get out of there to grow,” she says. “I was always aware of the very low ceiling that unfortunately Cuban artists and people in general have. I knew I had more to do, more to learn.”
Ribbed stretch cotton vest and denim-printed leather trousers by BOTTEGA VENETAPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Compact viscose body and thigh-high leather boots with cotton ruffles by ALAÏAPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
When she arrived in the Spanish capital aged 18, de Armas barely knew anyone except her agent, but the gamble paid off: two weeks later she won the role of a fearless schoolgirl in the homegrown television series El Internado. Set in an elite boarding school teeming with murky secrets and ghoulish happenings, the show put her on the covers of teen magazines and made her famous nationwide overnight. At two series a year, it was an acting bootcamp, but also provided the still-adolescent actor with a surrogate family to assuage her homesickness. “Thank God I had that support network,” she says. “Being alone in Spain was really tough. It never crossed my mind to go back, but it was hard. I’d never been anywhere else before and it was a huge culture shock. To be honest, I just started eating candy, chocolate and donuts – everything I’d never had when I was younger.” She stuck with the series for three years, “and then I was like, OK, I’m not learning anything new”. By then, though, the financial crisis was biting in Spain and new film productions had ground to a worrying standstill. (“If no solutions are found, it could spell the end of many a promising career,” wrote the Spanish newspaper El País in a 2012 article entitled No Money, No Movies.) De Armas, already conscious of being typecast in teen roles, was getting restless. In 2014, an opportunity arrived that she grasped with characteristic tenacity. She was shooting Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Hands of Stone, playing the wholly undutiful wife of the hell-raising Panamanian boxing champ Roberto Durán, a part that transformed her into a hot-pink-Lycra-wearing mother of five. “De Niro was in it, and his agent came one day to a table read when we were shooting in Panama,” she remembers. “Afterwards they called up and said they wanted to represent me. I went back to Madrid, gave away all my stuff, packed a suitcase and left for Los Angeles.”
“Acting is my passion and what makes me happy, but it’s not who I am. That’s one of the reasons I left LA. I want to go there, see my friends, see my industry, but it’s not my life” – Ana de Armas
It was another roll of the dice: when she touched down at LAX, she had none of the profile she had built in Spain – instead she now faced auditions in a language she didn’t yet speak. “When I had my first meeting with my agent, I couldn’t say anything,” she says. “I just nodded and smiled. It was starting from scratch.” And yet she kept winning roles, showing up to auditions with her lines learnt phonetically. There was Eli Roth’s horror Knock Knock, in which she schools a beleaguered Keanu Reeves in stranger danger, then Todd Phillips’s black comedy War Dogs, based on the true story of two coke-fuelled Miami hustlers who made millions brokering shady arms deals for the US military in Iraq. As the girlfriend at home with the baby, de Armas made far more of her role than was on the page, but the language barrier was suffocating her usually expansive range: “In one of the scenes the director wanted to change the dialogue. It was one of the worst moments of my career. In front of the entire crew I tried and tried and just couldn’t do it. Todd went, ‘Forget it, just say it the way it was.’ I was so sad and frustrated because I couldn’t be myself, and I had no freedom as an actor. But it was a great reality check. I was like, ‘I have to do better. Work harder.’ And I did.” She signed up to a four month crash course in English and plunged back into auditions, continuing to make a name for herself – occasionally in films that didn’t deserve her – as an actor capable of rearranging our emotions with lived-in performances brimming with humanity.
Her breakthrough, though, came by way of a nonhuman role. In Denis Villeneuve’s ravishing, perpetually raining neo-noir Blade Runner 2049, she morphed from manga to geisha to Fifties housewife at the touch of a button as AI projection Joi. Despite her hologram’s ability to vanish inside a handheld console or stretch into a building-height advertisement, de Armas invested Joi with three dimensions and found tangible chemistry with Ryan Gosling’s sad-eyed, replicant-hunting gumshoe. The film won a couple of Oscars, put de Armas on genuine billboards and then on the red carpet, between Gosling and Harrison Ford. So it must have been a little exasperating when soon after, she was asked to provide an audition tape for a secret project that described her character in two words: “‘Latina, caretaker’,” de Armas says, rolling her eyes. “I was like, I do not have the energy, what is this?” She was in the midst of a gruelling threemonth shoot for Greg Barker’s biopic Sergio, pinballing from Thailand to Brazil to Jordan as the partner of peace-broker and human rights crusader Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat who was killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad in 2003. “I said, you either tell me why this is worth it or I can’t. I passed on it twice because of that description. In the end, they sent me the whole script and I thought, oh shit! Right away I did an audition.” The film was Knives Out, Rian Johnson’s sly Cluedo game of a murder mystery, and her pivotal turn as the nurse to a millionaire crime novelist wove a critique of Trump’s immigration policies that subverted that cliché of a character description. It won her a Golden Globe nomination and the admiration of co-star Daniel Craig, who engineered the role in Bond that transformed her into one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors.
Ruffled polyester top by MAISON MARGIELA. Tiffany Victoria earring in platinum with South Sea pearls and diamonds by TIFFANY & CO. And nylon and spandex mesh gloves (throughout) by WHAT KATIE DIDPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Silk cape and corseted silk skirt with train by OLIVIER THEYSKENS. Pleated silk bandeau bra by MISS CROFTON. Suspender belt and stockings as before. Satin and nylon underwear by WHAT KATIE DID. And bracelet in platinum with diamonds by TIFFANY & COPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Today she has a home in Havana (“My friends come over, we cook and play dominoes and what starts with some pork and rice and black beans ends up in a huge music jam session”) and an apartment in New York, shared with her boyfriend, Paul Boukadakis, and her two dogs, Salsa and Elvis. The latter canine is also now a movie star: when Dominik met Elvis, he was struck by his uncanny resemblance to Monroe’s own Maltese terrier, Maf (short for Mafia), given to her by Frank Sinatra the year before she died. And so Elvis was hired to play him – you can see the silky white terrier in the spectral, hazily lit scenes depicting Monroe’s bleary final hours behind the bougainvillea-laced walls of Fifth Helena Drive. When I mention struggling to sleep post that haunting ending, de Armas nods and her voice drops a little. “Those final scenes at her house – I know she was there with us,” she says. “We all felt it. And I think you can feel that in the movie.”
During her lifetime – and even her afterlife – Monroe was reduced time and again to a caricature of herself, despite her formidable talent and ambitions. Blonde’s intricate, knotty portrayal of her, de Armas says, sets out to reconstruct that diminishing narrative. “It’s the story of the double standards and hypocrisy of the culture we live in,” she says. “People obsessed over her body and shamed her for it. They criticise you for the same things they celebrate you for. There’s no way of winning. Marilyn was one of the first actresses who broke her deal with the studio and created her own production company, to make her own films. This was massive at the time. She wanted to be taken seriously. But no one was listening. They just wanted her to keep repeating the same thing forever.” In some ways, though, Monroe might help de Armas avoid that impossible trap herself. With Blonde, the actor who has already shapeshifted from lamp-post-climbing kid to Havana theatre student to Spanish teen star to Hollywood action heroine looks poised for another reinvention. “So many action roles have come my way from those few minutes in Bond,” she says. “If Blonde now brings me all these intense, dark roles, I will be happy. Blonde was hard on my head and hard on my heart, but I want to confront these issues. I want to talk about taboos and uncomfortable things and figure out how we really feel about them. And I think telling stories is a beautiful way to do that.”
Hair: Orlando Pita at Home Agency. Make-up: Francelle Daly at Home Agency. Set design: Piers Hanmer. Manicure: Megumi Yamamoto at Susan Price. Digital tech: Tadaaki Shibuya. Photographic assistants: Nick Brinley, Alex Hopkins and Shri Prasham. Styling assistants: George Pistachio, Molly Shillingford, Rosie Borgerhoff Mulder and Cornelius Lafayette. Tailor: Eliz Diratsaoglu at Lars Nordensten. Set-design assistant: Louis Sarowsky. Producer: Gracey Connelly. Post-production: Gloss.
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale internationally now. Buy a copy here.
The Ethereal Beauty of Fran Summers
The British model is shot, covered in Swarovski crystals, by Elizaveta Porodina and styled by Katie Shillingford for the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine
This editorial appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine which is on sale now. Head here to purchase a copy.
Crystal mesh bandeau, hood and Mesmera crystal and rhodium plated cocktail rings (throughout) by SWAROVSKI. Polyamide and elastane mesh body customised with Swarovski crystals by MAISON CLOSE. Stretch tulle bra by YASMINE ESLAMPhotography by Elizaveta Porodina, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Mesmera crystal and rhodium plated breast plate by SWAROVSKI. Polyamide and elastane mesh body customised with Swarovski crystals by MAISON CLOSE. Stretch tulle bra by YASMINE ESLAMI. Polyamide and elastane mesh body customised with Swarovskicrystals by MAISON CLOSE. Polyester thong skirt by SUPRIYA LELE. Cotton underwear by BASERANGE. Photography by Elizaveta Porodina, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Constella metal and crystal dress, necklaces (worn as necklace and bracelet) and cuff by SWAROVSKI. Stretch tulle body and bra by YASMINE ESLAMIPhotography by Elizaveta Porodina, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Somnia metal and crystal bra, Lucent crystal stud earring, Harmonia metal and crystal choker, bangle and bracelet, and Gema necklaces and motif ring by SWAROVSKI. Stretch tulle body by YASMINE ESLAMI. And crew neck stretch nylon bodysuit by SKIMSPhotography by Elizaveta Porodina, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Astrologia palladium and crystal bra and ear cuffs, Millenia crystal and rhodium plated cross-body chain, Dextera rhodium and crystal chain bracelets, Harmonia crystal and mixed metal rings and Millenia rhodium and crystal necklaces (worn as a belt)by SWAROVSKI. Mesh body customised with Swarovski crystals by MAISON CLOSE. Stretch tulle high-waisted underwear by YASMINE ESLAMI. Photography by Elizaveta Porodina, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Polyamide and eco-lycra gloved body by ROOM 24. Millenia crystal and rhodium plated ear cuffs and Constella metal and crystal earrings by SWAROVSKIPhotography by Elizaveta Porodina, Styling by Katie Shillingford
See the full story in the gallery above.
Hair: Olivier Schawalder at Bryant Artists. Make-up: Aurore Gibrien at Bryant Artists using GUCCI BEAUTY. Model: Fran Summers at Elite. Casting: Noah Shelley at Streeters. Set design: César Sebastien at Swan Mgmt. Manicure: Eri Narita at Artists Unit. Lighting: Josef Beyer. Photographic assistant: Valentine Lacour. Videographer: William Nixon. Styling assistants: George Pistachio, Juliette Dumazy and Claire Thorn. Seamstress: Pryscille. Hair assistant: Damien Lacoussade. Make-up assistants: Claire Laugeois and Christine Hubert. Set-design assistants: Frédérick Asséo and Ilan Aksoul. Production: Kitten. Postproduction: INK
This editorial appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine which is on sale now. Head here to purchase a copy.
Luis Alberto Rodriguez Photographs Dancers as Human Sculptures
For the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine, Luis Alberto Rodriguez and Robbie Spencer imagine a series of abstract sculptures in a fusion of fashion, choreography, and the human form
This editorial appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine which is on sale now. Head here to purchase a copy.
Lea is wearing a cotton jersey neck-pillow top with back pillow by CHA MYUNG. Linen rayon petal dress by WED. Layered silk and wool socks (worn throughout) by FALKE.And suede sandals (worn throughout) by PACO RABANNE Photography by Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Akti is wearing a link rings polyester skirt (worn as dress) and nylon and polyurethane body by ISSEY MIYAKE. Chenille socks (worn throughout) by JASMINE BROADHURST. Wool leg warmers (worn throughout) by DSQUARED2.And wooden clog sandals (worn throughout) by MAISON MARGIELA Photography by Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Lea is wearing a vest and shorts by SALVATORE FERRAGAMO. Hand-macramé dress by CHLOÉ. Cotton body by WOLFORD. Silk hood (worn throughout) by ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD.Akti is wearing a dress by CHLOÉ. Spandex body by MELITTA BAUMEISTER. Lambskin leather shorts by LOEWE. Loden wool hood (worn throughout) by MAISON MARGIELA. Socks by JASMINE BROADHURST. Photography by Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Lea is wearing a PVC cloud dress with boned bodice by AMBER HEALEY. Socks and sandals as before.Akti is wearing a PVC cloud dress with boned bodice by AMBER HEALEY. Socks and clog sandals as before. Photography by Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Lea is wearing a double-breasted tailored wool jacket with bomber sleeves in poly faille by ALEXANDER MCQUEEN. Wide-ribbed knit rayon dress by TOGA. Akti is wearing a draped satin bustier dress by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO.Cashmere cardigan by CHANEL. Bonded double crepe scuba body by MAXIMILIAN. Cropped cotton shirt (worn as hood) by PATOU. Embellished stretch leather and gathered satin gloves by MING LIM. Photography by Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Loli is wearing an elongated draped Venetian wool jacket with signature sleeves and layered patchwork dress with smocking and tulle hip by SIMONE ROCHA. Pleated tulle collar and draped tulle blouse with bateau neckline by SCHIAPARELLI.Silk cotton cello dress and silk cotton boots with kitten heels (worn throughout) by CONNOR BAXTER. And Juste un Clou yellow gold hoop earrings by CARTIER. Photography by Luis Alberto Rodriguez, Styling by Robbie Spencer
See the full story in the gallery above.
Hair: Mari Ohashi at LGA Management using BOUCLÈME. Make-up: Ammy Drammeh at Bryant Artists using CHARLOTTE TILBURY. Models: Loli Bahia at Women Management, Akti-Magdalini Konstantinou at Crumb and Lea Orož. Casting: Mollie Dendle at Mini Title. Set design: Afra Zamara at Second Name. Photographic assistants: Alessandro Tranchini and Cameron Williamson. Styling assistants: Met Kilinc and Isabella This page, from left: Lea is wearing a silk tulle minidress and satin and tulle minidress by DSQUARED2. Spandex body by MELITTA BAUMEISTER. Recycled cotton blend shorts by SALVATORE FERRAGAMO. Hood and socks as before. Beaded cashmere gloves by SIMONE ROCHA. Tulle gloves (underneath) by YUHAN WANG. And leather loafers by PROENZA SCHOULER. Akti is wearing a cotton blazer by SPORTMAX. Patchwork knitted cardigan with pearl and crystal embellishment and tutu dress with rickrack trim by SIMONE ROCHA. And hood, leg warmers, socks and sandals as before. Akti is wearing a denim bomber jacket by DSQUARED2. Reflective waxed cotton trench dress by RORY TOWNSEND. Opposite: Loli is wearing a cotton trench coat with metal plate by LOEWE. Leather bonnet by ELLA MORRIS. And leg warmers, socks and sandals as before Damazio. Hair assistant: Nao Sato. Make-up assistant: Rina. Set-design assistant: Anderson Asteclines. Printing: Sarah England. Producer: Noot Coates at Town Productions. Production assistants: Simon Biu and Jess Chant. Post-production: Dtouch Creative
This editorial appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine which is on sale now. Head here to purchase a copy.
A Personal Portrait of Vincent Rockins, by Alasdair McLellan
Alasdair McLellan and Alister Mackie combine forces to capture the young musician, designer and model for the cover of our Spring/Summer 2022 issue
This editorial appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine which is on sale now. Head here to purchase a copy.
Printed knitted wool top and skirt (just seen) by ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOOD. Gold paper-clip earring (worn throughout) by HILLIER BARTLEY. Silver and pearl necklace by VIVIENNE WESTWOODPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Photography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Embroidered leather jacket with appliqué detail by JEAN-LOUIS SCHERRER from STEVEN PHILIP STUDIO. Silk shirt, embellished velvet trousers and velvet bow by GUCCI. Leather platform boots from THE CONTEMPORARY WARDROBE COLLECTIONPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Embroidered leather jacket with appliqué detail by JEAN-LOUIS SCHERRER from STEVEN PHILIP STUDIO. Silk shirt, embellished velvet trousers and velvet bow by GUCCI. Leather platform boots from THE CONTEMPORARY WARDROBE COLLECTIONPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Polyester track vest and trousers by ERL. Earring and necklace as before. Leather platform boots by NATACHA MARROPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
See the full story in the gallery above.
Hair: Syd Hayes at Art and Commerce. Make-up: Miranda Joyce at Streeters. Model: Vincent Rockins at Kate Moss Agency. Photographic assistants: Lex Kembery and Simon Mackinlay. Styling assistants: Vincent Pons and Brian Conway. Hair assistant: Ryan Wood. Make-up assistant: Faye Bluff. Producer: Alice Kasinather-Jones. Production assistants: Ed Conway and Arthur Millier. Post-production: Output. Special thanks to Spring Studios
This editorial appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine which is on sale now. Head here to purchase a copy.
Craig McDean Captures the Season’s Most Magnetic Looks
In a series of dancerly portraits, Craig McDean and Katie Shillingford capture the highlights of the Spring/Summer 2022 season
This editorial appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine which is on sale now. Head here to purchase a copy.
Giselle is wearing a cotton vest, pleated cotton shorts with lace detail, antique metal ring with enamel and Swarovski crystals and thigh-high stretch leather boots by GIVENCHYPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Crepe chiffon minidress with velvet bow, latex corset, tulle bra and knickers with GG star embroidery, felt cowboy hat, tulle suspender belt, cotton stockings and leather platform sandals by GUCCIPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Maty is wearing a corseted draped chiffon dress and leather belt by ANDREAS KRONTHALER FOR VIVIENNE WESTWOODPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Ribbed jersey swimsuit, cotton T-shirt, resin and strass earrings, metal, resin and strass necklaces, metal and resin belt and leather ballerina flats with metal ankle straps by CHANELPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Maty is wearing a chiffon cape, lacquered stretch denim bodysuit and cotton top with chiffon cape sleeves by RICK OWENS. Crystal bracelet by SWAROVSKI. And varnished leather platform stilettos by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLOPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Giselle is wearing a leather jacket, satin skirt, jacquard skort and leather slingback pumps by PRADAPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
See the full story in the gallery above.
Hair: Eugene Souleiman at Streeters. Make-up: Lynsey Alexander at Streeters. Models: Giselle Norman and Majesty Amare at Premier Model Management and Maty Fall at IMG Models. Casting: Noah Shelley at Streeters. Set design: Andy Hillman at Streeters. Manicure: Lorraine Griffin. Digital tech: Nicholas Ong. Photographic assistants: Nick Brinley, Margaux Jouanneau and Tomo Inenaga. Styling assistants: George Pistachio and Joseph Bates. Seamstress: Anissa at Chapman Burrell. Hair assistants: Massimo Di Stefano and Carlo Avena. Make-up assistant: Phoebe Brown. Set-design assistant: Saskia Wickins. Props assistant: Lizzy Gilbert. Production: North Six
This editorial appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine which is on sale now. Head here to purchase a copy.
“I Want to Bring a Sexuality Back”: Inside Pieter Mulier’s Alaïa
For the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine, Pieter Mulier – the Belgian designer helming the house of Alaïa – speaks to Alexander Fury on passion, Picasso, working with Raf Simons, and the spirit of fashion’s most maverick maison
Pieter Mulier seems at home at the house of Alaïa. It’s an early winter evening, dark by six, almost a year since he began as creative director. We are in the backstage area for his January 2022 show, normally the Alaïa boutique at 7 rue de Moussy, with its panels of glass and bare brick walls, gargantuan artworks just leaning against them. As you walk in from the street, you ascend a small flight of stairs, directly facing a monolithic colour-daubed canvas by the artist Christoph von Weyhe, Azzedine Alaïa’s partner. In the cabine to the left there’s a Julian Schnabel smashed-plate portrait of Alaïa that, thanks to the angle of the shattered porcelain around the mouth, appears to be staring beatifically. When the light shifts the face seems animated, alive.
Mulier is sitting at a glass-topped table between two rails of the clothes that he’s about to show. I ask him what the collection is about, a hackneyed question. “The beginning of the collection was a sense of family,” Mulier says, softly. “It’s a love song, for Azzedine. And it’s everything I find important for Azzedine. Everything he loved.” As he says this he’s flanked by body-conscious dresses, their bombastic shapes squiggling even on their hangers. There’s a bit of animal print behind him, and a full skirt in featherweight poplin, the kind Alaïa adored, but here attached to leather thigh-high boots. He’s playing with a pair of sandals that have brackets of red metal bolted on as their heels. They’re based on the work of Jean Prouvé: Alaïa was a passionate collector, a statement that understates his fervour entirely. He slept in a glass petrol station Prouvé designed in 1953, one of only three remaining. I often feared leaning back on a chair chez Alaïa, because most of them should have been in museums. Behind Mulier are shelves stacked with bangles. “Techno Nancy Cunard,” Mulier says, picking one up. It’s a polished-brass, small-scale recreation of the Alaïa Diabolo waist-cincher belt from Spring/Summer 1992. In leather aerated with punched designs resembling broderie anglaise and with serrated edges, it’s a favourite archival piece of Mulier’s. It’s one of the first he reissued, full-size, in different leather finishes, including one that resembled blown glass. In miniature, in metal, that belt-bangle looks almost industrial, a small cog for a big machine.
Mulier was an unexpected appointment to Alaïa, announced about three and a half years after the founder’s death in November 2017. He was a relative unknown outside tight-knit fashion circles, having worked as right-hand man to Raf Simons from 2002 – when he began as an intern in that designer’s company – until 2018. By that point, Mulier had been appointed creative director of Calvin Klein, alongside Simons’s chief creative officer role, but was still a low-key figure even though he took a bow with Simons at their debut Calvin Klein 205W39NYC show for Autumn/Winter 2017, and regardless of his role in Frédéric Tcheng's 2015 feature documentary Dior and I, which charted his work alongside Simons on their debut haute couture collection for the label.
That did raise Mulier’s profile, granted – and gives something of an insight into both his working processes and the inestimable importance of his innate ability to enthuse and engage a team of highly trained and, perhaps, slightly jaded technicians to make his dreams a reality, to excite the same passion in them that he feels himself. You observe Mulier working with Simons to manipulate pieces from the Dior archive, dusting off cobwebs to try to give a new relevance to the house’s storied but sometimes staid history. And you see the delicate pas de deux between Mulier’s mind and the ateliers’ hands. “Pieter, j’adore,” said Florence Chehet, the formidable première of Dior’s flou atelier, to camera. She’s blushing. And eliciting that kind of emotional reaction – joy, loyalty, devotion – is arguably more Alaïa than any curvy leather jacket or spiral-zipped knit dress.
When I first speak to Mulier, four months after he was appointed to Alaïa and two and a half weeks before his debut show for the label, he’s excited, enthused. He lights up when talking about Alaïa’s ateliers, and understandably so. They are known as some of the best in fashion – as other houses closed their haute couture operations, Azzedine Alaïa employed the best of the best, with impeccable pedigrees. His retinue of staff included seamstresses trained by Cristóbal Balenciaga and 15 former members of Yves Saint Laurent’s couture workrooms, employed after the cessation of that line in 2002. Many are still with the company today – including Alaïa’s first assistant, a shaven-headed Hiroshima-born artist and designer named Hideki Seo. Mulier only brought one collaborator with him – Frenchwoman Clémande Burgevin Blachman, who headed Calvin Klein’s home division and who is an Alaïa obsessive herself.
In June 2021, over one of those glitchy Zoom connections that have become the defining audio of our time, Mulier’s reverence for the craft of the Alaïa ateliers – and their point of view – is paramount. “I ask the two heads of the atelier, when we see pieces, ‘Is it Alaïa?’ Always. At the beginning they didn’t answer me. I said, ‘I really respect you, I really want to know. Is it Alaïa?’ In three weeks they started to answer.” He smiles. “They’ve been here 25 years, they know.” And the outcome? “Last week, when we did the selection for the runway and the showroom, they were both crying. That’s even more important than the collection.” He takes a breath. “The ateliers are alive again. It’s a human thing.” It’s clear why he was chosen.
Cotton dress and hand-painted iron earrings by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Cotton dress and hand-painted iron earrings by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Jump forward to this year, back inside the bare brick walls of the Alaïa backstage-boutique space. The January 2022 show marked Mulier’s second catwalk collection for Alaïa, but his fourth overall. There was a swim capsule but, first of all, a pre-emptive series of pieces, unveiled in a digital campaign photographed by Paolo Roversi, an old friend of Alaïa’s and a new collaborator for Mulier, as a kind of preview before his first show in July 2021. They consist of what the house calls archetypes but what Mulier, privately, calls Alaïa icons – and they’re the rare fashion pieces today that truly deserve that often-hyperbolic moniker. There’s that Diabolo belt, alongside leggings and a coeur croisé halter top, a flared skirt, and another laced tight down the thigh and constructed of horizontal strips of fabric, from Alaïa’s famous 1986 Bandelette collection. “I remade each icon in a reflective yarn from Japan,” Mulier says. “It’s all the shapes that I think are diehard. It sets the tone.” As shot by Roversi, they became silhouettes of pure light, almost ethereal. Maybe spiritual.
It’s difficult not to feel the spirit of Alaïa in the house he built, because it isn’t just a house in that fashion sense. Azzedine Alaïa’s idiosyncratic bedroom is perched on top of the building; von Weyhe, whose relationship began with the designer in 1959, still sleeps a few hundred feet from where Mulier and I are talking, in an apartment in the warren-like complex. Monsieur Alaïa famously hosted friends in the space, with multiple bedrooms for them to stay in, and held dinner parties and lunches around his kitchen table for an eye-popping mix of his atelier workers, artists, writers and general devotees. I once failed to recognise Monica Bellucci, seated opposite me. Because who has Monica Bellucci in their kitchen?
Maison Alaïa was always more home than house – Alaïa’s first fashion shows, in the early 1980s, were held in his own tiny flat on rue de Bellechasse on Paris’s Rive Gauche, audiences crammed into the living room, some sitting on the floor, Alaïa pressing clothes in the kitchen. The house in the Marais is much bigger – 750,000 square feet, or thereabouts. Alaïa moved there in about 1988, and began showing his collections there the following year. Yet the man himself always seemed omnipresent – startled shoppers often caught a glimpse of him crossing the boutique floor, as his studio was just overhead. Physical then, his presence is ideological now, almost five years after he died.
Silk and wool velvet knitted ensemble with gloves and hand-crafted glass and brass bracelets by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Silk and wool velvet knitted ensemble with gloves and hand-crafted glass and brass bracelets by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Mulier doesn’t shy away from the legacy of Alaïa, one many would find overwhelming or overpowering. Indeed he seemed giddy at the thought of it when we first met at the house last year, bubbling over with references to Alaïa’s greatest hits – which were also present, all around. Burgevin Blachman was darting about wearing a leopard intarsia skirt, from Alaïa’s Autumn/Winter 1991 collection. It would be tempting to say that Mulier’s collection featured a checklist of Alaïa-isms – but that would be lazy, which Mulier isn’t. What it felt like was an instinctive, even gut reaction to the potential sucker punch of taking up one of the most formidable mantles in modern fashion. Mulier went with what he loved. “I played around with what I thought was Alaïa,” he told me, just before that first catwalk collection was presented. “The base was in the Eighties, that’s when he began to build. The sense, the essence.” It was as direct as the curvy corset-belts, body-defining knits and leopard prints, and as subtle as a meandering fagoted seam defining the erogenous zones of the bust and waist on brief dresses and bodysuits.
“Full-on” is how Mulier described that first collection, a recalibration of those Alaïa greatest hits, reimagined for a new audience. “I want to bring a sexuality back,” he added. “Alaïa is the only house that can do sexuality without being vulgar. Here in the atelier, from the moment they do something sensual – nearly explicitly sexual – it’s just beauty. That’s the strength of this house.” He even switched the labels back – in the 1980s and 1990s they were bold black on white typeface. “It’s a small thing, but it’s an important thing,” he says. “You know, most of them were stitched all the way around. So you could never take it out.” He laughs. “Very Azzedine.” Mulier also chose to make his debut outside the boutique on the aforementioned rue de Moussy, a doubly loaded act. Firstly, it recalled a famous Arthur Elgort image of statuesque Alaïa models in the street after one of his shows in 1986, and an Ellen von Unwerth film that includes scenes of Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington cavorting around the Marais after another in 1990. Those images loaned a reality to Alaïa’s fantasies – and the same to Mulier’s. It was also, Mulier says, about humility and respect. “You must respect Alaïa,” he says. Mulier smiles a great deal, but he isn’t smiling now.
If that first collection was something of a mark of that respect, it was also a communiqué of Mulier’s intent as well as a palimpsest demonstrating his knowledge of Alaïa’s past. Mulier – like Azzedine Alaïa – is a passionate collector of vintage clothing. He and his partner, the designer Matthieu Blazy, who is now creative director of Bottega Veneta, have a vast archive of vintage pieces at their home in Antwerp, spanning from Twenties Lanvin through more obscure names such as Norman Norell to modern masters like Martin Margiela. Since his appointment last year, Mulier has – understandably – been buying vintage Alaïa pieces in a frenzy, turning them inside out, examining their cut and construction. He’s especially drawn, he says, to early Eighties pieces, which are the rarest.
Silk and wool knitted lace dress with shearling tail and matching gloves by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Silk and wool knitted lace dress with shearling tail and matching gloves by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
There’s a magic in objects that images often cannot convey – especially in work like that of Alaïa, devised as three-dimensional pieces with a sculptural quality. Moreover, many contain tricks and traits that can only really be appreciated in the physical handling – skirts tugged into position by belts, dresses whose surfaces are composed of a multitude of interlocked pattern pieces, giving them a unique physical tension, like stroking your hands over a living body, feeling the give and take of muscle and skin. Alaïa once described one of those dresses, intricately seamed in wool jersey, as like a racehorse. And he certainly believed in the magic of objects – his quietly amassed archive, held by the foundation established after his death, is now regarded as probably the most significant private collection of fashion in the world. It includes pieces by Balenciaga and Charles James, Madeleine Vionnet and the Hollywood costume designer Gilbert Adrian, all of which influenced his own designs. The archive holds more than 22,000 examples of those, too.
Many designers accumulate fashion collections – vintage pieces are valuable reference points, after all. But the manner in which both Mulier and Alaïa collected has a certain kinship – a value given to pieces from the past, an innate appreciation of fashion, a love of and fixation with craft, and an urge to protect. It’s miles from the slavish copying of archival pieces, and luckily light years from the hopefully apocryphal tales of fashion designers torching vintage garments to hide just how closely they were ‘inspired’. Alaïa once told me a story of a rich family he knew, former clients of Vionnet. They lived next door to a convent and, at the end of every season, gave their cast-off couture to the nuns to chop up and sew into habits. Alaïa looked aghast when relaying that story. That idea of cherishing fashion, the value of its history, isn’t something everyone has.
There are other connections between the two. How about the fact they’re both kind of outsiders in Paris? Alaïa was born in Tunisia, coming to Paris in 1957, Mulier is Belgian, although his accent is soft. Both began quietly, in the shadows – and, actually, worked in some of the same ateliers. Alaïa’s career began at Christian Dior – although he was only employed for four days because of issues with immigration papers. Mulier was there for three years, from 2012 to 2015, alongside Raf Simons, who was then the artistic director of womenswear. Alaïa, incidentally, attended that first couture show, and all the ones that followed. It was Simons who first encouraged Mulier, as a student, to pursue fashion instead of his intended vocation of architecture, in which he originally trained at the Institut Saint-Luc in Brussels after a brief foray into law. Another parallel: Alaïa studied sculpture, not fashion, yet he referred to himself as a bâtisseur, a builder, although his clothes were neither stiff nor heavy. Indeed, Alaïa’s breakthrough in 1980 was to create a collection entirely in leather, studded with eyelets. He gave the hitherto unyielding material a new softness and suppleness, pulling it tight around the body. The clothing collection was originally designed for the shoe manufacturer Charles Jourdan in 1979 – the company freaked out at the strident, powerful sexuality of his garments and nixed the collection, but Alaïa presented it under his own name, his first ready-to-wear collection.
Wool blazer and matching jacket, cotton ruffle volants and leather boots with hand-painted iron heels by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Wool blazer and matching jacket, cotton ruffle volants and leather boots with hand-painted iron heels by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Sex is something Mulier is interested in – who isn’t? And sex was Alaïa’s leitmotif. “The iconic part, for me, was from 1980 to 1994 – the heyday,” Mulier says. “It wasn’t lady – although I do love that aspect. But that is when the Alaïa revolution really happens. Timeless simplicity, sensuality and sexuality. That’s the most important.” His first collection showed both sides of sexuality: a python top and skirt, composed of snakeskin, were laced tight, gaps showing the flesh underneath. Another floor-length dress covered a model entirely, a hood smothering her scalp, gloves her hands, but the dress clinging close, which reminded me of those violated Vionnet nun’s habits. In his second collection, there were vestal virgin shirt dresses that were cocooned in the back, drawn in at the knee and kicked out into a pooling mermaid skirt.
If the first show was, by necessity, demonstrating Mulier’s agility with and understanding of Alaïa’s codes and, indeed, his respect – “A beautiful word,” he says – the second seemed like he was relaxing, stretching a little. “Clients are coming. Couture is working extremely well. I feel confident,” he says. While Mulier doesn’t want to impose his vision on Alaïa, he hastens to add that Alaïa cannot be purely referential. “Don’t change it, but push it,” he says. “Bit by bit.” It embraced more of Mulier’s own loves. The soundtrack was classical music – “I was raised with classical music,” Mulier says, commenting that it reminded him of his mother. There is a sequence of dresses created in close collaboration with the Picasso Administration that marry Alaïa’s body-clinging knit with motifs drawn from Pablo Picasso’s sculptural porcelain female figurines of the late 1940s, called tanagras after their reference to antecedents from the Hellenistic period. “An ode to Azzedine, who was the greatest sculptor of fashion,” Mulier says. “The idea behind it is to put Azzedine – as the greatest sculptor of fashion – with the greatest sculptor in the world.” He smiles. “And also, everybody talks about collaboration … but you cannot go higher than Picasso.” He shrugs.
There’s also history there: Mulier was able to call Claude Ruiz-Picasso, son of the artist and the painter Françoise Gilot, and one of the heads of the Picasso Administration, to ask for permission. “We worked together at Jil,” he says. That is of course Jil Sander, where Raf Simons and Mulier collaborated with the administration in 2011 on a series of knits inspired by ceramics. “There’s some Raf in there too,” Mulier allows, of these dresses. “It’s a nod to Raf, what he means in my career.” Simons is, of course, part of Mulier’s community – his family, even. After more than 15 years working side by side, the two are still close – they speak constantly, and Simons was a prominent front-row presence at Mulier’s debut. For this second show, he was referenced in a letter addressed to Azzedine that Mulier placed on each seat: “Raf, who taught me the love of art and how to mix it within my creations.”
“The idea behind it is to put Azzedine – as the greatest sculptor of fashion – with the greatest sculptor in the world … everybody talks about collaboration … but you cannot go higher than Picasso” – Pieter Mulier
Their continued synergy is interesting: Mulier shows me a dress where fullness is created by nylon crin (or horsehair) knitted into the structure itself. “They normally apply it after,” Mulier says. “This is the first time.” A week before, Simons had enthused to me about sweaters in the Autumn/Winter 2022 men’s collection he had created alongside Miuccia Prada. Their swaggering shape was created by nylon thread similarly knitted into the shoulder line. “It’s actually all people, on a personal level, that gave me a chance,” Mulier continues. “It’s the house of Alaïa, I cannot talk of Azzedine like that” – he and Mulier never met. “But still, yes – it’s his house. It’s Raf, who still plays such an important role in my life. And sculpting and fashion and architecture is the concept. It’s about how to sculpt beauty.” He stops again, smiles. “Sounds very pretentious, and I don’t mean it pretentiously at all.”
It is interesting that instinct leads Mulier back, somehow, to Azzedine Alaïa, who referenced ancient Greece also, in his artfully draped and bound dresses; he adored the Musée Picasso, which opened in the Marais a few years before Alaïa moved to the rue de Moussy. And the Picasso family were intimates. “He was very close to Claude Picasso,” Mulier says. “We called him, and he said yes to the collaboration in a minute.” Then his voice rises. “Because he used to come here and sit next to Azzedine when he was pattern-making.” The Picasso Administration was included in every step – the resulting dresses, a half-dozen, combine intarsia knit with hand embroidery, and will be limited edition. “They’re very involved, and that’s what I like,” Mulier says. “It’s this sense of community – almost like a Bauhaus.”
Mulier jumps up. He wants to show me the space where the show will be held, an enormous double-height atrium with a vaulted glass roof. “We are showing in Azzedine’s heart,” he says. “I always call it the cathedral.” The Alaïa complex is so big, it straddles an entire city block, and technically the entrance to this space is at 18 rue de la Verrerie, through a pretty courtyard with a giant hammered-bronze female breast incongruously plonked in the centre. It’s a 1966 sculpture by the French artist César – a friend of Alaïa’s, of course – and its full title is Le Sein d’Hélène Rochas, modelled after the embonpoint of that fixture of French high society, a doyenne of haute couture and artist’s muse.
Knitted wool lace bodysuit with matching gloves and patent leather and PVC shoes by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Knitted wool lace bodysuit with matching gloves and patent leather and PVC shoes by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
The cathedral betrays the origins of the Alaïa building – built in the 19th century, it was latterly a warehouse for the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville department store around the corner on the rue de Rivoli, and formerly a factory that, during its time, created clocks and mattresses. That feels ironic: Alaïa was rarely on time – during the 1980s, his shows not only famously ran hours late, but were presented weeks after the rest of the fashion industry had wrapped up their seasonal presentations – and given his passion for his work, he didn’t really sleep much. Alaïa himself presented collections here from 1989 onwards – unless, perhaps, he decided to cancel a show because the clothes weren’t up to his exacting standards, or because he didn’t want to force his beloved dogs out of the space. “In its present, unfinished state, a chill rain dripped through the cracks, showering press and buyers during the 1½-hour wait,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, of Alaïa’s first show at rue de la Verrerie in May 1989. “The models got wet, too.” The models at Mulier’s debut got a little wet also – Paris decided July 2021 was a time for rain.
It brings a wry smile to my face that, to many eyes, the Alaïa headquarters still doesn’t seem finished: when I walk through in January, that exposition hall is a building site. Although, credit where due, that was because the space is also used by the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa to stage exhibitions. They were taking one down, juxtaposing Azzedine Alaïa’s clothes with those of Cristóbal Balenciaga, to allow Mulier to use the place for his sophomore show. Showing there “was my dream, in the beginning”, he says. “But I’m happy I didn’t do it the first time.” Mulier enthuses about a wrought-iron staircase off to one side, normally boxed in and rarely revealed to public view, and by a series of enormous maps painted onto raw plaster walls, again usually hidden. The vaulted ceiling had also been shrouded in cloth that blocked out the sky, Mulier said, for almost 20 years. Stripping Alaïa back to its bones – its foundations – excites him.
What do those constitute? This collection, it seems – it’s the unexpected, the extreme. “It’s big fashion this time,” Mulier says. “It’s about shoulders, about volume. It’s about proportion and sculpting. It’s very simple, really.” There are knitted bodysuits in wool, in black or nude – Alaïa offering nine shades of ‘nude’, reflecting the inclusivity that was one hallmark of its namesake. “You’ll buy it in a box – and it looks like a Sarah Lucas!” Mulier laughs. Sculpture again, I guess. “But on the body it’s sublime.” He sounds just like Simons when he says that word. As with Azzedine Alaïa’s own collections, conventional seasons are eschewed – Alaïa has named them Winter/Spring and Summer/Autumn, reflecting when clothes will actually arrive in stores, and chooses to show them just outside the official haute couture weeks. The collections themselves include a mix of couture pieces and ready-to-wear, which Alaïa himself initiated. “The beauty here is that even ready-to-wear has a couture feeling, the construction, the finishing,” Mulier says. “It’s not important to put it in a category.” The finale of the show, entirely haute couture, features ball gowns made in calfskin and Japanese velvets – all the fabrics, Mulier says, are made especially for Alaïa, including specially treated leathers.
Cotton velvet dress by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Cotton velvet dress by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Some details are more esoteric: several dresses, and those aforementioned bodysuits, are held in place with moulded metal frames around a deep, undulating décolletage. Reflecting Mulier’s love of community spirit, they were shaped by the husband of one of Alaïa’s premières. “He makes staircases,” Mulier says. “She’d go home in the evening and send videos of him manipulating it.” That neckline is an echo of a dress Alaïa called the Carla, after Carla Sozzani. It wasn’t because she wore it: in 1987 she put the dress on the cover of Italian Elle – she was then its editor – shot by Roversi. The publication was devoted to championing Italian fashion only, and Sozzani was promptly fired. I love that story.
Azzedine Alaïa was a storyteller, a raconteur par excellence. Those stories have outlived him. Mulier is delighted by one account of him spending an exorbitant amount on a coat by Paul Poiret – an inspiration for bloused backs on dresses and coats, with a 1911 feel, caught in low around the thigh. They’re influenced by a coat from 1985, which not only shapes the gently curved tailoring but also appears in the show. It nods to another famous story, of Alaïa creating a coat for the actor Greta Garbo in the 1970s. By then Garbo had become a reclusive figure. “They told me she was waiting outside with Cécile de Rothschild. I said, ‘Sure, who else?’” Alaïa recalled, with his typical humour, in 1990. He made her a dark blue cashmere coat – “Big, bigger, biggest! And a huge collar to hide.” He kept the patterns until the day he died.
The Garbo collar inspired Mulier to pull turtlenecks over the mouths of his models, an echo of her mystique. Edie Campbell, daughter of Sophie Hicks, had a Picasso pulled over hers – Hicks was a friend of Alaïa, and is currently redesigning the brand’s boutiques (new ones are set to open in New York and Shanghai). “I think he loved Garbo because cinema in Egypt and in Tunisia when Azzedine was growing up was a copy of that. He was obsessed with Hollywood, and the Egyptian copies,” Mulier says. “I asked Christoph [von Weyhe] and he agreed. Christoph told me the stories of Garbo, because he was there. He fitted the coat and everything. He said it was such a big moment because Azzedine was obsessed with her. Obsessed.” He seems obsessed too. “Can you imagine,” he knocks loudly on the glass table. “Garbo?!” Mulier’s infectious obsession, it seems, is with Azzedine Alaïa – the man, his myths.
Embroidered silk and wool jacquard knitted Picasso dress by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Silk and wool velvet knitted ensemble with glove and hand-crafted glass, Plexiglas and brass bracelets by ALAÏAPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Mulier’s Alaïa show takes place in the “cathedral”, atop a polished black lacquer floor that reflects the night sky. The moulded metal necklines make dresses appear suspended, magically, around the body; the skirts buttoned to boots seem to be hovering; and the models, walking on platform shoes with Plexiglas heels, look like they’re floating a few inches above the ground. Four days later the space has been transformed to all white, for an exhibition of archival Alaïa clothing. Fittingly, after the second show of Alaïa after Alaïa, this is titled Alaïa Afore Alaïa, and looks at the made-to-measure clothes created for his private clientele. There’s another Garbo coat – she was a repeat customer – but it isn’t navy blue. An exhibition-goer said the space looked “heavenly”, and it did.
Mulier is calm after the storm. I ask him what he wants to convey with his work for Alaïa, and he takes a moment. “Emotion,” he says, and his voice cracks a little. “I hope that comes through, that emotion. And I hope that emotion will be the same in the people who see it. It’s driven by emotion. It needs to make the heart beat. If it doesn’t make your heart beat … ” He pauses. “I mean, we’re at Alaïa.”
Hair: Duffy at Streeters. Make-up: Karin Westerlund at Artlist using DR BARBARA STURM. Model: Mariacarla Boscono at Women Management. Casting: Ashley Brokaw. Manicure: Eden Tonda. Digital tech: Henri Coutant. Lighting: Romain Dubus. Photographic assistant: Corentin Thévenet. Styling assistants: Niccolo Torelli, Ewa Kluczenko and Kevin Grosjean. Hair assistant: Lukas Tralmer. Make-up assistant: Noa Yehonatan. Producer to Willy Vanderperre: Lieze Rubbrecht. Production: One Thirty-Eight Productions. Producer: Ashleigh Hayward. Production assistants: Arthur Debriffe, Félix Biton and Julien Fernandes. On-set retoucher: Stéphane Virlogeux
The Full Shoot: Jodie Turner-Smith for AnOther Magazine Spring/Sumer 2022
In a dawn-to-dusk shoot located in the Californian desert, Jackie Nickerson and Katie Shillingford capture Turner-Smith and a cast of supporting characters wearing Gucci’s decadent Love Parade collection
Jodie Turner-Smith: “Everything I Do Is Political”
In our Spring/Summer 2022 issue, the history-making actor speaks to her friend Jeremy O Harris about transformative love, motherhood, and her role in Kogonada’s offbeat sci-fi film, After Yang
In 2021, Jodie Turner-Smith made history as she played history, becoming the first Black actor to take on the role of the doomed Queen Anne Boleyn. In Turner-Smith’s hands the most troubled and controversial of Henry VIII’s six wives was as fierce as she was tender: as believable in her unbridled ambition and overwhelming grief as she was dignified – majestic. That is a quality Turner-Smith seems to have been born with, one that elevates her characterisations, giving a nobility to her Angela “Queen” Johnson – the criminal defence lawyer turned outlaw in Melina Matsoukas’s 2019 film Queen & Slim – and, last year, to her unexpected appearance as part of Alessandro Michele’s Love Parade show for Gucci. Back then, an uplifting display of both fashion and the people who wear it best – stars – played out on Hollywood Boulevard; here, we move that diverse parade of beautiful people to the desert outside Los Angeles, shooting Turner-Smith and a cast of supporting characters over the course of a day – dawn to dusk – clothed in Michele’s designs. Alongside this, Turner-Smith talks to writer, actor and director Jeremy O Harris about transformative love, motherhood, the responsibility of storytelling and her role in Noah Baumbach’s upcoming adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.
Jeremy O Harris: This is such a crazy year for you. You have so many new things on your plate, but the first thing I want to talk to you about is, what’s it like having your daughter? As your friend, who’s watched you grow up over the past decade and become the woman you are now, I feel like every day as a mom changes you in significant ways. How do you feel seeing your daughter grow every day?
Jodie Turner-Smith: It’s incredible to watch a person gain an understanding of the world and be beside them as they conceive of every single thing. It’s like experiencing life again, because you are seeing them discover a tree, the ocean, a shark. We were looking at sharks in the water today – we’re in the Bahamas. One of the best parts about parenting is that you get to learn everything again because you see the world anew through innocent, fresh eyes. It’s humbling and beautiful and exciting – and it’s really emotional.
JOH: I think about some of the projects you’re doing this year and realise that it’s only really just now that people are interacting with your Anne Boleyn. It’s this great story about a young woman, a complicated mother and someone who had a really difficult life. Your lens on Anne Boleyn is the thing I was most excited about when it was announced and you did not disappoint. What was that like, stepping into that role and also stepping into so much history?
“As a dark-skinned Black woman, my body is politicised. Everything I do is political. My existence is political” – Jodie Turner-Smith
JTS: Well, when I accepted that job, I was so raw with motherhood. And I use the word raw because I feel like it is such a raw-feeling experience. The transformation that you go through internally, while it is incredible and epic and beautiful, birthing this living creature that you held inside your body, your body grows an entire organ to feed this child. And then when that child is born, that organ detaches itself from the inside of your body and you birth that out too, the placenta. And it leaves a huge wound that takes time to heal. And five months out from that, I was still extremely raw.
JOH: Oof.
JTS: People have asked me, “Did you have any worries about taking it on?” Anytime something creative comes across your path that excites you and lights you up, the first instinct is to be like, “Fuck, yeah.” You say yes. And then you’re like, “Oh fuck.” There is also the rest of the world and their opinions and how they’re going to respond to this. That is also going to affect me. I am not creating inside a bubble, which would be really nice sometimes. One thing I admire about theatre is that there’s so much more freedom to portray others. And maybe it’s because you are so connected to the audience that they’re willing to drop the veil, whereas in film and television, people are thinking that they’re meant to be presented with an imitation of reality – they’re less willing to make those allowances. But this project is cool – symbolically. This idea of Anne as an outsider because of her upbringing, the way that she was a disruptor. It was interesting to tell her story in a different way, because I saw The Other Boleyn Girl [2008], which I loved at the time. I thought Natalie Portman was amazing in that, but it was a very specific portrayal of Anne that goes with that negative history that people have sometimes recorded about her. And at this point in my life as an adult woman, I think about any woman in history who was super powerful and who is written about as this horrible person, I take it with a grain of salt – men were recording that history and were threatened by that power.
Oversized embroidered silk crepe de chine coat and patent leather glove by GUCCI. Yellow gold and gemstone earrings from the Hortus Deliciarum collection by GUCCI HIGH JEWELLERYPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Trumpet sleeved silk muslin gown with teardrop neckline and sequin embroidery and leather high-heeled sandals by GUCCI. White gold, spinel, sapphire and diamond brooch and white gold and ruby ring from the Hortus Deliciarum collection by GUCCIPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
JOH: Yeah. Anyone that was married to Henry.
JTS: Henry was a sociopath.
JOH: You’ve been in America for a really long time. Were there any Britishisms you had to relearn to become Anne?
JTS: Well, first of all, unless you have really practised received pronunciation [RP], you have to work on that. I started acting in the US, Anne Boleyn was my first job in the UK. For me having never worked in the UK, having not gone to drama school, I definitely needed to work on the RP. I worked with this really amazing coach who was there on set to make sure everything sounded how it needed to, because it’s just very particular to sound like you come from that class. And although Anne may have had more of a French accent, we decided to go with something that felt more like RP.
JOH: It was so jarring and exciting to see you speaking in RP for the entire show, because it’s so rare to see a Black performer, even a Black performer who grew up in the UK, get to use that tool in the toolbox. Did you feel a responsibility? Like, “If this is something that works really well it means so much for other Black girls coming up after me.” I feel like you’ve done such significant roles and at a time when people are asking a lot about representation, especially representation of dark-skinned Black women, you have come to the forefront as one of the first names that’s consistently called. What do you feel about that responsibility?
“Every project I go into, I think, who’s the woman that I’ll be on the other side of this? That is the goal and the focus” – Jodie Turner-Smith
JTS: It’s impossible for me to not think about it every time I go into something and not as if it’s some kind of burden, but for the simple fact that being who I am, I know how much it means to see someone who looks like me on screen. I’m so honoured to have the opportunity to portray someone on screen, to create a woman who looks like me on screen and to fill her with life. It’s something I think about in every project I do. Obviously the goal is to create wonderful three-dimensional characters but every time I go into a job, I always think about that because as a dark-skinned Black woman, my body is politicised. Everything I do is political. My existence is political. I wish I could exist in a vacuum but I have an understanding of the systems and the social mores and everything that’s going on around me. And I know that I’m a part of all of that. I also think about my daughter and the fact that I want her to be able to look at the things I’ve done and the women I’ve played and see something powerful and interesting and beautiful and ... complicated.
JOH: I love the punctuation of complicated.
JTS: Yeah. Because sometimes there are certain spaces where people that look like me aren’t expected to be seen. And that’s what I love about a project like After Yang.
JOH: Yes. That’s what I was about to get to. Because After Yang is the definition of complex and moreover it’s this amazing meditation on motherhood. And on top of that, it has this thing happening inside it, because of [the writer-director] Kogonada’s beautifully open imagination. There’s this real opportunity there for this casting to be a model for how we see families in movies going forward, especially speculative fictions. What was it like crafting this family with Colin [Farrell] and Kogonada?
JTS: Kogonada is just an incredibly talented, gentle, amazing spirit and he created that energy on set, held such a safe space for us. The movie’s only coming out now but that was my second film, the movie I did after Queen & Slim. It was my first time playing a mother on screen, and then I became a mother shortly afterwards. And the thing is, even the way that he writes his scripts, he doesn’t write a lot of stage direction. He doesn’t write a lot of things that would indicate to you what your character is going through internally. He just presents the story and he trusts you as the actor to come in and infuse that with life. The film meditates on very specific themes but we all got to add our own specificity to what was happening in our characters’ internal lives. And I love the world that he built, that conception of a future world. If the future world looks like that, I think we would all be in a really good place.
Silk chiffon caped gown with turtleneck and plissé detail and leather high-heeled sandals by GUCCI. White gold and diamond necklace and white gold, sapphire and diamond necklace from the Hortus Deliciarum collection by GUCCI HIGH JEWELLERYPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Silk chiffon caped gown with turtleneck and plissé detail and leather high-heeled sandals by GUCCI. White gold and diamond necklace and white gold, sapphire and diamond necklace from the Hortus Deliciarum collection by GUCCI HIGH JEWELLERYPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
JOH: Yes. What was the mood on set like? I’ve seen all the interviews post-Sundance and there seems to be so much joy on these Zoom calls among the cast – but as exciting and beautiful as the film is, there is also so much heaviness there. How does one navigate that?
JTS: The reason we’re all a fucking love fest every time you see us together is because it was just so supportive and so loving and so generous. The energy felt so good. And it’s interesting because in terms of my relationship with Colin, we are in a marriage where we’re not really hearing or seeing each other and there’s frustration and there’s stress and there’s distance, but there was so much love on that set. We shot most of it in this little house. And just around the corner there was a house that we used as our base camp and everybody had a bedroom and anytime someone was making food in the kitchen, you’d smell that through the house. It always smelled like incense and we’d play with hair and make-up in the front room. It was just this lovely, delicious, warm atmosphere. And honestly, I thrive in that kind of environment. It doesn’t work for me to be dark all day in order to play dark shit. It actually stresses me out more, it’s better for me to feel loved and held by everyone in the crew every time the camera cuts. You’re not always going to get that. And I know that, but when you can create that kind of environment, for me, I feel like I thrive – like I can go deeper into whatever darkness I have to go to when I feel that safety when the camera’s not rolling.
JOH: I love that. I think that’s so true. I feel like we make best with our families. Even if these families are sort of quickly put together – but put together with love. If things feel sterile, it’s so hard to make it work. Looking at your career so far, you’ve led a lot of projects already. You’ve jumped through a lot of genres. We’ve mentioned your first film, which is like an amazing modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, a romantic getaway film that takes place across America. And then you have Anne Boleyn, this historical drama, a television series. You have After Yang, the speculative fiction. And one of the things you’re doing next is White Noise by Noah Baumbach, which is the Don DeLillo adaptation. What fuels how you choose the projects you want to do? Having had such significant work happen at such an early part of your career and being in such a pivotal moment, where the type of actress Jodie Turner-Smith is starts to solidify itself. What helps you decide which direction you want to go in?
“I don’t want to get cancelled for saying this but I feel like there are still so many directors who are creating all-white worlds” – Jodie Turner-Smith
JTS: Honestly, there are different deciding factors every time. Mainly it’s about the story and then there’s who’s telling the story. For Anne Boleyn, I wasn’t necessarily that familiar with Lynsey [Miller]’s work as the director, but I knew that I wanted to tell that story. I was like, “Yes, this resonates with me. It lights me up.” With White Noise, I didn’t really have any script until the very last minute – when I auditioned, I didn’t have a script. It was 100 per cent about who was in the project and that I wanted to work with Noah, who is so talented and amazing. I really consider White Noise to be my first comedy because Noah makes comedies. Everyone’s like, they’re dramas, but they’re actually comedies – in my humble opinion.
I make these choices – I would love to work with that person. And then I jump in and maybe that was a good decision or maybe it is, “OK, what did I learn here?” But every project I go into, I think, who’s the woman that I’ll be on the other side of this? That is the goal and the focus, because you never know how something’s going to turn out. I don’t have any control after I do my bit. It’s really about, “What did I come here to learn? Can I expand from this experience and be better?” The goal is that I just want to get better. And I really hope it never solidifies, what kind of actress Jodie Turner-Smith is, because I want to do so many different things and I don’t want to end up in a box.
JOH: I love the idea that part of what fuels you is a thirst to get better. One of the things I enjoy so much about watching many of my friends who come from so many different backgrounds start to be seen in this industry is that I get to watch them grow on screen in front of me. Not just age-wise, but talent-wise. It’s like watching someone work out from afar over a year or two years and seeing how their body changes and what muscles develop. I’m seeing all my friends develop on screen in front of me right now in their first significant roles on screen. It is exhilarating watching someone learn the muscle of being a lead and then taking what they learnt there to go to the back and work as a supporting actor and build that muscle. And you see that their understanding of how to stand with a scene partner has changed significantly. I’m so excited to see what the Jodie Turner-Smith I meet in four or five years is going to be.
JTS: Me too, Jeremy. Me too.
Jodie is wearing an oversized light silk organza cape with feathers, ruffled silk scarf and tulle gloves with crystal rhinestone detail by GUCCI. White gold, spinel and diamond necklace from the Hortus Deliciarum collection by GUCCI HIGH JEWELLERYPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Oversized silk organza cape with feathers, ruffled silk scarf and tulle gloves with crystal rhinestone detail by GUCCIPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
JOH: Are there any projects you want to do that you haven’t yet? I feel like there’s going to be someone reading this, looking to see if you’re right for this thing they’re doing and you just might tell them right now – “This is where I want to grow next.”
JTS: I feel like I always mis-answer this question, because I guess in a way it is your opportunity to say, “Hi, so-and-so, I’d love to work with you.” Like, “Denis, put me in the next Dune, I’m here.”
JOH: Exactly.
JTS: Listen, when I watched Dune I didn’t stop thinking about it for four weeks. I think it was just so incredibly beautiful and poetically done. But you know what else I think about? Other than working with Denis Villeneuve ... And I don’t want to get cancelled for saying this but I feel like there are still so many directors who are creating all-white worlds. I constantly have this conversation with my team, “OK, well, who do I want to work with?” And I realise that these directors I would really love to work with, I’m like, “Well, I don’t really see a place for myself in their world.” But honestly before White Noise, you could have probably said that about Noah Baumbach and here we are.
JOH: Yes, absolutely.
JTS: You know something else? I’m really wondering when I’m going to be working with Jeremy O Harris and Janicza Bravo.
JOH: Well, when you said that White Noise is your first comedy – I was like, well, you were really funny in Lemon too. But yeah, we need to do a comedy together. Before we go, I want to talk about your mom, Hilda, who I had such a great time with when we were shooting.
“There is a legion of women inside me – I think all of them should get to come out and play” – Jodie Turner-Smith
JTS: Shout-out to Hilda. My mom. Don’t you just love her? Isn’t she everything?
JOH: I love her to death. And you have been such a great daughter to her and that was so evident when we were there. Such a great model for how daughters give back to their parents and how parents can stay so integrated in a family’s life if you choose to have them there. I think so many people make excuses for not having their family be involved in their lives, and seeing your family as a model, I was just like, “There are few excuses, right?” I would love to be someone who has integrated a family as you do in the sense that your mom is there with your daughter. She’s there helping you out on long trips and you’re there helping her out, sending her on bougie trips like in How Stella Got Her Groove Back, talking about boys together.
JTS: I feel so lucky that I have my mom with me to not only just be there for my daughter, but to teach me how to be a mom. My mother is a really, really good mother. And now I have her teaching me how to mother my daughter. I never had a close relationship with my grandmas. So the fact that my daughter is really close with her grandma literally makes me cry every time I think about it. To me, the concept of someone being close to their grandma was like a movie and TV thing. It wasn’t real life. I’m just happy to create that world for my daughter. It really does take a village. And I have so many people helping me make it happen.
JOH: That’s so beautiful. I’m so excited that we got to do this conversation together. There’s no one I’d rather wake up to talk to. How is the Bahamas for your family?
JTS: We decided last minute to come here. It’s just me, my husband and my daughter. I’m playing a Bahamian in this TV show, Bad Monkey. I thought, let me come to the Bahamas and be around the people.
JOH: What kind of Bahamian are you playing?
JTS: Anyone who’s read the book will know some of the characters but I am playing a woman who is an Obeah woman, which I love because it just feels witchy and interesting. It’s funny because her name is Dragon Queen and I don’t know how this keeps happening to me, that I keep playing people that are named queen or are a queen, but if this is the way I’m being typecast, I’m down with it.
Cici is wearing a polyamide furry crew neck cardigan and knickers, cut-out headgear with metal chain and sequin embellishment, suspender belt and cotton net stockings by GUCCIPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Lex is wearing a faux-fur coat, tiered cotton lace dress with corset bodice, suspender belt, cotton net stockings and palladium-finished metal and crystal tiara (throughout) by GUCCIPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
JOH: Oh my God. I love that. I mean, you give off queen shit, you know what I mean? You give off “Don’t fuck with her.” Do people know who you are in the Bahamas yet?
JTS: I don’t think I’m, like, Jen Aniston famous, where everywhere I go people are crowding me. It’s just the kind of thing where people might look at us twice and say, “Is that ... ?” We just go about our business. And we always go to places that are more remote and not too intense, so that we can live a quiet existence anyway because that’s what we prefer. And obviously with a young child, that feels safer. I love my life and I’m so grateful for all of the bounties that it provides. It definitely is a little bit unnerving, fame, especially because a lot of my fame comes from the fact that my husband’s been famous for a long time and I’m a Black woman married to him. As I said, political body. That is a story for people. And that is not what my daughter chose. I want to protect her from that for as long as I can and not let the more negative elements of that affect her. I just want her to feel like a grounded human being, as grounded as one can be when you grow up wealthy.
JOH: Exactly. And I mean, given the fact that she’s with an actual queen every day, queen on and off screen, it’s going to be really hard for her not to realise that she’s a princess.
JTS: And her father treats her like she is a goddess walking on Earth. The Bahamas have a really special history for me and Josh, because this was the first place we came together. You know how it is, when you meet someone, it’s like, are you going to take me on holiday? That’s how I know you’re serious.
JOH: Yes, exactly.
JTS: But we were both working, so we had to wait a little bit. And then we went to the Bahamas and it was this really special trip because we were falling in love with each other but not wanting to say that yet. And I remember he rented this boat and took me on a tour of the Exumas. That’s why we came straight to the Exumas this time. And when we were on this boat ride, the captain kept saying, you guys are going to make a baby out here and you’re going to call it Exuma.
JOH: Oh my God. That’s you guys.
JTS: And we did less than a year later. And now we’ve brought our daughter here. It’s really special to be here together.
JOH: Can I ask you something quickly? I watched you walk in the Gucci Love Parade show on Hollywood Boulevard. I was there screaming. Was there any anxiety about jumping back into the space of fashion after you’d made this transition into acting and even after motherhood, being on a catwalk, walking a Gucci show – did that feel like a daunting thing to do? Or were you just like, “You know what, this is another classic Jodie challenge”?
JTS: First of all, that was a long stretch of Hollywood Boulevard and those shoes we were wearing, I was just like, “Oh my God, bitch, do not fall down.” But it was a little bit of both because I feel like the catwalk is a kind of performance, it’s sort of like being on stage. It’s why I loved it when I did it for the first time – I didn’t realise at the time, but I think it was the performance element of it that I loved so much. I loved re-entering that world as an actor, because it’s different when you do it as an actor versus as a model. I mean, it’s why you didn’t see me all over billboards everywhere. I was never a successful model. But as an actress to now model, I can take everything that I’ve learnt from that and put it to great use. I can come with my personality and everything that I am. And there is a legion of women inside me – I think all of them should get to come out and play.
Quannah is wearing a sequin-embroidered gown by GUCCI. Her own nose ring and ruffled silk scarf (both throughout)Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Cici is wearing a beaded silk chain top and GG star embroidered tulle bra by GUCCIPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Justin is wearing a belted duchesse silk jumpsuit, leather flower motif brooch and felt cowboy hat with grosgrain band by GUCCIPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Lex is wearing a faux-fur coat and tiered cotton lace dress with corset bodice by GUCCIPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Lex is wearing a plissé satin velvet gown by GUCCIPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Lex is wearing a plissé satin velvet gown by GUCCIPhotography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Jodie Turner-Smith: Hair: Ursula Stephen at A-Frame Agency using ORIBE. Make-up: Sheika Daley at Day One Studio using Gucci Beauty. Manicure: Sigourney Nuñez using OPI
Models: Hair: Jenny Kim at Frank Reps using ORIBE. Make-up: Zenia Jaeger at Streeters using SUBMISSION BEAUTY. Models: Lex Peckham at Kollektiv Mgmt, Quannah Chasinghorse at IMG Models, Cici Tamez at New Icon Models and Justin Thomas at Next NY. Casting: Noah Shelley at Streeters. Set design: Bette Adams at MHS Artists. Manicure: Sigourney Nuñez using OPI. Digital tech: James Weir. Photographic assistants: Gregory Brouillette, Milan Aguirre and Carolin Schild. Styling assistants: George Pistachio, Bota Abdul and Megan King. Seamstress: Katie Casey at 7th Bone Tailoring. Hair assistant: Sol Rodriguez. Make-up assistant: Katie Mann. Production: Tiagi. Executive producer: Chantelle-Shakila Tiagi. Producer: Mica Kossakowska. Local production: Arzu Kocman at Productionising. Production assistants: Turner Fair and Brett Goldberger
The Full Shoot: Willem Dafoe for AnOther Magazine S/S22
Joshua Woods and Ellie Grace Cumming capture the chameleonic actor
This editorial appears in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of AnOther Magazine, which will be on sale internationally from 24 March 2022. Pre-order a copy here.
“I Don’t Want to Be Nostalgic”: Willem Dafoe Is on a Roll
As he hits his seventh decade, one of the world’s greatest actors is burning brighter than ever. In AnOther Magazine Spring/Summer 2022, Willem Dafoe speaks with Hannah Lack about the value of fear, and playing everyone’s favourite supervillain
In 1979, tiny New York theatre The Performing Garage had 60 seats, a tin collection box and some of the most radical ideas in a grimy, broken-down city pulsing with creative energy. That year, Willem Dafoe was playing a foul-mouthed oil-rig worker, a heroin-addicted mother and a nun – all in the same play – when Kathryn Bigelow took a seat in the audience one night. The experimental works staged at the scrappy space in SoHo had more in common with the no-wave shows happening around the corner at the Mudd Club than with polite theatre uptown. Plundering all genres, they were loud and freewheeling, incorporating looping video projections, actors shouting over pre-recorded audio, technicians in full view, occasional nudity and, once, Dafoe in the role of a living chicken heart.
After seeing him onstage, Bigelow called the actor to ask if he wanted to be in a film. “I was still in the phone book then,” Dafoe says today, over Zoom from his home in central Rome. “I had to call up friends to find out what to ask for as a salary. I had no idea – I had no representation. My identity was totally as a downtown theatre actor living hand to mouth.” Bigelow cast him as a delinquent, leather-clad antihero in The Loveless, the tale of a nihilistic biker gang who ride into a Georgia backwater and set fire to its simmering tensions. It became Bigelow’s debut film (co-directed with Monty Montgomery), Dafoe’s first starring role, and today an artful cult oddity that makes one thing overwhelmingly clear: whether he’s dodging a shotgun or pouring ketchup over congealed scrambled eggs, Dafoe’s screen presence has been intact from the start.
Even over an imperfect Zoom connection it’s easy to see how journalists get tangled up describing his face, its angles and hollows and meme-generating expressiveness: “a demiurge as rendered by a cubist” (The New York Times); “the pallidly beautiful embodiment of pure evil” (The Village Voice); “the boy next door, if you live next door to a mausoleum” (that was Dafoe himself). None of those descriptions captures his amiable charm in interviews – and as singular as he looks, in the four decades since his debut, the 66-year-old has carved one of the most versatile careers in cinema, uprooting his audience’s expectations again and again. His staggering 120-plus roles to date have encompassed oddball detectives, drug lords and unhinged hitmen, a giant alien and a manga god of death, Pier Paolo Pasolini and TS Eliot, a tropical fish and Jesus Christ. Dafoe’s versatility shows not just in his chameleonic powers, but his willingness to take a gamble and work outside his comfort zone. “I’m always nervous on my first day, but that’s good news,” he says in the ridged, textured voice that has become as distinctive as his elastic features. “It motivates you, fear. It’s what keeps you curious, keeps you trying to find new ways. If you accept fear, that’s a good practice for an actor to have – it’s a good practice for a person to have. You get used to being a little off balance. I don’t know whether I enjoy it – I’m like anyone, I like to be lazy and comfortable. But you know, that can kill you too.”
“Comfortable” is not a word often associated with Dafoe’s choices, but it might be a good description of Appleton, Wisconsin, the small paper-mill town he grew up in, a hundred miles north of Milwaukee. Pre Dafoe, Appleton’s two most famous residents were Joe McCarthy, ringleader of the communist witchhunts of the Fifties, and the magician and escapologist Harry Houdini. (A possibly unfair joke goes: “What was Harry Houdini’s greatest escape? Getting out of Appleton.”) Houdini was indeed long gone and Eisenhower was in office when Dafoe was born there in 1955, into an already-crowded family. The seventh of eight children, he was christened William, soon known as Bill, and later nicknamed Willem. His nurse mother and surgeon father both worked long hours, resulting in minimal supervision and family mealtimes – Dafoe credits his elder sisters with raising him. There’s a revealing childhood story he tells of shutting himself in a closet for two days to mimic the conditions of the Gemini astronauts orbiting Earth at the time: nobody noticed. Clearly attention would have to be sought elsewhere. “My place in this large family of eight kids definitely contributed to me becoming an actor,” he says. “It shaped me very much. I’m married to an only child [the Italian director Giada Colagrande] of a single mother – you have a totally different sense of your place in the world.”
Fittingly for someone who has played monsters better than anyone, Dafoe’s earliest film memories were the Frankenstein and Dracula reels his father brought back from work trips to Chicago. “We’d get these Super 8 edited features and I’d play them over and over in slow motion on a little Bell & Howell projector,” he says, “and charge the neighbourhood kids to watch.” You could argue that Dafoe’s first performances were surreal pranks – he once dressed up in a gorilla suit to picket Planet of the Apes at the local cinema. Appleton’s community theatre provided a more structured outlet for that mischievous energy, and brought him his first review – “This is a lad with a promising future on the stage,” announced the local paper of 13-year-old Dafoe’s turn in A Thousand Clowns. But in a family of medical professionals there was little thought that that afterschool hobby might become a career. “No, not at all,” he says. “Having said that, my family was very lively, great singers and dancers. The irony is, and it sounds a little coy but it’s sort of true, they’re all more talented than I am. I just worked on it.”
In 1977, after a few semesters at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a stint with experimental troupe Theatre X, his ambitions led him to the logical destination for an aspiring stage actor. When Dafoe arrived in New York wide-eyed from the Midwest, the city was plunged in some of its darkest years. Virtually bankrupt, it was decaying and weed-ridden, with broad-daylight muggings and night-time blackouts (and a serial killer, Son of Sam, who took advantage of those blackouts). But its febrile atmosphere was causing an outburst of creative, cross-genre collisions, and after assuming he’d try his luck on Broadway, Dafoe found himself drawn instead to the grittier scene downtown. “I don’t want to be nostalgic, it was a rough time,” he says, “but I’m 20 years old, a kid from Wisconsin, not very sophisticated, not much of an education. I was living in tough areas, with people who had different problems and world views than I had grown up with. So it was a radical time for me. When I moved to SoHo it was a no man’s land, there was a bunch of old factory buildings gone belly-up. New York was in such bad shape people were taking over spaces to make their own work. So many musicians, painters, dancers that later became successful were all in the same room together then – at clubs, at the Kitchen or La MaMa. We were young and we weren’t thinking about tomorrow.”
Cotton poplin shirt and tailored wool trousers by DUNHILL. Leather tie from CARLO MANZI. Leather belt by ANDERSON’SPhotography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Single-breasted pinstriped wool jacket and wool trousers by PRADA. Cotton poplin shirt from CASSIE MERCANTILE. Leather tie from CARLO MANZIPhotography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
That year he grafted as a stagehand at The Performing Garage on Wooster Street and encountered the explosive, uncompromising Elizabeth LeCompte, director of what would soon be christened The Wooster Group. The plays she helmed fused influences from vaudeville to Noh, and could feel white-knuckle reckless, as though being worked out in front of a crowd’s eyes. “It was a whole little world unto itself,” Dafoe remembers. “We were doing it for the love of it, not for a career. Every show we did felt like it was going to be the last, but that was the beauty of it.” He fell for The Wooster Group and LeCompte simultaneously and soon moved into the latter’s SoHo loft – in 1982 they had a son, Jack. Dafoe went on to appear in every production the crew staged for the next 27 years, despite the demands of a movie schedule that had him criss-crossing continents. There was just one stumble before his star began to rise: cast as a cockfighter in Michael Cimino’s 1980 western Heaven’s Gate, he laughed too loudly at a joke during a lighting set-up. Cimino, nicknamed “the Ayatollah” on that shoot, fired Dafoe on the spot. He’s too good-natured to relish the schadenfreude, but the film became a monumental albatross, floundering under bloated budgets and excessive retakes – hours lost waiting for the right clouds to roll by and weeks spent on roller-skating lessons for the cast. It came out to toxic reviews.
At first, screen villains came Dafoe’s way: a twitchy biker in Walter Hill’s neon-lit inner-city fable Streets of Fire, and then, in 1985, a homicidal, Ferrari-driving counterfeiter in William Friedkin’s brutally amoral neo-noir To Live and Die in LA. Friedkin’s vision of a city riddled with corruption, all blood-red skies and windlashed palms, climaxes with Dafoe’s character burning to death in a bonfire of counterfeit money. It was the first of many spectacular on-screen deaths that have included being impaled by a hoverboard, dissolved in a shaft of sunlight, and crucified. But it was the following year, and his slow-motion, bullet-addled demise in the Vietnam jungle to the sound of swelling strings and thudding helicopter blades, that marked Dafoe’s breakthrough, as the doomed Sergeant Elias in Oliver Stone’s searing indictment of the Vietnam War, Platoon. Stone upended the bad-guy narrative and cast Dafoe as the film’s moral anchor. “There was a soul in him, a gentleness that could radiate from those eyes,” Stone wrote in his memoir. The conflict in Vietnam had gnawed at the director since his own tour of duty, where idealism crumbled into disillusion, and he was determined his cast would emanate the gluey, bone-deep exhaustion he remembered. In 1986, they were dropped into the jungle for a gruelling boot camp – they dug trenches, slept in two-hour shifts and battled bamboo snakes and the night-time ambushes Stone surprised them with. Dafoe had to be medevacked at one point, after drinking river water downstream from a decomposing ox. The role put him on the cover of Time and gave him his first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor. “I still have my dog tags from Platoon,” he says. “I’ve got a little area in my office where things that have meaning for me pile up. Pictures, writings, poetry … I also have my parents’ ashes in a mason jar, so go figure.”
Michael Caine won that year for Hannah and Her Sisters, but Platoon brought Dafoe a new level of attention – specifically from Martin Scorsese, who needed an actor to play the son of God. He cast Dafoe in The Last Temptation of Christ and in 1987 he was performing miracles in the deserts of Morocco, in melting temperatures. “I really believe those difficulties are gold,” Dafoe says of his willingness to embrace whatever a shoot will throw at him. “They not only give you the authority but they create the stake. If something is hard, like you’re in the desert, that puts you in it. That will fuel the inner life and make the performing not feel like work, but like an adventure, like a life experience … Last Temptation was a big deal for me. That doesn’t mean I became a born-again Christian, but I started thinking about a spiritual life and forgiveness, and that triggered something in me.”
“I should just shut up and say it’s fun to play bad guys because it’s titillating to do bad things and not get punished for it” – Willem Dafoe
The film’s release prompted no forgiveness from the religious right; they unleashed hell. There were protests outside movie theatres, drive-by paint bombings and an arson attack that gutted a Paris cinema. The actor has never been afraid to provoke – most notoriously the boos and whistles of Cannes critics outraged at Lars von Trier’s psychosexual drama Antichrist, in which Dafoe gets his testicles crushed by a plank of wood. But the fact Last Temptation became a lightning rod for protest was something of a back-handed compliment to the actor’s earthy performance: he humanised Jesus, an apparently unforgivable blasphemy. (He also gave him a libido: in one scene Jesus imagines having sex with Mary Magdalene.)
But if Dafoe can humanise deities, he extends the same courtesy to his darker characters, often misfits whose dangerous menace has a streak of vulnerability. “Outsiders are the most interesting characters because they aren’t quite recognisable,” he says. “The audience has to work through how they feel about them.” His role last year in Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, as a carnival grifter with a collection of pickled babies and a finely attuned ability to exploit the weakness in others, finds a muddy human space in a character whose actions are chillingly cruel. His more outlandish villains – who almost always go on to parallel meme careers – still have a textured, slippery nuance: it’s what made his odious, stubby-toothed hitman Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart so indelibly disturbing. Dafoe credits the gruesome dentures Lynch made him wear – “Without those teeth who knows what I would have done? But the second I put them in, I knew exactly what to do” – but Lynch wrote that Dafoe was “a gift from God” in that role. Even when his characters are ripped straight from the speech bubbles of a comic book, like the cackling arch-nemesis the Green Goblin, Dafoe plumbs deeper waters. “I didn’t want to just be a device, that’s kind of a drag,” he says. “They’d probably pay you to do very little, but that’s not what I was interested in.” Instead, he threw himself into the part like a circus performer, switching between comedy and Shakespearean tragedy to craft what is generally considered everyone’s favourite supervillain.
“I should just shut up and say it’s fun to play bad guys because it’s titillating to do bad things and not get punished for it,” he says. “But the whole idea is you don’t want to see the world that way, or accept those kinds of categorisations. It challenges our idea of morality when you can find the most human aspect in dark characters. If a character does unsavoury things, you try to balance it with another aspect where it’s plausible that this guy can do bad things but still be your brother, your father, your lover.” Dafoe is now treasured for that ambiguity; he draws our imaginations out of well-worn grooves into unexplored territory. It has led him to build sustained and fruitful relationships with maverick directors who have a similar distrust of easy answers: Lars von Trier, Paul Schrader, Abel Ferrara – auteurs with vision and a personal stake in the stories they tell. If they have demanding reputations and unorthodox ways of working to get the demons in their heads onto film, Dafoe has always been game – it’s the pool he was baptised in at The Wooster Group.
Leather shirt by ZEGNA. Leather tie from CARLO MANZI. And wool trousers by HERMÈSPhotography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Single-breasted wool coat, ruffle-front cotton poplin T-shirt and tailored wool trousers by COMME DES GARÇONS HOMME PLUS. Polka-dot silk velvet suit by GUCCI. Nylon shirt and striped leather tie from CARLO MANZIPhotography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
It was Schrader – the gravelly voiced veteran of New Hollywood long preoccupied with sin and redemption – who wrote Last Temptation. The pair have made seven films together since, most recently last year’s murky crime drama The Card Counter, set between the twilight world of poker tournaments and Abu Ghraib. Their first collaboration was 1992’s Light Sleeper, starring Dafoe as a high-end drug courier soaking up nocturnal Manhattan from the back of a chauffeur-driven car, dropping off illicit deliveries to the city’s glass-and-art-filled penthouses as garbage piles up on the streets below. He’s one of Schrader’s classic troubled loners, lending an ear to his clients’ coked-up philosophies while being stalked by the feeling his luck is running out. Dafoe says it’s one of the roles he has felt closest to – perhaps the act of moving between so many different lives rang a bell. “There was nothing about him that was different from me except for what he did,” he says. “He was a lost soul, that’s not necessarily me, but I could have been him. If I didn’t find what I wanted to do and I got into that line of work … I understood him.” Dafoe shadowed a dealer for three weeks prior to shooting, which must have been a little bizarre for the customers. “I got to know the business, the clients. He was different to my character – he was gay, had different music taste, lived in a different part of town, but he taught me a lot.”
That commitment to performing the actions of his characters is often central to Dafoe’s approach. He doesn’t do method or spin intricate backstories, but melts into his roles by rooting himself in their physicality. That meant skinning his own wallaby as a mercenary in Daniel Nettheim’s The Hunter (Dafoe puts his lack of squeamishness down to a stint as the janitor of his father’s medical building when he was a teenager). And to step into Van Gogh’s battered shoes in 2018 for Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, he got paint under his fingernails during art lessons with Schnabel himself – they first crossed paths in the New York nightlife of the Eighties. “Painting literally changed how I see things,” he says. “I was doing it in Van Gogh’s clothes, looking at the same things he looked at. It was thrilling.” It’s an electrifying performance: Dafoe unearths the famous name from the calcified cliché, stripping away the layers of dust and bad merchandise to reveal an unmediated glimpse of the world through the artist’s eyes: raw and alive, flooded with yellow light, tugged by the swells and currents of madness. “I loved that film,” he says. “It was a little channelling job. He’s in the air, he’s in the soil in Provence.” In 2019, it gave Dafoe his most recent Oscar nomination and he’s kept all the canvases he painted during filming, “even the bad ones”, he says with a smile.
He played another late icon, Pier Paolo Pasolini (they look uncannily alike), in Ferrara’s 2014 portrait of the provocative Italian filmmaker’s final 24 hours and shocking, grisly death. Ferrara, the irascible director whose career has spanned porn to grindhouse to studio films, is exactly the kind of partner in crime Dafoe gets a kick out of – a live wire who wills his work into existence. Their friendship stretches back to a late-night meeting in a Canal Street bar that resulted in the woozy 1998 cult movie New Rose Hotel. They’ve made five feature films together since, including 2019’s Tommaso, shot on a shoestring in Rome. In it, Dafoe plays an American director transplanted to the city, living with his young wife and child, attending recovery meetings and sporadically pierced by sudden and terrible visions. It’s not autobiographical, but it feels like their most personal film: at one AA meeting Dafoe’s character shares a rock-bottom memory from a drug-fuelled Miami shoot that seems pulled straight from Ferrara’s own battles with substance abuse; at another he teaches an acting class with musings that align closely with the actor’s own methods. (His character also practises some gravity-defying yoga, as Dafoe has done every morning for years, though he prefers not to harp on about it.) The pair’s ongoing collaboration is emerging as one of cinema’s most stimulating actor-director partnerships – today they’re neighbours in Rome and Dafoe is godfather to Ferrara’s child.
From left: Singlebreasted wool coat, ruffle-front cotton poplin T-shirt and tailored wool trousers by COMME DES GARÇONS HOMME PLUS. Polka-dot satin suit by GUCCI. Nylon shirt and striped leather tie from CARLO MANZIPhotography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Polka-dot silk velvet suit by GUCCI. Nylon shirt and striped leather tie from CARLO MANZIPhotography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
The actor has split his time between New York and the Eternal City since meeting his wife there in 2004, while shooting his role as Klaus, the comically loyal shipmate in tiny blue shorts in Wes Anderson’s offbeat gem The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Dafoe is now an Italian citizen and speaks the language of his adopted country. “I’m one day back here and I’m in heaven,” he says, recently released from a rapid-fire round of Spider-Man: No Way Home junkets. “There’s a sense of beauty and impermanence and history that I love. I like the people so much. I don’t want to sound like a rube – it’s a broad statement – but they’re empathetic. Americans like a winner. Italians consider people that have lost in a different way. In more puritanical societies, which probably includes where you’re from and where I’m from, it’s, ‘If they fall, keep ’em down, because it’s their fault.’”
Dafoe and Colagrande married in 2005 (she will next direct him in the noirish spy thriller Tropico). That brought his epic run with The Wooster Group to a close, but his theatre work has continued elsewhere: in 2011 he was the shapeshifting storyteller of Robert Wilson’s The Life and Death of Marina Abramović, with ghostly make-up and fiery hair; and Abramović later asked him to star in her seance-like experimental opera 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, in which the pair morph through operatic death scenes – in one Dafoe strangles the artist with two gigantic, coiling snakes. They will reprise the performance this May at the world’s oldest opera house, the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. “I probably get more inspired by art, performance, dance, than film actually,” he says. “Sometimes I see a painting and I don’t have the language to say why, but it opens me up to wonder. You come to it, rather than it coming to you. I think that expresses something about my taste in movies too.”
Dafoe has often said he feels more like a dancer than an actor, trusting his senses and his body’s intelligence as a dancer might. On screen he has a lithe physicality – there’s a tracking shot in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project in which Dafoe wrestles the wallet from a shady character that is so gracefully accomplished it might be a choreographed dance, though it took him barely two takes. That film is another example of the actor’s undimmed pleasure in exploring new territory – as well as the older generation of cinematic rebels, he has sought out the new vanguard of original thinkers. There are plenty of film stars who would balk at jumping on board with less-seasoned directors (and less-bountiful budgets). Dafoe has no such qualms if the work is good, and those young directors have returned the favour with roles that have inspired some of his best performances. After seeing Tangerine, Baker’s iPhone-shot slice of life in LA’s transgender community, Dafoe volunteered to star opposite non-actors as the besieged manager of an ice-cream-coloured motel near Disney World in the director’s The Florida Project. The quiet integrity Dafoe brought to his role as a guardian of wayward families on the brink of eviction was a reminder of what an unselfish co-star he has always been. (See his understated, straight-arrow federal agent to Gene Hackman’s bombastic southern charmer in 1988’s Mississippi Burning.) His dedication – forged in theatre – to working for the group allowed the film’s nonprofessionals to breathe. “I didn’t think about playing scenes,” he says simply, “I thought about being the best manager of a hotel I could be.”
Wool jacquard suit by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO. Lurex polo shirt from CASSIE MERCANTILE. And embroidered wool and suede slippers from CARLO MANZIPhotography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
That film delivered him another Oscar nomination in 2018, the same year he began working with Robert Eggers – he had contacted the director after seeing a poster for his candlelit indie horror The Witch and spontaneously walking into a cinema to watch it. Eggers created The Lighthouse, a nightmarish tale of screaming seagulls, ocean spray and maritime superstition with Dafoe in mind, and he delivers an acting masterclass as a loquacious, weather-beaten wickie trapped with Robert Pattinson in briny isolation. (Dafoe holed up in a creaky fisherman’s cottage in Nova Scotia and learnt to knit like a 19th-century New Englander during the storm-tossed shoot.) Where Dafoe leads, others follow: he and Eggers reunite again this spring in The Northman, a lush, 10th-century saga steeped in Norse myth, this time with a $60 million budget and a cast including Nicole Kidman and Alexander Skarsgård. Dafoe’s role sounds perfectly appropriate: he plays a jester, the figure who challenges the court and its hierarchies under the guise of performance. “The artist is supposed to challenge society, and that includes the jester in this case. But – he pays for it!” says Dafoe. “I’m a real cheerleader for Robert [Eggers]. He’s from the theatre – when I met him I felt very close to him.” He’s just finished shooting with another former theatre director, the gleefully unpredictable Yorgos Lanthimos, who cast Dafoe as a Frankenstein-like scientist in Poor Things, his follow-up to The Favourite. The Greek auteur is notorious for eccentric rehearsals that have involved asking actors to recite lines while fighting invisible force fields or behaving like human noodles. “It helped to liberate the actors from their shtick and find new ways,” Dafoe says of the process. “Let’s just say I wasn’t disappointed by the specificness of his vision. I think of Yorgos and it puts a wry smile on my face.
After four Academy Award nominations to date, this year Dafoe will be receiving that enduring symbol of movie-icon status, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It’s doubtful he’s been losing sleep over it, but it’s odd that a household name like his wasn’t etched into the pavement years ago. In part, that might be Dafoe’s own cleverness at hiding in plain sight – all the better to disappear into his roles. He’s the A-lister who has slipped the leash that moniker entails and crafted a career on his own terms, switching from blockbuster to indie to experimental opera, often in the same year. It’s part of his considerable charm that he will commit with his every fibre to each project; Dafoe is not an actor who phones it in. The result is that everyone has their own favourite version of him – for every Florida Project fan, there’s someone with a special place in their heart for his cross-dressing FBI agent in The Boondock Saints.
Francis Ford Coppola once asked Dafoe to write an essay, Why Act in Theatre?, for his Zoetrope: All-Story magazine. It’s a question that might have returned a rather ponderous answer. But Dafoe’s caught at the joy he finds in performing, onstage or on screen. “It engages the high-minded seeker and simultaneously satisfies the crude exhibitionist in me,” he wrote, “as does dancing, dressing up for Halloween, telling jokes, sex, reading aloud to someone, doing imitations, smiling at strangers, playing with animals, flirting, playing charades, singing on a bus.” In his seventh decade, one of the world’s greatest actors is on a roll, burning as brightly as the twentysomething kid Kathryn Bigelow spotted onstage. He has brought the anarchic spirit of the downtown scene onto the big screen and shifted the conversation in the process, both his heroes and villains questioning the way we think, and watch. Many actors harbour, for better or worse, a yearning to direct. Dafoe is not one of them: he found his calling in his teens, and he’s still fired up about its possibilities. “If you’re open to experience, and it doesn’t have layers of ego over it, hopefully people will see that and say, ‘I wonder whether I could do that?’ Or, ‘How would I feel?’ And that brings you on the trip with me,” he says. “That’s the pleasure of telling stories. It challenges how we live and sometimes proposes other ways to live.”
Single-breasted wool blazer by PRADA. Cotton poplin shirt from CASSIE MERCANTILE. Striped leather tie and tailored wool trousers from CARLO MANZIPhotography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Hair: Mustafa Yanaz at Art and Commerce. Make-up: Amy Komorowski at The Wall Group. Set design: Alice Martinelli at MHS Artists. Photographic assistants: Nicolas Padron, Ahmed Alramly and Elizabeth Borrelli. Styling assistants: Jordan Duddy, Isabella Kavanagh, Marley Cohen and Lilly Nasso. Set-design assistant: Mattia Minasi. Producer: Jennifer Pio. Production manager: Alex Frischman
“You’re Supposed to Be Messy”: Margaret Qualley Is a Maverick in the Making
In AnOther Magazine Spring/Summer 2022, the American actor discusses working with Quentin Tarantino, her role in the Netflix smash hit Maid, and the importance of taking up space
Margaret Qualley is learning how to trust herself. It doesn’t always come easily to the actor. In 2018, Qualley was on the biggest production of her life, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood. It was only a minor role: that of Pussycat, a fictionalised member of Charles Manson’s cult, the Family. But a Tarantino film. Qualley had never dreamed she’d be asked to be in anything so prestigious, or share screen time with Brad Pitt. (“He’s all the things you want him to be,” she says.)
It was the first day of filming at a ranch in the Simi Valley, a stand-in for Spahn Ranch, where Manson infamously devised the gruesome Tate-LaBianca murders that, as Joan Didion famously wrote in The White Album, brought an end to the Sixties. Dogs prowled the perimeter: Tarantino was insistent they be visible in every shot, to approximate the rangy, pseudo-beatnik vibe of life in a cult. The then 23-year-old Qualley was nervous, of course, and focused on getting through the scene without flubbing her lines in front of her co-star Pitt, who was playing languorous stuntman Cliff Booth.
But Qualley had this urge. Pussycat is a louche, free-loving, hitch-hiking hippy chick with LSD-dipped cigarettes in her back pocket. She does what she wants and thinks social norms are a drag. She’s all uncontrolled id in denim cut-offs and a halter top. Pussycat would do something off-key in this situation, Qualley just knew it. Like? Stick her tongue out at Cliff. A half-leering, half-promiscuous gesture. Jarring, but also an invitation.
Qualley thought about it but ruled it out. “I thought, I better not do that,” she recalls. “Who am I to take up that space? This is my first day on the job, this is Brad Pitt and Tarantino. What the fuck am I doing? I better just obey.”
Afterwards Tarantino beckoned her over. He asked Qualley: was there something you wanted to do in that scene that you didn’t do? “How did he fucking know that?” Qualley wonders. “I was blown away.” And with that, Tarantino gave Qualley permission to lean into the sheer weirdness of her role. She did indeed loll her tongue at Pitt in the next take, and it became one of the stand-out moments of a stand-out film, earning Qualley rave reviews for what might have been, in the hands of another actor, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role.
“You forget that you’re supposed to be messy,” she says. “You’re supposed to take up all the space and make all the mistakes, and you’re supposed to do the thing you feel. But it’s so scary sometimes.”
“The messier you are, the more mistakes you make, the more vulnerable you are, the better it is” – Margaret Qualley
She was born in Montana to the actor and model Andie MacDowell and the model-turned-property contractor Paul Qualley. Her parents divorced amicably when she was five and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where Qualley and her siblings Rainey and Justin split their time between their parents’ houses. Growing up in a small town had its blessings – Qualley was removed from the neuroses and competitiveness of the LA scene – but also downsides. “My mom was the only actor in Asheville,” Qualley says, “so it makes you a bit more on display, and people are interested when there’s nothing really interesting going on.”
Qualley was a strange, terminally uncool child. She would think that inanimate objects like pillows and chairs had feelings and was obsessed with making sure that her socks were neat and unwrinkled. Later she grew into what we would now call a social justice warrior, only this was in the early Noughties, when activism was uncool. “I was a vegetarian who was selling recycled global-warming bracelets for charity and sifting through the trash bins, being like, ‘You didn’t recycle this,’ and putting up pictures of cows being slaughtered,” she laughs. “I was so annoying, and passionate, and gangly.” By contrast her sister was “conventionally beautiful in her own whimsical and incredible way. I grew up in a time when it was, like, Uggs and Juicy Couture, and denim miniskirts, blonde hair and boobs. And I was like” – Qualley gurns and affects a deep voice – “look how long my fingers are.”
Even if it’s difficult to accept for a moment that anyone could ever see Qualley as an ugly sister – she is possessed of the sort of luminous beauty that has booked her Chanel and Kenzo campaigns – she is such a funny and self-deprecating raconteur that it’s possible to suspend disbelief. Sprawled across a sofa in her New York City apartment, Qualley is dressed casually in a T-shirt, her hair pulled back in a French plait. She’s in high spirits despite the fact that she’s got a nasty-looking infection in her right eye. “Don’t mind my eye!” she hoots, leaning into the camera so I can get a closer look. “I have this crazy thing going on. Or do mind it. It’s been a process.”
Top: Stylist’s own cotton shirt and denim jeans. Silk tie by LINDMAN NEW YORK. Below: Wool trousers, tweed jacket and glass and metal necklace by CHANEL. Nylon swimsuit by NORMA KAMALIPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
Cotton padded coat and trousers by WOMEN’S HISTORY MUSEUMPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
Although Qualley would visit her mother on set, once spending a memorable few months running free on an Italian island, she had no interest back then in pursuing an acting career. Dance was her first love. “I did competition dancing and ridiculous Honey Boo Boo pageant-style dancing,” she says. Alas, there are no pictures of this online. “And then at a certain point I realised that ballet was more sophisticated and the pinnacle of perfection. So I was like, OK, I should do that.” Qualley studied dance at the prestigious North Carolina School of the Arts. “The obsession,” she says, “really was about being perfect.”
Aged 16, after attending a summer programme held by the American Ballet Theatre in New York, Qualley had a dark night of the soul. “I realised,” she says, “you don’t even love this. You’re just doing this because you want to be perfect, and you’re about to waste your whole life because you’ll never be perfect.” She wrote her parents a long, impassioned email, outlining her plans to become self-sufficient, and persuaded them to let her stay in New York, where she became a working model. In her telling of the story, Qualley is a hillbilly doofus who avoided getting into elevators with men because someone had told her that men attack women in New York City lifts. “I was like,” she snorts, “is this guy going to kill me? I better leave.” Qualley was likely more sophisticated than she lets on – she was, after all, presented to society at Le Bal des débutantes at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris later that year.
But the New York modelling scene is not a healthy place for a perfectionist teenager and Qualley has spoken elsewhere about developing an eating disorder. “I was really hard on myself when I was in high school and modelling, and just trying hard to be perfect at everything, and be a perfect student, and a perfect model,” she says. This was a pre-body-positivity time, when high-fashion models were uniformly size zero. “Hopefully now there’s more body inclusivity,” she says, “and celebrating all of the different variations of bodies, and how beautiful that is, and how versatile beauty is in general. It’s wild that we shift through people with the same criteria in mind, that people have checklists. I’ve been a victim of that, and it’s a dark, ugly place to exist.”
“For young women ... we’re often told that our accounts of reality aren’t correct. That the way you feel and the way you’re experiencing the world is somehow your fault” – Margaret Qualley
Qualley freely admits that her mother’s celebrity created a carapace around her. “I think I’ve been protected in a certain way my entire life because of that. I was put into a different category and there’s definitely a protective shield that I feel is related to being my mother’s daughter,” she says.
Qualley quit modelling after four months. “I realised it wasn’t good for me,” she explains. Her boyfriend at the time, The Fault in Our Stars actor Nat Wolff, took her to an acting class in a church on the Upper East Side. For the repressed, hard-on-herself Qualley, it was a revelation. “The thing that I loved,” she says, “was that back then I didn’t give myself permission to have many feelings in life. I was an incredibly disciplined, controlled person, that didn’t talk very much, and nodded a lot, and never broke the rules. So I didn’t have permission to do anything or have any feelings, basically. And then I went to an acting class and I got really mad, got really sad and had all the feelings. And I was like, ‘This is great! I could try to get paid to do this – that would be nuts.’ And I still feel that way.”
After so many years of ballet and modelling – both professions that demand punishing self-discipline and a certain degree of stoic professionalism – acting felt loose, chaotic, exciting. Like throwing paint at a canvas, Jackson Pollock-style, instead of the technical precision of the old masters. Like peeling off Spandex and pulling on sweats. Like being given permission to be the goofy, oddball version of herself that she was when she was a climate-change evangelising little girl instead of the uptight model. But with liberation comes a different sort of fear.
Photographer’s own vintage cotton T-shirt. Wool skirt by CHANELPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
Wool bandeau, Bermuda shorts and neck piece by CHANELPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
“What I love about acting,” Qualley says, “is that it’s so scary to do it. It’s a real fear-factor kind of thing, in the sense that the messier you are, the more mistakes you make, the more vulnerable you are, the better it is. You’re constantly in front of the camera, going, ‘I’m not perfect, I’m not perfect, look at me, I’m not perfect.’ And that is terrifying, but incredibly exhilarating. And coming to terms with that is going to be something I work on, I think, for ever.”
In less than a decade Qualley has become one of Hollywood’s brightest talents, even if she doesn’t actually live in the epicentre of the movie industry. “New York feels very cosy to me,” she says. “LA feels scary. LA feels like I’ll never be good enough.”
She is at her happiest when she’s walking around New York, eating cereal milk ice cream from cult favourite Milk Bar. “It’s a touristy thing,” she says, “but I think it’s just phenomenal.” For many years Qualley’s apartment didn’t have any furniture: she ate meals from a plate on the floor. “I have furniture now,” she deadpans, gesturing proudly. “It’s really exciting.” In New York you can throw a dime in most directions and hit a celebrity. “Nobody gives a shit,” Qualley says. She prefers the relative anonymity of big-city life. “No one stops me,” she insists. “I really am not terribly recognised. And any recognition I get from my work is great because I want to touch people. I’m telling these stories because I want them to be watched.”
“A lot of actors – and people – are people-pleasers. Who doesn’t want love? And it seems like the easiest way to get it” – Margaret Qualley
In 2021, Qualley got her wish, starring in the Netflix smash hit miniseries Maid, based on Stephanie Land’s 2019 memoir of her time spent working as a cleaner to support her infant daughter after the break-up of an abusive relationship. Maid is an unflinching portrayal of abuse, poverty and the backbreaking reality of life for low-income Americans, but it is also a show about maternal love, the dignity of work and finding joy in small things, whether a walk through sun-dappled forests or singing along to a favourite Salt-N-Pepa song in the car. Shoop shoop ba-doop.
As Alex, Qualley is straight-backed and utterly without self-pity, even as life heaps calamities upon her: a car crash, homelessness, employers who stiff her out of her wages. The role was a revelation. “So many people are just treading water to get by,” she says, “just barely able to pay their bills and stuck in this constant loop of trying to stay afloat. To be a person in the States who is lower middle class and working your fucking ass off, and still be a good mom or a good dad, I think is truly heroic. It’s just fucked up what we do to people.”
Her on-screen relationship with daughter Maddy, played by five-year-old Rylea Nevaeh Whittet, is the emotional heart of the show. “I became obsessed with hanging out with Rylea,” Qualley says, “because the hardest challenge was to make a convincing mother-daughter relationship. I’m not a mom and it’s a really challenging feat to be a believable mother to a child I don’t know, and who doesn’t know me, more importantly. So I just spent all of my time with her and carried her around everywhere, and temporarily kidnapped her from her parents.” They would go grocery shopping and make pancakes. At the end of many scenes where she was carrying her in her arms, Qualley wouldn’t be able to tell if Whittet was pretending to be asleep or was actually so relaxed she had nodded off.
Leather skirt by CHANEL. Her own watchPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
Leather skirt and necklaces with glass and strass beads by CHANEL. Vintage pearl bracelets from ALBRIGHT FASHION LIBRARYPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
Her hard work paid off: Qualley and Whittet’s relationship is as plausible and nuanced as is possible to imagine, as is the on-screen relationship with Alex’s mother Paula – which is unsurprising, given that the role is played by none other than MacDowell. Qualley lobbied for her mother to have the role, calling Margot Robbie, one of Maid’s producers, who loved the idea. “It was the biggest cheat I’ve ever managed to pull off,” Qualley said last year, pointing out that the comfort of having her mother on set gave a sense of easy confidence.
Maid is not only critically acclaimed but has also advanced the public understanding of emotional and financial abuse. “One of the greatest things about Maid was how accessible it was,” says Qualley. “How so many people felt a part of their story was being told. They saw themselves there, or their sisters there, or their moms.”
While Qualley credits her time on Maid as one of the most fulfilling professional experiences of her life and is full of praise for everyone involved in the production, she had to stand her ground when it came to her vision of Alex. “Everyone was really disappointed in me at first,” Qualley says, “because they thought I couldn’t access rage, and that I was playing a victim, essentially. And I was like, ‘No, I can access rage, I promise you.’” Qualley explained that Alex simply wouldn’t lose her cool while holding Maddy in her arms. “Alex is fucking smart and she’s not going to blow up at someone unless it’s going to have an effect. If she’s holding her child, she’s going to be mindful of her child’s experience. She’s a mama bear. She’s going to protect her kid at all costs.”
“I’m working on trying to get back to whatever I was when I was a little kid, which is a total freak show” – Margaret Qualley
It wasn’t until they came to film episode three, where Alex confronts her ex-boyfriend Sean in a bar, that she was proved right. “I yelled like crazy and they’re like, ‘Finally,’” Qualley says. “I was like, ‘Well, yeah, no shit. I’m not holding a kid and this is something that I’m mad about.’” It may not seem like much – a creative disagreement that was resolved to the satisfaction of all parties involved – but for an inveterate people-pleaser it was progress. No Tarantino standing in the wings, mouthing “OK” at her. Qualley understood the role on an elemental level and was ultimately vindicated.
“For young women,” Qualley says, “we’re often told that our accounts of reality aren’t correct. That the way you feel and the way you’re experiencing the world is somehow your fault, and if you want certain things you should feel bad for wanting those things.” We’re not talking about Alex, or Maddy, or Maid any more. Something bigger. “By proxy of standing up for Alex and standing up for Maddy,” she continues, “I was able to realise that I shouldn’t feel ashamed of certain wants or beliefs or feelings. And that it is literally still hard to say these things, because people are so conditioned and practised not to speak this way.”
I ask her whether she still feels like a people-pleaser. “Definitely,” she responds. “A lot of actors – and people – are people-pleasers. Who doesn’t want love? And it seems like the easiest way to get it. I don’t know if it’s the right way to get it, but it seems to make sense. If I make this person happy, maybe they’ll stick around; maybe they’ll love me and love feels great.” Qualley drew on these experiences of desperate longing when playing the iconic choreographer and dancer Ann Reinking in the 2019 miniseries Fosse/Verdon, a role for which she was Emmy nominated.
Tweed coat, wool trousers and glass and metal belt by CHANEL. Nylon swimsuit by NORMA KAMALIPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
Wool skirt by CHANELPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
Reinking was the partner of legendary Cabaret choreographer and director Bob Fosse after his split from the equally legendary film and Broadway star Gwen Verdon. There were three people in their relationship – Fosse and Verdon continued to work together, even after their romantic partnership ended – and Reinking fought valiantly to get Fosse off drugs and booze, to little effect. “I see a similarity in us,” Qualley says, “which I’m hesitant to say, because I really do look up to her. The similarity I see is like, ‘Let me lay down so you don’t have to push me down. It’s safer to just be run over by the bus of my own choosing.’”
Qualley got to know Reinking before she died in 2020. “She was the most giving, generous, humble, kind, sweet, powerful thing. All she did was just love everybody all of the time,” Qualley says. “You’d ask her about somebody and she’d go, ‘Oh, they’re the greatest.’” Getting to know Reinking made Qualley reflect on her own approach to relationships. “I’ve been trying to think lately,” Qualley says, “what allows certain people to not hurt themselves by letting people walk over them, but to take a bullet instead of being resentful and angry and hung up on it. I think that ability to love other people in such a big way comes from loving yourself in a big way. So I’m working on that.”
Has she been walked over or treated badly in the past? “Yeah,” she says. “And I’m really lucky now because I have really amazing people that have the best intentions. I’m really lucky. I’m not getting hurt very much. But you’re not always going to be around those safe, special people. You have to build up those skills and figure out how to navigate the world.”
“You’re not always going to be around those safe, special people. You have to build up those skills and figure out how to navigate the world” – Margaret Qualley
In January 2021, Qualley was reported to have ended her relationship with fellow actor Shia LaBeouf after his ex, musician FKA twigs, filed a lawsuit against him, alleging sexual battery, assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress. (LaBeouf has denied some of the allegations made by twigs and other former girlfriends but accepted accountability for “those things I have done”.) Qualley has not commented publicly on their break-up but signalled her support for twigs in an Instagram post, in which she shared a picture of a magazine cover the singer had recently shot, accompanying it with a caption that read, simply, “Thank you.”
Now Qualley is happily in love, although she doesn’t say with whom (according to gossip blogs it’s musician, songwriter and frequent Taylor Swift collaboator Jack Antonoff). She met his parents a few months ago. “Terrifying,” she says. “Please like me, please like me, this is so important, please.” I ask how it went and she grins. “Great,” she says. “Love them.”
Lately Qualley has been surprised by how fast she’s changing. Maid was a nine-month shoot, and in that time “I changed so much,” she says. “I grew a lot in that time, or shed a lot, whatever it is.”
Wool cardigan and skirt by CHANELPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
Wool jacket and tied metal top by CHANELPhotography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Emma Wyman
Her goal right now, she says, “is to be like I was when I was a kid. We come into this world and we’re just the purest versions of ourselves. And then we put on all these affectations and people-please. We go to middle school and we’re like, ‘I want the boys to like me, and the girls to like me,’ and so you’re taken away from yourself a bit. You’re putting on all these different shields. I’m working on trying to get back to whatever I was when I was a little kid, which is a total freak show.”
What Qualley might term a “freak show” other people would probably see as incredibly charming. She has a goofy quality to her personality that comes out in compulsive self-deprecation, silly voices and a dork laugh that sounds like it’s running away from her in fits and starts. When I ask her what her best quality is, she groans, before finally offering that she makes a good breakfast and is “clean”. Despite her lifelong proximity to fame, Qualley is unaffected and down to earth, her happiest when she’s improvising a dance routine in a hotel corridor or eating her dad’s favourite pancakes. When not filming, she’s been spending her time at his latest construction project, a block of flats he built himself on the windswept beach of San Carlos, on Panama’s Pacific coast.
But her opportunities for downtime are limited. She recently wrapped production on the Claire Denis film The Stars at Noon, based on a 1986 novel by Denis Johnson about an American woman caught up in the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1984. Filming took place in Panama, which meant that Qualley’s father was able to stay with her and visit her on set. “My God,” she exclaims. “It was so freaking cool!” Because of the pandemic she hadn’t seen him for nearly two years. He went to see her every day, listed on the call sheet as “Margaret’s dad”. They would go for long walks in the morning before filming. She jokes that she was able to finally take him back with her to the US when filming wrapped. “It’s good because he can get all the surgeries that he needs,” she says. (Building all his construction projects himself, without external help, means Paul can be accident-prone. Qualley credits him with teaching her her work ethic.)
“I think playing the dark sad girl is my go-to, but it’s not on purpose. People just think I’m that. I can play convincing dark sad girls. But I’m not really that sad, and I don’t think I’m dark” – Margaret Qualley
In addition to The Stars at Noon, Qualley has a part in Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming Poor Things, alongside Willem Dafoe. “Margaret made me laugh a lot and was always game and unpretentious,” says Dafoe of their time on set. The feeling is mutual. “He is so grounded and great and giving and kind and professional,” she says. “And he’s always telling the most ridiculous stories that are just normal anecdotes for him.”
If the past decade has been a whirlwind, there are some moments that stand out. Like driving down Sunset Boulevard shortly before the release of Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood and seeing herself on a billboard for the movie. Qualley hadn’t told anyone about the role because she was convinced she would be cut out in the edit. “I was like, ‘I guess I’m in the fucking movie,’” she remembers. “It was shocking.”
She’s determined to maintain that wide-eyed sense of gratitude and joy about a job that brings her transformation and release. “I want to keep pushing myself,” she says, “and I want to keep having fun and keep doing things that are important to me. I don’t know what that will look like. I feel like I’m so different from last month to this month, and who knows where I’m going to get to next month?” Qualley knows what she doesn’t want to do: be typecast as a loose approximation of her character in Maid. “I think playing the dark sad girl is my go-to,” she says, “but it’s not on purpose. People just think I’m that. I can play convincing dark sad girls. But I’m not really that sad, and I don’t think I’m dark.”
More than anything, Qualley wants to stay true to herself: to the “total freak show” she was before she grew up into a person anxious to please others, at her own expense. To be maverick. To be authentic. “I want to make sure that my intention when I’m making something is never to please the cool people,” she concludes. “You know what I mean? I want to operate from that place.”
All CHANEL clothing and accessories from the Métiers d’Art 2022 collection.
Hair: James Pecis at Bryant Artists. Make-up: Dick Page at Statement. Set design: Ian Salter at Frank Reps. Manicure: Alicia Torello at Bridge. Digital tech: Jarrod Turner. Photographic assistants: Dylan Garcia, Tom Maltbie and Ariel Sadok. Styling assistant: Marcus Cuffie. Hair assistant: D’Angelo Alston. Set-design assistants: Russell Mangicaro and Robert Forbes. Production: Hen’s Tooth Production
It now seems inevitable that Zoë Kravitz would become a star. In AnOther Magazine Autumn/Winter 2021, the actor speaks openly with Lynette Nylander in a conversation spanning family, activism and her biggest role yet: Selina Kyle aka Catwoman
No one can resist the allure of Zoë Kravitz. Not the waifish model-cum-waitress serving us at Greenpoint’s premier hangout Five Leaves, where we’re meeting for our interview. Between taking our order she reports back to her colleagues in hushed tones that she is serving “Zoë’s table”. Not the archetypal Brooklynite couple reclining in the park on the overwhelmingly humid mid-July day, who only break from gazing at each other to stare as we stroll past post-lunch. Not the two hipster bros who whip their heads around at breakneck speed on Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue as she walks back to her home nearby.
Although Kravitz herself seems unaware of the attention, one thing is clear: she is the cool kids’ cool kid. She arrives for our interview straight from Pilates, dewy from the midday heat and dressed down in a white tank and heather-grey yoga shorts, her signature wavy braids framing her delicate features. Her mix of good looks and down-to-earth energy (she’s happy to offer counsel on my dating life) goes to prove that some people really do have it all. She’s genuinely nice too. She greets me with a hearty grin, graciously pours us both water every time we run low, and takes breaks from her kale and steak salad to ask with genuine concern if the sound from the busy Brooklyn street where we are sitting will interfere with my recording.
Arguably set up for life with Eighties (and enduring) style icon and actress Lisa Bonet as her mother and perennial rock god Lenny Kravitz for a father, Zoë Kravitz could easily have had her head turned by the inevitable interest this was going to generate in her and her life and assumed vapid It-girl status. A fashion favourite, she has been the face of Saint Laurent across beauty, fragrance and fashion for four years – “It’s simple and beautiful clothing,” she says.
“I feel like me and Anthony inspire each other. We talk about inspiration pictures and send things back and forth. Me and Anthony are tight.” She has also fronted campaigns for Calvin Klein, Tiffany and Balenciaga. Yet Kravitz has taken that undeniable head start in life and written her own story.
Beginning her acting career with appearances in films such as 2011’s X-Men: First Class and 2014’s Divergent garnered her big-screen time, albeit in supporting roles. A kick into high gear came with parts in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road and the Fantastic Beasts film series. But it was her performance in HBO’s Big Little Lies that led to Kravitz breaking through. Holding court as the bohemian yoga instructor Bonnie Carlson (a part originally written for a white woman, and for which Kravitz adroitly handles the nuanced racial power dynamics in the shifting of the story), she stars alongside an assemblage of Hollywood’s finest actors: Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and Divergent co-star Shailene Woodley.
Zoë is wearing stylist’s own ribbed cotton vest. Her own earrings.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
An ability to flit seamlessly between indie flicks and mega-budget franchises is Kravitz’s superpower. Her turn as Robyn “Rob” Brooks in the 2020 TV adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, High Fidelity, may have been short-lived (it was cancelled after one series), but she cleverly reinvented it with millennials in mind. Her character, a female record store owner living in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, who has flashbacks to and laments her ill-fated relationships with both men and women, ensures this is a far cry from the Stephen Frears movie of the same name, which John Cusack and her mother starred in 20 years earlier. Kravitz, here, plays the Cusack role.
In addition to the lead character, Kravitz was an executive producer on the project and her command was seen everywhere from the freewheeling, globe-trekking soundtrack to the directing decisions. “I don’t think the network understood the importance of that story,” she says, “but I am still touched by how many women, especially women of colour, come up to me saying they loved it.”
Laminated jersey body and leather over-the-knee boots by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO. Earrings as before.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
Lurex and fur body, metal bracelet and coneflower chain metal belt by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO. Earrings as before.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, she left her Williamsburg home for London to take on her biggest role yet, starring alongside Robert Pattinson’s Batman as Selina Kyle – aka Catwoman. She had already played the role, after a fashion, in 2017’s The Lego Batman Movie, but now she can get her teeth into a character that has already been portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry and, most recently, Anne Hathaway. It was the biracial Eartha Kitt’s 1960s Catwoman – coming as it did in an era of racial tensions even more heightened and politicised than our own – that has remained in memory, immortalised. Today the role comes with its own legacy and feverishly passionate fanbase. The weight of that didn’t go unnoticed by Kravitz, but it didn’t deter her either. “It was different. It was scary. It was unexpected for me. And that was what was exciting.”
With megastardom on the cards, her rise hasn’t come without setbacks. After marrying actor Karl Glusman in an intimate ceremony at her father’s Paris home in 2019, she filed for divorce 18 months later – a dark spot on an otherwise bright few years but the start of an invigorating new chapter. She feels affirmed – unafraid. Her feature directorial debut Pussy Island was recently acquired by MGM. Kravitz herself is reluctant to divulge much but she’s already hard at work on the project, off to scout for locations after we meet. “I am 32 and it’s fucking fantastic,” she says. “I am happy about all the experiences. If you don’t learn and grow, what’s the point?”
Organic crepe muslin dress and knot-chain metal choker by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
Laminated jersey shorts, metal bracelet and patent leather slingback heels by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO. Earrings as before.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
Lynette Nylander: How have you been spending your time in these strange circumstances we find ourselves in? What’s been your reality in the pandemic?
Zoë Kravitz: It’s been so many things. I never had to worry about my job or where I was going to live – how I was going to pay rent or for food. In that respect, I’m very lucky. I also worked a lot through it. We had already started shooting The Batman when it happened. It was crazy because we were shooting this big movie and then everything stopped. The movie was shut down for six months. I stayed in London for three months, in a house in Notting Hill, this dark, funny house in London. It was very weird being away from home and my family being in other places.
LN: Whereabouts are your family?
ZK: My dad’s in the Bahamas. My mom’s in California. Eventually I ended up coming back here to New York for a couple of months and living upstate, which was good for me. I think it was important to take the time to feel all the things that we were all feeling. I realised how I was personally using the fast-paced life as a way of not doing and dealing with a lot of things. I’m very thankful for that time to really sit and look at, “Who am I? What do I want to be doing? How do I want to spend my time? How am I connecting with my friends and family when I talk to them?” All of those things, I had to look at.
LN: I am interested in your childhood from your perspective and the allure of your family. Everyone says you’ve got the coolest parents in the world. Though to you they’re simply Mum and Dad. That photo of you at a fashion event sitting next to Donatella Versace springs to mind.
ZK: Yeah, if you look closely at that picture, I’m looking at my nails. I’m bored. I want to hang out with my friends. You know what I mean? Yes, that stuff is very cool from the outside, but when you’re a kid you don’t know what that means. It doesn’t feel the same. It was all very normal to me and then alienating in a lot of ways because when you’re a kid you’re just trying to fit in with other kids. Standing out was the worst thing in the world.
LN: How old were you when your parents separated?
ZK: Two. I don’t even remember them together but they were very friendly. I lived with my mom in LA primarily until I was 10 or 11. My dad was on tour then, so I didn’t see him very often. He’d be in town for a month or a couple of days. It was the schedule. He was around, but it wasn’t one week on, one week off, or anything like that. When I was 11, I moved in with him for a couple of years in Miami, near the Bahamas, where his family is from. I moved out when I was 18 and came to New York.
Organic crepe muslin dress and metal bracelet by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO. Cotton briefs by HANES.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
Her own cotton T-shirt. Vintage denim shorts by LEVI’S from RAGGEDY THREADS. And metal pendant necklace and metal bracelet by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
LN: It’s natural to put you in an indie-role category – how do you navigate your career and choose the breadth of roles that you do?
ZK: I don’t put a lot of thought into it in terms of, “I have to do something different so I don’t get boxed in and put into a corner.” We have many layers. I’m very lucky to be able to be creative for a living. I simply want to have fun and explore and challenge different sides of myself. If I read something that I feel that I’ve seen or done before, it doesn’t spark that thing inside me. When I read something unexpected for me, it’s exciting and scary. It makes me feel alive.
LN: I love that you changed your Instagram bio to Black Lives Matter.
ZK: There’s nothing else to say. If you disagree with that you should leave.
“I’ve felt pressure to post something that I wasn’t ready to post about or didn’t know enough about. It affected me. It can feel like if you don’t post about something that means you don’t care about it” – Zoë Kravitz
LN: I remember that it used to read “Trying not to be a TOTAL asshole since 1988”.
ZK: That’s the point, we’re all quite an asshole sometimes, and that needs to be OK.
LN: You are not afraid to put yourself out there. LGBTQ+ advocacy, Black Lives Matter – political conversations.
ZK: I feel like we’re living in a very odd time, where people confuse posting something with activism, which is not the same thing. There are people who dedicate their lives and their time and their physical bodies to being at rallies and meetings and being on the front lines.
I always want to make it very clear that I am not that person. I’m not saving the world.
That’s been a really difficult thing, emotionally, for me, where I’ve felt pressure to post something that I wasn’t ready to post about or didn’t know enough about. It affected me. It can feel like if you don’t post about something that means you don’t care about it. That’s conflicting for me because sometimes I don’t have enough information and need to learn more, or I don’t want to be on my phone today and something’s going on in the world. I’ll get a lot of hate for not talking about something, and I’m like, “I’m not a fucking news anchor.” Also, just because I don’t post on this thing it does not mean that I’m not feeling it or learning about it. My silence doesn’t mean I’m taking a side. The internet is not the real world.
Vest as before. Patent leather pantaboots and metal bracelet by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
Vest as before. Patent leather pantaboots and metal bracelet by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
LN: How did the Catwoman role come about?
ZK: My agent called me and was like, “They’re making a Batman movie and there’s a Catwoman role. You’re on the list of actors they are looking at.” I think the first thing that happened was I went to LA and met with Matt Reeves, the director, who also wrote the script, and just talked to him.
I read the script. Then he talked with me again to hear my thoughts, to see if we were on the same page. I didn’t know him well and it was a bit of a process. When these big opportunities come up, these big roles, and you really want them, it’s heartbreaking when you don’t get them. You put a lot of energy into it.
The thing that I tried to keep in check throughout, though, was just wanting to be agreeable and likeable to get the role. To read the script and say, “I love it. I love everything about it.” Then I go to the audition and I have this puppy dog energy.
It was important to give him an idea of what it’s really like to work with me. To say what I really think and, if we’re on set together, to ask the questions I want to ask. I tried to come at it from the angle where I am showing him what I see and feel about this character. I believe that’s why it happened and I got the role. Matt’s a fantastic director, and he’s really into talking about the character. We had some really good conversations. I had some thoughts about the character once I’d read the script too and they were welcomed.
LN: Have you seen all the other Batman movies?
ZK: I’ve seen all the movies, yeah. I’ve read some of the comics now, but I wasn’t a comic head or anything. I also tried to think about it not as Catwoman, but as a woman, how does this make me feel? How are we approaching this and how are we making sure we’re not fetishising or creating a stereotype? I knew it needed to be a real person.
LN: How do you feel about the importance of that massive comics universe? It’s different from what you’ve previously done. Those fans are hardcore.
ZK: They are, and because I respect them so much I chose not to think about them when making the movie. If I’m thinking about wanting everyone to like it and wanting all the fans to like it, I’m not going to actually bring a real person to life. Matt wrote a really interesting story with a complex character, and the relationships are really interesting. All I wanted to do was honour that story.
Sometimes with really big movies, it can feel like you’re just a puppet and part of this big machine. This felt like an independent movie in the way that there was real heart and soul and thought being put into the process and into every scene. It was incredibly collaborative. Matt’s very specific. It took him a year to make this because of Covid. We were in this bubble, really in this world, and it was an incredible experience. To spend a year of your life, and it’s very physically demanding ... I had to be in very specific shape, and there’s a pandemic going on. I’m being zipped into a catsuit every day at 7am, working 12-hour days and then coming home and working out. It was intense.
Faux-fur coat, laminated jersey shorts and patent leather slingback heels by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO. Earrings as before.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
LN: You’ve been working on your feature directorial debut, Pussy Island, too, which you also wrote.
ZK: I’ve been writing it for four years. I want to be careful about how I speak about it and what information I put out there because there are a lot of layers to the story. I was actually in London shooting Fantastic Beasts when I started to write it. I had a decent amount of time off during that film, and I was feeling a lot of frustration and anger towards men, specifically in my industry, and I felt like this wasn’t a conversation that was happening at the time. Then my imagination ran away with me and I started writing a story around those feelings. Then Harvey Weinstein happened and the world changed. This story has evolved with the world evolving, which has been interesting and which is part of the reason it took so long. This conversation is happening in real time.
LN: And you want it to reflect what was and is happening?
ZK: Yeah, and my opinions changed and the world changed, and so the characters and their interactions have had to change. That was interesting. It was this living, breathing thing. It’s been a crazy journey, writing this movie, and I’m in love with it. I’m so excited to bring it to life.
“It’s so complex, that space, when you’re in between heartbroken and mourning the loss of something and excited for what’s ahead of you” – Zoë Kravitz
LN: When you wrote it, did you imagine you’d also direct it yourself? What was the plan?
ZK: Maybe not right away. I wrote the lead role for myself, assuming I’d be in it, just naturally, because I was writing it from my perspective, in a way. Then, maybe a year in, I had decided that I wanted to direct it and that I didn’t want to do both. It was actually really fun, creating this character and taking her away from me and making her something that is not a version of me. Writing something for a woman that she can sink her teeth into, as I’m constantly reading one-dimensional, boring roles. So now we have [British actor] Naomi Ackie on board. I feel very lucky to have her.
We’re in prep right now. We’re still figuring out when we’re going to shoot – there are a lot of different factors. Schedules and locations and stuff. It’s the fun part right now, where we get to see how it all falls together. It will start filming either at the end of this year or sometime next year. I’m still figuring it out.
LN: Are you nervous?
ZK: I am. In a really good way – nervous and also very ready. I know the story inside out. I know how to tell it. I know what I want to do. I know where I’m coming from emotionally. I’m going to learn a lot and it’s going to be hard, but the challenge is good.
Stylist’s own silk bra. Earrings as before. And knitted glass pearl and oxidised silver choker with rhinestones and metal bracelet by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
Laminated jersey body, metal bracelet and leather over-the-knee boots by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO.Photography by Collier Schorr, Styling by Avena Gallagher
LN: From my perspective, to see so many female directors shine in the past few years seems new. There had been odd glimpses before but I feel like there’s such a great wave of women telling worthwhile stories now. And you can always tell when a woman has directed the film.
ZK: Of course you can. It’s been really interesting also looking for crew and seeing what’s out there. I’m looking for DPs, most are white men and then white women. There are very few Black female DPs, Asian female DPs, queer DPs, queer female DPs. People are aware of that now and it’s at least progress to be having these kinds of conversations. Especially as a first-time director, I want someone that’s done it before. And the people who’ve done it before are white men. It’s like being stuck between a rock and a hard place. I haven’t chosen a DP yet. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I’m trying to just stay open and feel it out.
LN: You also just wrapped on Kimi with Steven Soderbergh.
ZK: I loved working with him. It was a really fucking fun movie. It was my first time working with him. To get that phone call and to star in one of his movies was a wild experience. He is a true genius. Watching him work, especially going into directing, was like a college education. It’s so nice to meet a filmmaker who’s been doing it for so long and who’s still so interested and invested in finding new ways to tell stories. He wants to work. He wants to do new things. He loves filmmaking. It’s amazing.
LN: Have you had time for your music amid all of this?
ZK: Well, the band is no more but I’ve been recording a solo album with Jack Antonoff for a couple of years, on and off. It’s been hard with the schedule and the pandemic. Jack is a fantastic producer – he’s so good at really tapping into who he’s working with and not making it about him. Some producers want to make it about ... like, “I’m going to put my sound on you.” It’s what I experienced with my band. But for him to want to help me realise what I’m hearing in my head has been a really wonderful experience and very therapeutic. I wrote it over a long stretch of time, subconsciously just capturing this range of emotions, which has been interesting to look back on and see what I was writing about them, then and now and in between. It’s personal. It’s about love and loss. I got married. I got divorced. Separations, break-ups are sad but are beautiful things too. It’s about the bittersweetness, that beginning and that end. It’s so complex, that space, when you’re in between heartbroken and mourning the loss of something and excited for what’s ahead of you.
LN: Do you feel happy? Your twenties are crazy, I feel. I was holding on for dear life.
ZK: I was too. Now I’m holding on to my thirties and I’m like, “Can I just stay here, though? This is nice.” It’s great making better decisions, knowing what works for you, knowing what feels good to you, knowing what real fun is, not just the idea of fun. We’re in a sweet spot. We need to enjoy it and not pretend to be adults that don’t do fun things any more. It should be, “I’m in my thirties. Let’s do more things.”
Hair: Nikki Nelms at Ice Studios using MAUI MOISTURE. Make-up: Nina Park at Kalpana using YSL BEAUTY. Manicure: Aki Hirayama at Tracey Mattingly using YSL BEAUTY. Set design: Maxim Jezek at Walter Schupfer. Digital tech: Jarrod Turner. Lighting: Ari Sadok. Photographic assistants: KT Tucker and Rob Orlowski. Styling assistant: Taryn Bensky. Set-design assistants: Odin J Grina and Natalia Janul. Executive producer: Shea Spencer at Artists Commissions. Production: Jemma Hinkly at Artist Commissions and Alana Amram at Hen’s Tooth Productions. Production assistant: Donovan Powell. Post-production: Two Three Two.
This article appears in the Autumn/Winter 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale internationally from 7 October 2021. Pre-order a copy here.
Travis Scott and Kim Jones Speak on Their History-Making Collaboration
Travis Scott appears in AnOther Magazine Autumn/Winter 2021, dressed in the clothes he designed in partnership with Kim Jones and the house of Dior – speaking to Emma Hope Allwood, he and Jones discuss this deep-rooted, far-reaching collaboration
Travis Scott is difficult to pin down – literally, for an interview or a photographic shoot, but also ideologically. He eschews and evades easy categorisation. Sure, he’s a musician – he has one of the highest profiles of a new generation of rap artists. Yet to see Scott as just that is to miss the point: whether creating a McDonald’s meal – he is the first celebrity to have one named after him since Michael Jordan in 1992 – performing a virtual concert on gaming platform Fortnite, or remaking himself as a modern media mogul, Scott embodies creativity in the 21st century. While somehow juggling an aura of mystery with a stratospheric level of fame, he matches a hazy, autotune-inflected musical output that defines the sound of modern hip-hop with a creative auteurship that goes beyond hit singles. Scott’s creative collective Cactus Jack encompasses a record label, a publishing arm and an array of merchandise with graphics devised by him. Perhaps inevitably his manifold talents attracted the attention of the equally multi-hyphenate creative Kim Jones at Dior – he thought they should collaborate.
Jones, of course, has brought the work of visual artists into the Dior universe on numerous occasions since stepping into his role as artistic director of menswear in 2018: the pneumatic robots of Hajime Sorayama; the playful, cross-eyed characters created by Kaws; and art-influenced clothing in partnership with artists Raymond Pettibon, Daniel Arsham and Peter Doig. But this latest collaboration exhaustively explores the elastic definition of the term ‘artist’ today. “I have always collaborated with artists. This time I said to myself, why not a musician?” Jones says. “Creating is a collective effort and, let’s be honest, a creative director is surrounded by a whole team of creatives. You can’t accomplish your ambitions for a house like this if you’re doing it alone. It’s not about talent or celebrity, but if someone produces something I find cool, I want to interact with him.”
Scott was born Jacques Bermon Webster II in Houston, Texas, in 1991: he renamed himself after a favourite uncle, Travis, and the American rapper Kid Cudi, whose real first name is Scott. Thus rechristened, he achieved global success as a recording artist: after dropping out of university to pursue music, his first commercial EP, Upper Echelon, was released in 2013 – since then, he has been nominated for eight Grammy awards. His 2018 album Astroworld has gone triple platinum in the US and, after the release of his last single – fittingly titled Franchise – in September last year, he became the first artist to have three songs debut at No 1 in less than a year on the Billboard Hot 100. Spotify currently ranks him as the 24th most popular artist in the world, ahead of Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and the Beatles.
He and Jones first met six years ago, when the latter was head of menswear at Louis Vuitton, clashing modern luxury with streetwear in a manner that’s now commonplace – not least at Dior. The label’s much hyped Air Jordan collaboration was previewed on Scott’s feet at the house’s menswear show in Miami in December 2019. The next step was for them to collaborate for Spring/Summer 2022, on the first Dior catwalk collection created with a musician or a record label, dual-branded as Cactus Jack Dior.
All clothing and accessories from the DIOR menswear Spring/Summer 2022 collection. Travis is wearing a knitted wool jumper with Cactus Jack intarsia and embroidery, flared silk and wool satin trousers with Cactus Jack embroidery.Photography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
The collaboration, however, isn’t about two brands coming together – rather, it’s about the relationship between Jones and Scott, an intimate connection. The two have been in contact since that first meeting, talking, texting and ultimately gestating this possibly inevitable hook-up. “Kim is a friend of mine. I probably wouldn’t be doing this if he wasn’t involved,” Scott says. “He is such an inspiration. I was a fan even when I was in college, so it’s crazy to be working with him. Going to the atelier and watching things being sewn and made by hand, it was insane.”
“He is such an inspiration. I was a fan even when I was in college, so it’s crazy to be working with him. Going to the atelier and watching things being sewn and made by hand, it was insane” – Travis Scott
This wasn’t just a case of Scott slapping his name on a label and calling it a day. It never is with any of his collaborations: Scott and Cactus Jack have also worked with Nike, Bape and PlayStation, and his McDonald’s hook-up wasn’t just a meal – incidentally, it consisted of a quarter pounder with cheese, bacon and lettuce, fries with barbecue sauce and a Sprite – but a full line of merchandise. “This is the first time that a luxury house is collaborating with a musician and involving him in all the creation process,” says Jones in an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that while rappers like Scott are often on the moodboard or seated in the front row, they’re rarely found in the atelier or joining a designer for a bow at the end of the runway. Their creative process began with Scott visiting Dior’s archives. “Travis knew exactly what he wanted,” says Jones. “He understands what young people want, knows how to appeal to them. He also knows what the brand is about. We wanted it to be Dior with Travis’s element on top.”
Photography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Wool coat with satin lapels and soutache embroidery, cotton jersey boat-neck T-shirt with Cactus Jack print, gold-finish brass Cactus Jack brooch, white crystal Cactus Jack belt and mesh and nubuck leather trainers by DIOR. Trousers as before.Photography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
On his 2016 track “High Fashion”, Scott raps a list of designer names: Maison Margiela, Louboutin, Givenchy. But he isn’t keen to label either himself or his sound. He has bristled at a music industry keen to pigeonhole the latter as hip-hop: “I would just describe it as different pieces of my brain,” he has said. The same approach applies to his personal appearance – the two go hand in hand, blending sports and formalwear, street and couture. That is what influenced Jones for this Cactus Jack Dior show: Scott’s own style, filtered through his eye and the workmanship of Dior, a conversation in cloth.
Scott’s home state of Texas served as an inspiration – it was, coincidentally, the first place in America that Christian Dior himself visited, in 1947, a bit of Dior folklore that connected now to then. As such, the set of the show offered a visual mash-up of Dior’s childhood rose garden in Normandy with an imaginary rendering of the Lone Star State – all fluorescent fibreglass cacti, larger-than-life bleached bison skulls and desert sand (no matter that Scott actually grew up in the lush Houston suburb of Missouri City). The colour of the clothes came from there too. “The pink is the sky over Houston, the green is the cactus, the brown is the soil,” shares Jones. “We tried to connect worlds and take where I’m from and the identity of Houston, Texas, and spread it across the collection,” Scott adds.
Cactus Jack jacquard cashmere sleeveless jumper by DIOR. Trousers and necklace as before. And his own watch and jewellery.Photography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Oblique silk and wool satin blazer with Cactus Jack embroidery by DIOR. White and yellow gold Cactus Jack necklace with diamonds, cultured pearls, emeralds and lacquer (throughout) by DIOR JOAILLERIE. And his own earrings.Photography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Of course, Scott provided the soundtrack for the Cactus Jack Dior catwalk in June – the Paris menswear show debuted two new songs by Scott, one titled “Escape Plan”, the second “Lost Forever”, featuring rapper Westside Gunn. He also included a song originally leaked in 2019, “In My Head”, featuring Swae Lee and CyHi the Prynce, with a different beat and additional ad libs. All three are set for release on the forthcoming Utopia LP, his fourth album to date. As we go to print, it’s scheduled to drop sometime later in 2021 – but precise details are hazy. Scott values his mystique.
“Travis knew exactly what he wanted. He understands what young people want, knows how to appeal to them. He also knows what the brand is about. We wanted it to be Dior with Travis’s element on top” – Kim Jones
What does the music sound like? Ambient, unexpected, kind of earwormy, lo-fi yet high-tech. It’s a bundle of contradictions, which is – as Scott says – connected to the clothes. His personal style has been described as grunge – which it is, with beaten-up jeans and flannel button-downs and even Nirvana T-shirts making appearances. Then he’ll tote a crocodile Hermès Haut à courroies bag below an Ozzfest T-shirt. “I think high end and evening couture have always been in the metaverse of things I’m into,” says Scott, who cites the tailoring as his favourite part of the Dior collection. And there was a philanthropic element too: a series of shirts hand-painted by American artist George Condo will be sold to raise money for a new foundation Scott is establishing, which will support students with scholarships in collaboration with New York fashion institution Parsons.
Photography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Oblique silk and wool satin blazer with Cactus Jack embroidery by DIOR. White and yellow gold Cactus Jack necklace with diamonds, cultured pearls, emeralds and lacquer (throughout) by DIOR JOAILLERIE. And his own earrings.Photography by Joshua Woods, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
“I have been thinking about young people a lot recently. With the pandemic, it’s a very difficult time for them,” says Jones. “Studying, going to university, following their dreams, it’s all a lot more difficult today with Covid-19. And yet Dior is doing incredibly well in spite of this crisis. We need to use our power and the means at our disposal to support the kind of initiatives in which we believe.”
As Scott puts it, “I’m just a kid from Texas.” Maybe this collection will end up helping the next kid from Texas too.
Lighting: Romain Hirtz and Hugues Poulanges. Styling assistants: Isabella Kavanagh and Ewa Kluczenko. Production: Artistry Paris. Executive producer: Laura Forrest at Artistry Paris
This article appears in the Autumn/Winter 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale internationally from 7 October 2021. Pre-order a copy here.
“It’s Like Pornography”: Alessandro Michele on Hacking Gucci and Balenciaga
In the new issue of AnOther Magazine, Alessandro Michele tells Alexander Fury about his audacious Autumn/Winter 2021 Gucci collection, which confounded all expectations
“It’s like pornography.” Alessandro Michele uses typically atypical terminology to describe his latest Gucci collection. In an ongoing challenge to traditional seasonal nomenclature, he has called it Aria, the operatic term denoting a self-contained piece for a solo voice. Which is ironic, given that Michele’s Gucci is boldly plural – especially today, drawing in myriad creative voices, aesthetic histories and ideological constructs, many parts to make the whole. This time, Michele went even further, describing his approach of openly appropriating other styles, symbols and signifiers as “hacking”. To draw us back to his pornographic play on perception, he means the results seem slightly illicit, the gains maybe ill-gotten. “It’s illegal, but maybe we can start to change this word a little bit,” he says. “You can hack if you have permission.”
Michele, who turns 49 this autumn, has helmed Gucci for six and a half years now, a restless period of ceaseless reinvention of the century-old Italian leather goods house. Not only Gucci’s clothes but its entire aesthetic universe has been transformed – hacked, not in the sense of the act of illegally infiltrating a computer system, but of violently or sharply cutting. Michele has hacked at Gucci’s heritage, its history, its meaning, to reshape it into something new. I’m reminded of a turn of phrase by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin – whose work Michele admires and quotes often. Benjamin used the German word Tigersprung – ‘tiger’s leap’ – to describe fashion’s leap into the past to create an ever-changing present. Michele embroiders lots of tigers on things. Maybe they mean more than you would imagine at first glance.
Lulu is wearing a monogrammed wool cotton cape by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
“Gucci is a brand that started from the creativity of a family,” says Michele. He’s talking from his home in Rome, a few weeks after presenting his Gucci collection, via Zoom but without video. The focus instead is on his melodious, strong-accented voice, softly crooning. Michele is mesmerising in person, dressed like some kind of bejewelled fashion shaman with his long, flowing hair. But as with any great leader, his voice is enough to pull you into his world, his cult. Now he’s talking about the cult of Gucci – the history of the brand, but also of the family. “They just did something unbelievable because they were not couturiers. They were just people of the bottega” – the Italian word for ‘shop’, not the Kering brand that shares that name – “that started to work in leather goods. They really used a lot of creativity to start this unbelievable trip. In Gucci there is a space for everybody. There was a space for Tom, who invented, again, the image of the brand – you know the story.”
“Tom” means Tom Ford, of course, who in 1994 was appointed creative director of Gucci – a name then more commonly seen in tabloid headlines than fashion pages, emerging from a morass of familial power struggles and murder plots worthy of pulp-fiction novels and, now, a blockbuster movie – and ignited its rise to the pinnacle of the industry. What Ford did was to rebrand Gucci, as swiftly and adroitly as Michele has done, giving it a slinky, subversive sexiness that pervaded everything from evening dresses to advertising campaigns to exotic ephemera – such as a kinky leather Gucci whip – intended to provoke reactions. Michele’s vision for Gucci is softer, sure – it’s tough to picture Ford quoting Benjamin – and infinitely more multifaceted, as befits the vastly expanded sphere of luxury today. But it’s just as powerful.
Lulu is wearing a leather harness and monogrammed polyester pantashoes by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Lulu is wearing a leather harness and monogrammed polyester pantashoes by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Daan is wearing a leather harness and monogrammed wool cotton Bermuda shorts with leather trim by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Daan is wearing a monogrammed wool cotton coat with logo and leather trim, leather harness, monogrammed wool cotton Bermuda shorts and riding boots with leather trim by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
“There is a big philosophical conversation around the copy. And the idea of combining the language of two brands, it’s also a dream of a fashionista. I mean, it’s like history if you can combine Leonardo with Raphael, not because I feel myself like Leonardo! Maybe Demna is Raphael ... ” – Alessandro Michele
Lulu is wearing a leather bustier and monogrammed wool cotton Bermuda shorts with leather trim by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Lulu is wearing a monogrammed wool cotton jacket with logo and leather trim, leather bustier and monogrammed wool cotton Bermuda shorts with leather trim by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Daan is wearing a leather harness by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Lulu is wearing a leather bustier and monogrammed wool cotton Bermuda shorts with leather trim by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
And for this Gucci collection, Michele embraced every part of the house’s identity – his opening look was one hell of a tiger’s leap, exhuming a keynote outfit from Tom Ford’s Autumn/Winter 1996 Gucci collection, a velvet suit in a shade of scarlet that the New York Times critic Amy Spindler compared to Mick Jagger’s bruised lips, slithering over a baby-blue shirt. It was sort of Scarface. More tigers. I remember it, from when I was a kid, the advertising campaign showing Georgina Grenville languishing on a sofa, staring up at a male model, Ludovico Benazzo. They were both dressed in that suit, her hand stroking a velvety thigh.
Whenever fashion quotes from its past it’s never quite the same. Michele hacked at that look, shifting the proportions, overlaying the subtly sexual open shirt with an overtly fetishistic leather harness. Ironically, that has its roots in an even older Gucci – Michele tugged it from the brand’s origins, the leather equestrian goods offered alongside luggage in a tiny Florentine shop established by Guccio Gucci in 1921. He learnt his trade at Valigeria Franzi, purveyor of luggage and leathers to the Italian aristocracy, but had also spent time at the Savoy in London, hauling expensive luggage. Literal first-hand experience. Guccio started off importing goods to his store, but given the excellence of Tuscan craftspeople, he began to have artisans make pieces for him locally. But he – and those leather workers – probably never imagined their harnesses and whips would be shifted from horse to human.
Daan is wearing a leather choker harness and wool jodhpurs by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Daan is wearing a leather choker harness and wool jodhpurs by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Lulu is wearing a leather harness and polyester Flora skirt with logo by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Lulu is wearing a leather harness and polyester Flora skirt with logo by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
“Fashion is about life. Fashion is the closest thing to life – because every day, from the first day of our life, we put something on our body. So it’s such a crazy thing to apply boundaries or limits. Because life isn’t about limits” – Alessandro Michele
Daan is wearing a cotton velvet tuxedo and leather choker harness by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Daan is wearing a wool evening suit with feathered sleeves and leather choker harness by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Lulu is wearing a silk satin and lamé silk evening gown, leather harness and feathered sleeves by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Lulu is wearing a silk satin and lamé silk evening gown, leather harness and feathered sleeves by GUCCIPhotography by Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Then again, Michele likes to confound expectations. So, although rumours of a collaboration – or whatever you want to call it – between Gucci and its stablemate Balenciaga swirled before Michele unveiled his Aria show in April, the sheer audacity of Michele’s approach was still breathtaking. This wasn’t a polite example of co-branding, an anodyne sweatshirt plastered with a couple of emblems. Michele filched the patterns of Demna Gvasalia’s tugged-across asymmetric coats, his curve-bottomed Hourglass handbag, stretch trouser-boot hybrids and the waist-nipped, plump-hipped suits he showed in his first Balenciaga show in 2016 – it was at that event that the two designers first met one another – and slapped a Gucci label in them, sometimes over them. He printed Balenciaga’s logo atop Gucci’s monogram canvas, smothering one suit with crystals spelling out both labels’ names in a delirious co-branding confusion. The Gucci Jackie bag, a fiercely protected house classic first introduced in 1961 – it was given the rather less evocative serial number G1244 until last year, when it was officially renamed after its most high-profile fan, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – now comes stamped with a print stating, falsely, ‘BALENCIAGA’. It looks like a fake.
The language of the counterfeit is something Michele is fascinated by. I should have asked him if, really, he’s always hacking Gucci because he isn’t a Gucci – he’s perpetually working under someone else’s name. But he was already talking, slowly, methodically, about his ideas. “There is a big philosophical conversation around the copy,” Michele says. “And the idea of combining the language of two brands, it’s also a dream of a fashionista.” He breaks into laughter. “I mean, it’s like history if you can combine Leonardo with Raphael, not because I feel myself like Leonardo! Maybe Demna is Raphael ... ” He’s laughing again. “But it’s like a dream. It could be really bad, it could be a beautiful experiment. The beautiful thing is that it’s forbidden, and when you say that something is forbidden, I think that it starts to be interesting, in terms of creativity.”
Michele pauses, thinks. “Fashion is about life. Fashion is the closest thing to life – because every day, from the first day of our life, we put something on our body. So it’s such a crazy thing to apply boundaries or limits. Because life isn’t about limits.”
Hair: Anthony Turner at Streeters. Make-up: Lynsey Alexander at Streeters. Models: Daan Duez at Rebel Management and Lulu Tenney at Ford Models. Casting: Michelle Lee Casting. Manicure: Lotje Vleugels. Digital tech: Henri Coutant. Lighting: Romain Dubus. Photographic assistant: Samir Dari. Styling assistants: Niccolo Torelli, Louise Pollet and Jasmien Van Loo. Hair assistant: Harriet Beidleman. Make-up assistant: Raffaele Romagnoli. Producer to Willy Vanderperre: Lieze Rubbrecht. Production: Mindbox. Producer: Isabelle Verreyke. On-set producer: Lise Luyckx. Production manager: Roel Van Tittelboom. Production assistants: Charlotte Dupont and Marteen Rose. Post-production: Triplelutz Paris
This article appears in the Autumn/Winter 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale internationally from 7 October 2021. Pre-order a copy here.
Miuccia Prada on the Changing Fashion Industry and Importance of Bravery
Alongside an interview with Susannah Frankel, the designer has, for the first time, pulled from the Miu Miu archive to dress a cast of powerfully individual young people, who are photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth and styled by Katie Shillingford
If Prada is the elder statesman in the empire Miuccia Prada presides over with her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, Miu Miu is its intuitive, impulsive counterpart. Titled after the affectionate moniker by which the designer has been known by her closest friends and family since she was a child, Miu Miu has the sensibility of sibling rebellion. Each bears an echo of the other: Miu Miu’s intellect is light-hearted compared to Prada’s heavyweight approach; Prada questions luxury, whereas Miu Miu toys with its trappings. While also profoundly radical, Prada is more serious, the public face of Miuccia Prada and indeed the family dynasty – carrying the name of her mother, Luisa, who ran the company once her own father, Prada’s founder Mario Prada, stepped down. Miu Miu, which launched in 1993, is conversely just Miuccia Prada’s. It is a place where she can express herself freely. Prada is now co-creatively directed by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. Miu Miu is personal.
“The show in the mountains was personal – exactly that,” Miuccia Prada says. Entitled Brave Hearts, it was filmed in March 2021, with Europe in the throes of the third wave of the pandemic. With references to both Tyrolean and Highland dress, Miu Miu’s Autumn/Winter collection also draws on the dress codes adopted by its designer as a young woman. Those were unconventional. “I had so much fun in the mountains, skiing in a skirt,” she remembers. “I skied in a bikini too. I did it back then. It was perfectly normal. And the mountains are my favourite place in the world. I am in love with the mountains. I enjoy them at any moment, under every circumstance. I don’t know why.”
Prada’s clothing designs have always been drawn from her personal experience, personal history, personal tastes. She dressed in Saint Laurent as a rebellious, left-leaning student in the 1970s; later in the 1980s, butting against the direction of contemporary fashion, she bought her clothes from children’s tailors and from suppliers of uniforms for nurses and chambermaids, before deciding to design her own. Miu Miu is of course no exception: it began life as a small collection of minimal, vintage-inspired pieces, the sort of thing she might dream of wearing. If the sobriety of Prada reflected the life of a committed feminist and businesswoman – albeit a creative one, with impeccably refined taste – Miu Miu spoke of the side of Miuccia Prada that grew up wanting to wear pink when her mother dressed her in navy, that secretly hitched up her skirt as she left her house to go out, and that skied in a bikini.
Miuccia Prada likes bravery – she is herself brave. And it is a quality she admires in others. “Bravery is something women always need,” she commented at the time the collection was shown. “This talks about the fantasies of women, their imaginations and dreams of different places, different ideas. Following your dreams is courageous – that takes bravery and strength.” Still, for Miuccia Prada, while women’s fantasies are often the starting point of a conversation, fashion is always seen in the context of it being in the first instance a service to men (at Prada) but to women at both Prada and at Miu Miu still more so.
And so, at the Italian ski resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, against a backdrop of the Dolomite Alps, models walked through the snow in boots – from ankle to thigh-high – and chubby coats in teddy bear fur, bombers, jumpsuits and miniskirts in Miu Miu’s signature matelassé leather and boudoir satins in a sugary colour palette that seemed as sweet as it was incongruous, as apparently delicate as the look is ultimately fierce. Juxtaposing clothing designed to protect its wearer from the elements with more quintessentially feminine pieces – those aforementioned fantasies, evocative of an empowered sense of seduction – oversized satin padded jackets were layered over lingerie-inspired slip dresses in featherlight silks or lacy sweaters and skirts embroidered with twinkling sequins. Striped, pop bright and pastel crochet nursery knits framed faces and made for cosy cardigans, arm warmers, socks and tights. And yes, there was indeed a bikini of sorts: a bralet and skirt – the dimensions of the latter, an over-anxious mother might not unreasonably argue, are more reminiscent of a belt. One can only imagine what Miuccia Prada’s own parents had to say on the matter of their daughter skiing in her swimwear all those years ago now. Not that she would have let that stop her.
Idiosyncratically, sport has always been a passion for Miuccia Prada, long before the fashion world caught up. She was among the first designers to put sportswear on the runway: for Prada’s final Spring/Summer show of the millennium she introduced Prada Sport, inspired by Bertelli’s love of sailing and Prada’s announcement of its involvement in the America’s Cup in 1997. The red and white logo mirrored that of the lettering on the Prada Challenge boat, and the label, reintroduced in 2018, is now called Linea Rossa. Designer sportswear proved a rapidly expanding commodity across the board and Prada, with its luxe-industrial heritage, was well placed to capitalise on that. Clean shapes and technologically advanced fabrics with equally pragmatic shoes and bags were shown alongside the main collection, which was very much about both fashion and luxury in a more traditional sense: full, pleated canvas skirts and coats with broad, pleated ribbon edges, crumpled chiffon dresses, skirts and knickerbockers in tea-stained shades and richly coloured crocodile skirts and jackets all made an appearance, sometimes embellished with saucer-sized mirror embroideries. The wilful contrariness of the Prada handwriting – the space somewhere between the real and the unreal, the functional and the fashionable, the earthly and the otherworldly – was already well established.
Miuccia Prada needs no introduction, but here are the basics of her upbringing and career, the elements that formed her and still frame her current status and state of mind. Born in 1949, she grew up in Milan and left that city’s Statale University with a doctorate in political science in 1970. A committed activist, she was a member of the Unione Donne Italiane, dedicated to establishing equal rights for women. She studied mime at the Piccolo Teatro before joining the family business in the mid-70s. She met Bertelli in 1978 and they married in 1987, a year before she began designing her own clothes. For her wedding, Miuccia Prada wore a dress made by the Ferrari sisters, designers of clothes for the children of Milan’s elite, scaled up to her size. With Bertelli, she launched the famous Prada nylon backpack in 1984, debuted Prada women’s ready-to-wear in 1988 and Miu Miu five years later. Today, Prada is a multi-billion-dollar public company. It was floated on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2011, yet remains under their control both creatively and financially.
To help differentiate Miu Miu from Prada, principally shown in its hometown, the label staged catwalk shows in each of the major fashion capitals until landing, lastingly, in Paris in 2006. There Miu Miu was first presented at 34 avenue Foch, a hotel particulier in a chic residential arrondissement. From the start, Miu Miu exuded the spirit of the renegade debutante, all puffed sleeves, empire lines, pie-crust collars and slightly off party dresses. The clothes perhaps owe a debt to the Ferrari sisters too, and to Cirri in Florence, which Miuccia Prada once said made the best sailor dresses around. They often play with childlike elements, taking liberties with scale by blowing up or shrinking details. When they are more adult – in the Autumn/Winter 2011 collection of broad 1940s shoulders and mid-calf skirts, for example – models somehow still resemble young girls dressed in looks far too old for them. There are mismatched graphic prints – of swallows in flight or kittens at play – and unlikely fabric combinations: paillettes on sludge-coloured wools. Elsewhere, 50s Americana meets 80s Anglophilia or 70s psychedelia, varsity jackets are worn over big knickers (Miuccia Prada calls them panties), leather is oversized, silver and inlaid with everything from art deco florals to stars, and French terry towelling bathrobes double up as summer coats.
Such diversity of fabrication, silhouette and thematic makes the fact that Miu Miu is so immediately identifiable and distinct from its sister, Prada, more remarkable still. Across these pages the overview of Miu Miu is Miuccia Prada’s own, having delved into her archives to select pieces that best show her vision of her label. The edit reflects both past and present tense: the pieces are chosen from the label’s back catalogue but with the designer’s current mood and viewpoint in mind. They are the styles she feels are relevant for now. Miu Miu is always reactive: the shows are put together in a matter of weeks, sometimes even days. It is spontaneous, immediate, instinctive.
When we speak at the end of May, Miuccia Prada is alone. She is as elegant and conscious of the importance of good manners and humour as always, and a quietly contemplative mood prevails, one that acknowledges that we are living in a world that remains frightening in its uncertainty. While the designer’s circumstances – as she herself is the first to admit – are privileged, there is a modesty to the conversation, if not quite so much to the surroundings. An opulent olive-green velvet covers the walls of the room she is working from and that same fabric, in brown, a plump daybed. Pieces from the personal collection of modern art Prada and Bertelli have been building for a quarter of a century hang behind her – a fluffy white Pietro Manzoni Achrome like a lost cloud, a John Baldessari pop portrait of Bruce Lee, the eyes cut out.
Since the first lockdown in March 2020, she has been based here, away from the crowds and mainly focused on her job. As perceptive and aware of the world as she always has been, she is grateful for the time that has afforded her – time to work, time to watch and to read, time to think. Many column inches have been dedicated to her wardrobe in the past and that too has moved with the times. Today she is wearing an oversized white cotton T-shirt that it’s somehow life-affirming to imagine her rolling out of bed in – and a pair of vintage diamond earrings that reach almost to her shoulders. Some things shouldn’t change.
Then as now, Miuccia Prada is the ultimate brave heart: a woman for whom courage and risk-taking are second nature – the driving force.
Anita is wearing a wool crepe coat with contrasting collar by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2011Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Miuccia PradaPhotography by Jamie Hawkesworth
Mira is wearing a natte fringed top and skirt with embroidery by MIU MIU, Spring/Summer 2014Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Lucy is wearing a vichy-printed mohair coat with ruffles, technical fabric polo shirt, vichy-printed cotton poplin shirt, acrylic headband with crystals and feather and crystal necklace (in her hand) by MIU MIU, Spring/Summer 2016Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
“I think bravery is very important in general. Otherwise, why do you live? You have to try to make things, to do things” – Miuccia Prada
Garfield is wearing a cable knit wool jumper with oversized collar, denim shirt, checked wool trousers and brocade belt by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2016. Leather boots with chain detail by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2021Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Mira is wearing a cotton poplin dress by MIU MIU, Spring/Summer 1997Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Anita is wearing a gabardine dress by MIU MIU, Spring/Summer 1998Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Mira is wearing an art nouveau floral-printed georgette dress by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2001. Stylist’s own tights. And suede heels by MIU MIU, Spring/Summer 2005Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Susannah Frankel: Can we talk first about the Miu Miu show in the mountains?
Miuccia Prada: I’m not sure I would do it again now but at that point you didn’t need many people, which was a good thing, and also there was so much snow. I said it’s now or never. Then everybody got excited. It was a long discussion because of the difficulties of there being no physical show. That is much more complex for me but also more interesting. You have to turn your ideas into a bigger picture. If you call directors, good movie directors, they are not, I think, very good at doing fashion, and fashion people, of course, they don’t know how to make movies. So we had to improvise, to reinvent our jobs. It all came out of this idea of bravery. The mountains, the walking in the snow, the symbol of being brave. Back then I was fixated on women being brave.
SF: You’re always brave.
MP: I try to be. I wanted to be. We decided to go, we dealt with whatever happened. We had very bad weather but also very good weather.
SF: In one way the collection was mountain appropriate – the big trousers, the big boots, the Tyrolean references, the Highland references – but in another way it was about a skirt covered in jewels. That’s very you. The conservative and radical, the appropriate and the inappropriate, often in one look.
MP: That is what I always aim for and it comes instinctively.
SF: It’s about you.
MP: Yes, it’s me.
SF: You were one of the first people to actually combine high fashion and sport in the 90s with Prada Sport.
MP: I remember back then I never wanted to dress myself in sporty things. I didn’t like them. Then I was always into inappropriate things. And I asked myself why when you do sport, or ski, do you have to become another person? I want to keep my love of fashion, my ideas. I don’t want to transform myself into someone else, into a sporty man or a sporty woman, wearing what everyone else is wearing. That was the origin of it.
SF: And today you still combine two apparently contrasting worlds. The idea of the couture gesture – the gloves are big woolly gloves but they’re still long gloves, the hats, the jewellery – with something much more obviously functional.
MP: That’s something that I really like. I like that when you do sport you retain your spirit. So if you run, why shouldn’t you wear a pair of earrings? Be covered in jewels, running along?
SF: You always work with extremes.
MP: I like very different things. There were men’s things in that collection and then there were feminine things. Probably I like the duality in myself. I can be very feminine, or very masculine, or both at the same time. In general, in a modest environment I like to put on the richest pieces. I like opposites together. Why? I don’t know. For instance, in the Fondazione, when we did the house in gold, it was not my idea, it was Rem’s idea, but I thought it was genius because it represents what I like to the maximum. What do you do in gold? The poorest, most industrial, most old-fashioned home. It’s also about assessing the value of something by putting it with its opposite, making inexpensive things look or feel very rich and vice versa. I don’t want to say it’s a political approach because the word carries so much weight but, yes, the point of view is to find the opposite between two extremes, always, and to try to improvise. I don’t question myself about that. It comes so naturally.
SF: Perhaps that’s the recognition that women are not simple or straightforward.
MP: Yes, for sure. It’s not enough to be feminine. Put simply, by mixing things you show the complexity of life, the complexity all around us. To be just one thing is boring.
SF: Do you think bravery is particularly important now?
MP: I think bravery is very important in general. Otherwise, why do you live? You have to try to make things, to do things.
SF: In the past we talked about the idea that, in the 2000s especially, you in particular seemed to be taking bigger risks than smaller, independent labels, bigger risks than the avant-garde.
MP: If you are small – niche – you can be avant-garde. It is very different in a bourgeois context. I struggle sometimes. And my husband tells me, you can’t pretend to be left-wing, because the other ones are all rich, or bourgeois. It is true that with Prada and Miu Miu I want to make the impossible happen. We are a luxury group with concepts that are not only about luxury. In fact, I don’t like the word luxury but I have always appreciated beauty and sophisticated things. So it really is a constant effort.
SF: A constant fight.
MP: Yes, that too.
SF: Miu Miu especially seems to be about female rites of passage – about a girl becoming a woman, a girl on the cusp of womanhood. Of course, that’s not actually about age at all but about spirit, and about the slight fragility – but also the exceptional beauty – of that time in a woman’s life, the time when you’re a girl working out what being a woman means. That is something that continues, that comes up again and again at all ages.
MP: That’s right. That’s great. It’s true that Miu Miu is also about that fragility, the fact that you don’t know who you are, who you want to be. You want to be beautiful, you want to be sexy – but you also want to be nasty, intelligent and political.
SF: However brave you are – however brave Miu Miu is – we are all vulnerable.
MP: I never think about that but, yes, actually Miu Miu is probably a lot about that.
SF: People always say Miu Miu is younger but it’s not about being young physically. It’s about ...
MP: The mentality.
Valeria is wearing a felt coat (over her arm), paisley crepe de chine dress and straw hat by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2000. Leather wedges by MIU MIU, Spring/Summer 2002Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Anita is wearing a tulle dress with crystal embroidery and technical fabric sleeves by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2020Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Anita is wearing a printed cotton poplin shirt dress, acrylic headband and knitted nylon belt by MIU MIU, Spring/Summer 2005Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Corinne is wearing a leather minidress, technical fabric shorts and ballerina flats with paillettes and crystal embroidery by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2018Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
“People are thinking more about the past, about things that count, about the heart, not about superficial things” – Miuccia Prada
Ludovica is wearing a printed silk jacquard minidress by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2006Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Elena is wearing a star-printed taffeta dress, jersey T-shirt and silk jersey gloves by MIU MIU, Spring/Summer 2006Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Yu Shan is wearing a striped gazar minidress and collar by MIU MIU, Spring/Summer 2008Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Garfield is wearing a volute-printed mohair suit, camellia-printed gazar shirt, embroidered jacquard collar and tie and leather belt by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2012Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
SF: It is also the embodiment of the fact that you can be 40, 50, 60, 70, but you can still flirt.
MP: I strongly believe in that. Apart from I don’t go out in miniskirts, which if you have the courage to and you want to, then why not, but apart from that, when I dress I’m not dressing like an old woman. When you become old, it’s not easy to have fun with how you dress. When you are older, dressing is even more about bravery.
SF: One of the things that has changed since you started designing clothes is that you really can wear what you like.
MP: True. Good taste, bad taste ... It’s very subtle.
SF: This issue of the magazine is about hindsight, the idea of looking at the past to inform the future. That sentiment feels intense at the moment because the present is relatively quiet. Our present is lacking in outside experience, so people are looking back in a romantic way, though not necessarily a purely nostalgic way – it feels like something bigger than that.
MP: That has something to do with looking for meaning. I hear a lot of people saying now that they don’t want to go to stupid parties any more, that what they value is friendship, love. That, of course, is romantic. We are searching for something more complete, more true, not superficial.
SF: You have always said you love superficial things.
MP: Maybe because I would like to be that person but really I’m not. Now people are thinking more about the past, about things that count, about the heart, not about superficial things. The word romantic makes sense.
SF: You have Prada and Miu Miu. Miu Miu is approaching its 30th anniversary, Prada is more than a century old. You shoulder a huge legacy. How do you feel now about that responsibility?
MP: I don’t think about legacy. I know I should but it’s not what motivates me. Also because of our age, people say to me you should enjoy what you have done, celebrate your achievement. Listen, I’m not like that. I’m always thinking about what I can do next. I don’t think of myself as someone who is ambitious but somebody told me recently, “You are a monster of ambition.” In truth, I am very ambitious.
SF: Historically, Miu Miu comes at the end of the ready-to-wear season. It’s reactive to what has come before it at the shows and is done quickly, in weeks rather than months. This situation must throw that slightly. The seasons are difficult to follow now.
MP: That’s why in the end I am still showing in seasons. It took so much time for the fashion world to get itself together, to facilitate the jobs of journalists and buyers and so on. So now I find myself in a place where I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. But I don’t know if that’s right. In the first place, you lose the sense of a season and with that, a little bit, the sense of fashion. I understand that it’s exciting to be free but instinctively I decided to stick with the calendar. Otherwise it’s going to be such a mess.
SF: Fashion is a community – you move from one place to another as a group. The pandemic has left a vacuum.
MP: Yes, but going back to normal shows is maybe like going backwards. Before, you did your job, your clothes, your show, then it was finished. This is the beginning of a whole different chapter and it’s ten times the work. But I’m afraid that now just to go back to physical shows won’t feel so exciting. Maybe you should do both. But both is double the money and more work again. We are discussing this all the time. In the end, somebody said, “People like being together. Who cares about the clothes? They just like having fun, like at a concert, in a football stadium.” It’s more the idea of being with people. Everybody always complains. But now that it is not possible people miss it.
SF: Now you work with Raf at Prada, how has your work with Miu Miu changed?
MP: It has changed. I decided that at Prada I wanted to work with someone else to create a new idea, to have more inspiration and to share, that’s a priority. The priority is for Raf and me to do something together. I’m very happy with that. So Miu Miu is now the place where I am completely myself. When I realise that, then I want to do even more, to really concentrate, to inject more passion, more of what I like. The show in the mountains was exactly that. It was very personal. Because of the location and the implications. For sure, Miu Miu is the only place where I am alone.
SF: Is there more of a sense of your renegade spirit in Miu Miu?
MP: Absolutely. It’s what I like in life. I have not always been able to be enough like that perhaps. I was when I was young, with my political ideas and activities, I kind of did it. Probably not enough. But that’s what I like.
SF: I think your son said to you that, as someone in a position of power, you’re obliged to speak out and say things that go beyond fashion. Do you believe that?
MP: That’s a big question. I always hated it in the past. I never wanted to answer any questions that weren’t specifically related to what I do, related to art or fashion. I didn’t want to talk about politics or any of the things that I care about most. That is partly out of a sense of decency, about being a rich fashion designer. Having said that, because of the influence we have, we probably should speak out more. I should probably speak out more. But that goes against my spirit and my thinking completely. I’m thinking about it, about how to try to speak to people more.
SF: People often talk about a certain woman they design for. Is there a Miu Miu woman?
MP: You know that’s something I don’t like. I design what I think is right. It’s theoretical. I never had a woman in mind, I don’t have an icon in mind. I do like a renegade. Usually, every brand has its target. I don’t. But I always said I do what I feel is right and if I am in contact with reality, if I know people through reading, through movies, through meeting them, then it will work. The more I am in contact with reality the more what I do makes sense. If it works it means I was connected and my thoughts were realistic. I’m trying to do something that is relevant, to translate that into clothes, because that is my job and something that I am able to do. You know that I am fanatical about the life of people, that is the reason I love vintage. I love thinking about who the woman was who wore something, about what their life was like. People’s lives. I like thinking about that a lot.
SF: You recently put exactly that idea into practice with Upcycled by Miu Miu, that idea of finding vintage clothes and letting them tell their own story all while putting your mark on it.
MP: When I did my first show for Prada, I was very much criticised for appropriation. It was the 80s, the art world did it the whole time, but in fashion it caused a scandal – a dress that was totally 60s, totally 70s. But I loved it because I like history, I like stories of periods, stories of women. I think, OK, modernity, the future, but all our ideas come from what we saw, what we heard, what we read. We are our past. How can we pretend it doesn’t exist? Now, with Upcycled, it’s conscious and we want to build on it, but in the first instance it came from a place of naivety, from a love of vintage and the fact that vintage pieces entertain the people who wear them. It is a piece of clothing but it expresses a whole life – how was it worn, what was it worn for, what did its original owner do while they were wearing it?
SF: In fact, that’s what we love about clothes generally.
MP: Yes, because clothes are instruments for living, basically. To conquer or not to conquer, to do whatever you want. I always think dresses have to be useful.
SF: As a young woman you were active in the second wave of feminism. Do you think things are better now for women than they were then?
MP: There’s a long way to go. That is one of my biggest questions – how long does it take? Sometimes it seems like we’re going backwards rather than forwards. Sometimes when you see movies about the suffragettes, you see how they really struggled. For sure in our countries, for people who are richer, more educated, things are better, but that’s easy for us to say. There are still things happening to women all over the world that are terrible – unbelievable.
Miuccia PradaPhotography by Jamie Hawkesworth
Yu Shan is wearing a loden dress with stud and crystal embroidery, satin skirt and faux-fur boots by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2021Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Valeria is wearing a leather and shearling gilet, viscose zip-up top and loden trousers by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2021Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Valeria is wearing a mohair dress and cashmere sleeves by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2021.Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
“Miu Miu is the only place where I am alone” – Miuccia Prada
Anita is wearing a polka-dot felted wool coat by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 1997Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Myrsky is wearing a lily-printed mohair suit, camellia-printed gazar shirt, embroidered jacquard collar and tie and leather belt by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2012. Leather brogues by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2003Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Mira is wearing a nylon bra and skirt, knitted mohair top, crocheted wool scarf and stockings and faux-fur boots by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2021Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Yu Shan is wearing a quilted technical fabric jacket and Lurex top by MIU MIU, Autumn/Winter 2014Photography by Jamie Hawkesworth, Styling by Katie Shillingford
SF: The upheaval of the past 18 months has meant we have all been forced to acknowledge a shift in our perspectives and change the way we look at things and how we prioritise.
MP: I think so. Six months after the pandemic started, my son told me that if it finished now things would go back to how they were before but that if it lasted longer things would change. I am very much changed. I’m changed in general but mainly in thinking that anything I used to do in a certain way I should now do differently. I have an instinctive desire for change, for not repeating things we did before.
SF: And when you’re designing, thinking about bravery and about fighting, you’re also dreaming.
MP: I always say that I don’t like dreaming. If I dream about something I want to make it happen.
SF: For someone who sometimes thinks they are not ambitious that’s quite an ambitious idea.
MP: Now my ambition at the Fondazione is doing science. We are preparing a show for the next biennale with the most important scientists in the world. It’s about the human brain. I always want to do shows that are about religion, feminism, science, big subjects that are floating in our heads but that many of us don’t really understand. And they said they wanted to do it only if the Fondazione Prada in Venice becomes a permanent place for exploring ideas about neuroscience. So, yes, that’s also ambitious.
SF: The idea of the same woman who grew up skiing in a skirt now doing that is inspiring – uplifting. Can we talk about Miu Miu as a community of women who shop but who also exchange and share ideas about culture, about things they are excited by and that they love? You have Women’s Tales, dedicated to supporting female talent in film, Miu Miu Musings, conversations between women about issues that are culturally and socially pertinent, Miu Miu Club ...
MP: We do and that’s very important to me. I love film and know that, even now, it is not so easy for women to break through, so if we can help we should. I also believe in giving women a voice, in projecting a feminine point of view. I have this idea that, during the day, our shops are shops, about shopping for fashion. Then, during the night they are about a community.
SF: Have you missed your teams during this period? Have you felt restricted?
MP: For the past 18 months, I have worked on Zoom. I don’t know if I miss my teams physically because I am discussing with them all the time. Sometimes when I am at work, there are so many distractions, so many empty moments, so many boring moments. Now at home maybe I’ve found the excuse to do other things. And that is fantastic. I want to be careful not to lose that privilege. Also, I can do so many more appointments. Before, you had to go to the office, to a bar. A ten-minute discussion might take two hours. This is easier, simpler. Also, I am lazy. I like staying home very much.
SF: So there is an element of relief?
MP: I am happy here. This pandemic has changed my way of thinking on so many levels. I’ve had more time to consider things. We were so afraid, there were so many difficulties – all the shops were closed and everything was a disaster. We were forced to react, to find new ways of doing things, new ways of taking care of clients. When we were closed there was a real sense of solidarity between human beings. Perhaps we had arrived at a point that was repetitive, generally decadent. When the world changes it signifies the rebirth of something, there is a new energy.
SF: Do you have a sense of it being wonderful to spend your life making beautiful things?
MP: For sure. And now I have much more time to do my job and to do it well. Before I was distracted. Even though I have barely any social life there were still too many distractions. And the idea that I could maybe stay in one place, for just one day, and think about clothes – that was such a joy.
SF: You have been one of very few designers who have actually changed our aesthetic, changed the way people – women and men also – dress. At the beginning, you had to fight to be understood, people described your work as ugly, and certainly it played with received notions of taste. Now though, with Prada and Miu Miu, there is an understanding, and a love of the things you have done and still do. Do you feel proud of that?
MP: Of that, yes, I am proud. I think that if I have achieved anything it is that. But it wasn’t revolutionary. It was subtle. Early on the avant-garde thought I was not avant-garde enough, the classicists thought I was very disturbing. And I loved that. It is the in between that interests me. In that sense, little by little, probably because I didn’t come from the fashion world, I changed things. It was only in fashion that there was this obsession with beautification in a conventional sense. In art, in the movies, in books, those ideals were questioned. And I too thought that was so old-fashioned, so conservative. Now it’s normal to question those values. I think I have contributed to that.
Hair: Paolo Soffiatti at Blend Management. Make-up: Luciano Chiarello at Julian Watson Agency. Models: Corinne at Street People Casting, Elena Burgin and Yu Shan Chen at Persona, Mira Nora Nagy at Why Not, Valeria Pavesi at Fabbrica and Anita Salinsky at Rebel Management. Streetcast models: Myrsky Kerko, Lucy Marega, Garfield Pagani and Ludovica Richiello. Casting director: Julia Lange at Artistry. Casting associate: Olivia Langner. Additional casting of Anita Salinsky by Florinda Martucciello, Sara Casana and Mara Veneziano. Photographic assistant: Cecilia Byrne. Styling assistants: George Pistachio and Fabiana Guigli. Production: Nicola Catterall and Sophie Hambling at Farago Projects. Local production: Alessandra Gabbetta, Eleonora Giammello and Alberto Angeloni at Hotel Production. Black and white printing: Peter at The Image. Retouching: Simon Thistle
This article appears in the Autumn/Winter 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale internationally from 7 October 2021. Pre-order a copy here.
Inside Demna Gvasalia’s Revival of Balenciaga Couture
In a series of interviews through the spring of 2021, Alexander Fury explores Balenciaga’s past and future with Demna Gvasalia, looking at the house’s rekindled couture and its first visitation since 1968
“Fear.” The designer Demna Gvasalia is talking about the emotions, namely his own, triggered by the daunting task of presenting his first couture collection. It’s May 2021 – the show is in July. “This is a little bit like a therapy session,” he’ll later add, laughing. His feelings are heightened because this couture collection is not just for himself, but for the august, austere house of Balenciaga, where couture – arguably – was raised from applied to pure art at the hands of its founder, Cristóbal Balenciaga, a legend in his own lifetime, deified since. He retired in 1968 and died in 1972. Couture bearing the label Balenciaga has never been designed by anyone other than him – until now. “This is the house where couture for me is kind of like innate, the essence,” Gvasalia says. “I felt it was my obligation.” But still, there’s fear. “Fear of not being enough. Fear of having to fill these very big shoes, left by ‘the master of us all’.” He isn’t laughing. “It’s not just a legacy – it’s Cristóbal Balenciaga’s legacy.”
Gvasalia has every right to be afraid, given that the history and prestige of the house of Balenciaga is, possibly, unparalleled in modern fashion. Others come close, granted. Christian Dior ensured his name’s immortality by resuscitating Paris haute couture after the strictures of the second world war, by saving women from nature and creating a fashion moment with his 1947 debut that outmoded all before it. Gabrielle Chanel emancipated women not once but twice, first in the 20th century’s teenage years, and then again after her comeback in 1954, inventing a uniform of modernity, eschewing fickle fashion in favour of eternal style. Yves Saint Laurent, Dior’s dauphin, rebelled in the 1960s and then refined, dedicating himself to the perfection of his craft. They are all couture greats, names whose work changed fashion. Yet the sombre Spaniard Cristóbal Balenciaga is feted as the greatest of all. Even those contemporaries – and others – openly acknowledged it. It was Dior who first called him “the master of us all”, comparing the couture to an orchestra composed and conducted by Balenciaga. “Balenciaga alone is a couturier,” said Chanel – who rarely praised anyone except herself. “The others are draughtsmen or copyists.” Madeleine Vionnet called him “un vrai”; Balenciaga’s friend and devoted disciple Hubert de Givenchy declared he was the greatest single influence on his career.
Almost half a century after his death, Balenciaga is still revered as the most significant figure of 20th-century haute couture, a defining architect of fashion as we experience it today. Balenciaga founded his couture house in San Sebastián, Spain, in 1917 – it was named Eisa, a diminutive of his mother’s surname Eizaguirre – expanded to Madrid and Barcelona, and in 1937 opened as Balenciaga in Paris, at 10 avenue George V. When that address – and the other branches – closed in 1968, the New York Times ran the news under the headline “Nothing Left to Achieve, Balenciaga Calls It a Day”. Nothing left to achieve because, in the 51 years in between, Balenciaga had reinvented how people dressed. His clothes were paradoxically formal and fluid, could appear heavy and architectural yet were magically weightless, “like a sea swell”, wrote Pauline de Rothschild, who, like pretty much every other woman of note, wore Balenciaga.
“One never knew what one was going to see at a Balenciaga opening,” wrote Diana Vreeland, breathlessly, in her 1984 memoirs. “One fainted. It was possible to blow up and die.” Balenciaga’s most passionate client was Mona von Bismarck, who featured in Cole Porter lyrics and Vogue photo spreads, and who ordered everything, including cinnamon-coloured gardening clothes, from the couture house. She was immortalised by Cecil Beaton in Balenciaga’s trapeze-line draped-back satin evening dresses, shot from behind to show the collar elegantly dipping at the nape. When the house closed she retired to her room for three days, to mourn.
Lisa is wearing a knitted vicuña wool turtleneck, tailored fresco wool trousers, antique brass earrings with Swarovski crystal rhinestones, fitted jersey gloves and glazed leather boots by BALENCIAGA COUTURE. Flocked velvet hat by PHILIP TREACYPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Adama is wearing a padded satin faille stole and opera coat with BB embroidery and moulded polyurethane sunglasses by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
In May, when Gvasalia and I meet at the Balenciaga archives, held in a vast warehouse on the outskirts of northern Paris, he has already been preparing for his couture debut for 18 months. Balenciaga had originally planned to present the line in July 2020 but was stymied by the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns that achieved what two world wars and the Nazi occupation could never do in halting the Paris haute couture shows for a year. With hindsight, however, Gvasalia says he’s been thinking about couture for six years – since he first began designing for the house in 2015. Surprising, because you wouldn’t immediately connect Gvasalia’s designs to couture, for many reasons. They are ready-to-wear obviously, their slick surfaces and sharp silhouettes revelling in an industrial quality inherent to their manufacture, while aesthetically and ideologically they sit as far away from the fluffy extravagance that characterises most modern haute couture, focused as it is on event dressing. When Cristóbal Balenciaga closed the fashion house in 1968 he reportedly told a distraught client, “Why do you want me to go on? There is no one left to dress.” Ready-to-wear, he recognised, was the future, but he had no interest in it.
“This is the house where couture for me is kind of like innate, the essence. I felt it was my obligation” – Demna Gvasalia
People store priceless fine art in the out-of-town repository where Balenciaga keeps its archive, a space segmented into aircraft-hangar-sized spaces crammed with stuff whose collective worth is equivalent to the GDP of entire nations. The Balenciaga archive houses some unusual things alongside clothes – the remnants of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s personal library and art collection, the furniture from his homes piled on shelves, even an elevator padded in cordovan leather that once ferried clients in his couture house. It has examples of ready-to-wear clothes by Cristóbal Balenciaga’s successors – lesser-knowns such as Josephus Thimister, who designed Balenciaga from 1992 to 1997, and the famous 21st-century trio of Nicolas Ghesquière, Alexander Wang and Gvasalia. There are also pieces actually made by Cristóbal’s own hands – holy stuff. Each collection, Balenciaga purportedly sewed one black dress entirely – he learnt the craft directly from his mother, a seamstress, and was venerated for his faultless technical ability alongside his creativity. Balenciaga would frequently make clothes for himself to wear, including such oddly un-Balenciaga garments as a ski anorak, sewn together on the eve of his departure for holiday. One 1960s collection featured a coat with sleeves that were based on Balenciaga’s own raincoat – Women’s Wear Daily, which often snubbed its nose at Balenciaga’s hauteur and the reverence with which he was held in the fashion industry, dubbed it a “Balenciagaberry”. Balenciaga wouldn’t sketch, rather he worked directly on the fabric of toiles, manipulating material in three dimensions until they achieved the effects he craved – a methodology echoed in Gvasalia’s own, where he chops up existing garments to shift forms on the body.
Anoraks, raincoats, brand mash-ups, high and low – there’s a whole bunch of unanticipated parallels you can find there between Gvasalia and Balenciaga. The most enduring connection between the two, however, is their quest for modernity – although the meaning of modernity in 1960s Parisian high society and circa 2021 is, of course, fundamentally different. Back then, it revolved around haute couture – today, women wear tracksuits rather than tweed suits, sportswear for everyday that can perhaps be traced back to Balenciaga’s revolutionary semi-fitted suits of 1951, which traced an eased line that foreshadowed not just the silhouette of the 1960s, but a whole modern idea of comfort in dress. “Parkas, denim jackets, five-pocket jeans,” says Gvasalia. He’s talking not about ready-to-wear here, but his couture. He’s talking about how he can make couture feel modern, for him.
Azenor is wearing a tulle minidress with sequin embellishment, moulded polyurethane sunglasses, embossed leather iPhone clutch, tights and glazed leather pumps by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Lisa is wearing a swing-back gabardine jacket and skirt, stretch mesh pantashoes and jersey gloves by BALENCIAGA COUTURE. Domed flocked velvet hat by PHILIP TREACYPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
“When I started, there were a lot of Cristóbal dress references because that is the base,” Gvasalia says. “I need to bring that elegance into this time. But I also want clients who don’t walk through a palazzo in Venice, in the robe manteau of Mona von Bismarck.” He laughs. “It’s somebody who, I don’t know, travels in haute couture. Because there are people who do that – I don’t know them, but I hope to know them.” Gvasalia has always been superb at unpicking his thought processes: he makes for an incredibly engaging interview. Here, next to Cristóbal Balenciaga’s old furniture, he is giving an ad hoc synopsis of his new take on couture. “It’s a trench coat. It’s a tailored suit. I will even have a couture T-shirt. I need to extend it. For couture to be modern, it has to be a wardrobe.” He pauses. “We cannot get locked into the ballroom.”
When you enter the Balenciaga archive, you are given a small oxygen monitor: the airflow is controlled and the climate, generally, is maintained at -7.8C (18F), a temperature so low fire cannot ignite. Off to the side is a rail of new (old) acquisitions from auction houses: a sculpted sheath dress in searing yellow duchesse satin from 1962, a black cashmere evening coat from 1951. In the back, there are several racks from which recent Balenciaga collections hang. Gvasalia won’t look at those, he tells me. He is wearing a long black coat, like the inverse of the traditional white couture worker’s smock, his hair closely cropped. He’s looking at an elaborately embellished bodice, contained in a grey cardboard archive box – the type known, in the trade, as “coffins”, because dead clothes sleep inside them. The bodice, swollen with tissue padding as if still inhabited by a living body, is pale silvery blue silk jacquard, a base for embroideries of strewn flowers in glass beads with crystal droplets. It’s a little raggedy, threads plucked and hanging loose, as if it’s been bashed about, with uncharacteristic disrespect, for half a century or so. Only it hasn’t: the piece is new, the top of an evening dress from his forthcoming couture collection. “This we have been working on, I think, for two months,” Gvasalia says. Its decoration is executed by the young French embroidery atelier Jean-Pierre Ollier and painstakingly sewn to seem, for want of a better term, a bit fucked up. Other pieces from the collection are too, like a sack-back evening coat in a poison green silk taffeta that is permanently crumpled, as though it slid off its hanger to the bottom of a wardrobe long ago and was left to moulder.
“I like the idea that couture is an effort to come as close as possible to perfection,” Gvasalia says, incongruously, staring down at the plucked surface. “I think Cristóbal’s idea of couture was that. He was a perfectionist.” Understatement of the century: Balenciaga was an absolute obsessive, “a haunted man” according to his parish priest and confessor Father Robert Pieplu, “haunted by a great plan, a vision of the world”. That vision accepted nothing short of perfection. Sleeves were a fixation, his couture house resounding with anguished cries of “la manga” as Balenciaga ripped his garments apart with his own hands, remaking again and again. He would not permit anyone else to pin his designs in his presence and, when he was asked to design the uniforms for Air France in 1968, he wanted to fit each of the 6,000 outfits himself. Conversely, Gvasalia has never been interested in achieving perfection. “Perfection doesn’t really exist. I don’t really believe in that,” he says. “I feel I always look for beauty in places that are not conventionally understood as that.” Gvasalia’s clothes, first for the label Vetements (which he co-founded in 2014 and left in 2019) and latterly for Balenciaga, have made a feature of their unusual fabric treatments and odd proportions – inbuilt creasing, bleaching, puckering and mismatched prints, coats tugged across the body and deliberately misbuttoned, shoulders cut to slide forwards, to almost round the back.
Lisa is wearing a satin stole and T-shirt, Japanese denim jeans, moulded polyurethane sunglasses, antique brass earrings and double-finger ring with Swarovski crystal rhinestones, jersey opera gloves and glazed leather boots by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Sori is wearing a satin faille coat dress, antique brass earrings with Swarovski crystal rhinestones and jersey gloves by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Back in 2016, when I spoke with Gvasalia for a profile for this magazine around his first ready-to-wear show, he recounted a story of Cristóbal Balenciaga draping fabric on a client, “of how this woman was transformed. How he changed the posture, the attitude,” Gvasalia said. “For me, that was the most important part. That was, for me, the source of inspiration. How do we do that today? How do we transform the attitude?” Gvasalia, though, is more likely to create a hunch than hide it: a Schiaparelli-pink satin faille coat in this couture collection looks a bit like it has a sofa cushion stuffed between the shoulder blades, an extension of a collar line Gvasalia drew from the stand-away collars of Balenciaga’s 1960s suits and translated into his clothes right from the start. His Oxford stripe shirts and denim jackets dip delicately at the nape, a nod to Mona von Bismarck.
“Perfection doesn’t really exist. I don’t really believe in that” – Demna Gvasalia
Attitude is all-important to Gvasalia. Attitude can mean both a physical posture – a gesture, a stance – and a mindset. It can also denote truculent behaviour. All three are evident in his approach. If today Gvasalia is in a reverential mood, it hasn’t always been the case. He has affixed Balenciaga’s name to tracksuits and trainers, to T-shirts with reconfigurations of the election merchandise of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders. Cristóbal Balenciaga was, by contrast, avowedly apolitical: he fled the Spanish Civil War in 1937, yet the final dress he created was a wedding dress for General Franco’s granddaughter Carmen Martínez-Bordiú in 1972. When Balenciaga decided to close his couture house, it was in the midst of sociopolitical upheaval – news breaking of the May 1968 Paris student protests, the world transforming before his eyes. However, Gvasalia reacts to those streets, translating the attitude of its founder into unexpected clothes, including hooded sweatshirts, leather jackets and jeans. Born and brought up poor, Balenciaga was a snob: he declared his house must dress only thoroughbreds and quoted Salvador Dalí – another Spaniard – when he stated, “A distinguished lady always has a disagreeable air.” So you may think he wouldn’t like sweatshirts labelled with his name – even if they’re cut with a cocoon back or to mimic the hip-thrust stance he instructed his models to adopt. Yet many of Balenciaga’s garments also have humble origins: his semi-fitted suits were based on the smocks worn by sailors in Getaria, the coastal village in Basque country where he was born. His father was one of them.
Gvasalia’s father repaired cars; his mother was a housewife. While Balenciaga was apolitical, Gvasalia wasn’t permitted that luxury. He was born in Georgia, though his family was displaced via a process of ethnic cleansing by Abkhaz separatists that ultimately expelled a quarter of a million Georgians from their homes between 1992 and 1993. He and his family relocated first to Ukraine and, with the Iron Curtain having fallen, Gvasalia’s father shifted, unexpectedly, to a lucrative business of importing hitherto restricted goods into Russia – mineral water, caviar. Fashion wasn’t such a great leap for Gvasalia, although he first got a degree in economics before going against his parents’ wishes and studying how to design clothes. He then began to work with other brands in Paris – namely Maison Martin Margiela and Louis Vuitton – before starting Vetements. It’s a far cry from the apocryphal origin story of a precocious Balenciaga, remarking as an 11-year-old on the elegance of the Marquesa de Casa Torres as she passed in a tailleur by the turn-of-the-century couture house Drecoll. Sometimes he’s 13, sometimes she’s wearing Worth. In all the stories, she allowed him to copy it, which he did with prodigious skill, and a star was born.
Marius is wearing a waisted barathea wool suit with trompe l’oeil shirt cuffs and onyx buttons, stainless steel glasses and glazed leather boots by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Marius is wearing a waisted barathea wool suit with trompe l’oeil shirt cuffs and onyx buttons, stainless steel glasses and glazed leather boots by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
As Gvasalia and I speak, surrounded by remnants of the maison’s past on the outskirts of Paris, preparations are underway to disinter the literal house of Balenciaga on avenue George V. The man himself didn’t live there, of course – although his directrice of couture, an icy woman referred to only as Mademoiselle Renée and a fervent acolyte, had an apartment on the top floor. Cristóbal Balenciaga’s own home was around the corner on avenue Marceau, at number 28, but his life was in 10 avenue George V. There’s a charge to the building – an imprint remains of the events it bore witness to. Balenciaga sat there, brooding and melancholy, devising silhouettes, inventing fabrics, shifting fashion. His clothes were sewn there, in stark ateliers that his former assistant André Courrèges described in religious terms: “Pure white, unornamented and intensely silent. People whispered and walked on tiptoe, and even the clients talked in hushed voices.” Those clients saw Balenciaga’s clothes in fashion shows from which the press was habitually excluded, in oddly fanciful white salons with stucco scrolls, Louie-hooey curve-backed couches and urn-shaped lamps on plaster pedestals. In complete silence, a cabine of models of unconventional beauty – less flatteringly dubbed “monsters” by the press – paraded clothes that, in their masterful cut, transformed not only the direction of fashion, but also the ways in which people saw themselves. Sleeves sliced at three-quarter length elongated arms; collars shrugged away from the neck extended the profile – silhouettes breathed easy, bodies were free.
For the past 30 years or so, those stately salons where Balenciaga showed clothes that redefined fashion, had been stripped back to brick. Most recently, they were stacked with boxes of Balenciaga’s bestselling Triple S trainers – a symbol if ever there was one of the couture house’s recalibration to the demands of the 21st-century luxury market. “Blasphemous,” is the word used by Gvasalia. Now the boxes are gone, replaced by a breathtakingly precise facsimile of the original interior – stucco, sofas, urns and all – less reproduction than resurrection, executed by a Berlin architectural practice named Sub and based on plentiful archival footage and photographs. But it isn’t exactly right: the walls are grimy, white darkened to a dingy grey, the silken curtains tidemarked. Like those creased silk dresses and plucked embroideries, its attitude is disrespect – as if the house of Balenciaga has been left to rot.
The inspiration, Gvasalia said, was the relatively recent unearthing of an apartment in the 9th arrondissement of Paris once owned by an actress named Marthe de Florian. It was closed up at the outbreak of the second world war and only opened again in 2010: water had leaked in, staining walls, curtains had faded and greyed with dust. Gvasalia wanted the same in George V. “It has to really feel like the passage of time, which I think is the most beautiful thing,” he says. Hence a ‘patination’ team spent the month before the show basically living from the space, “spilling Coca-Cola in the morning, smoking, dipping ash a little bit everywhere”, according to Gösta Andreas Lönn Grill, one of the team’s designers, to speed up the ageing process and make it seem as if 53 years had elapsed since the white carpets were last trod. “It’s a time machine, somehow,” says Gvasalia. Or like a tomb cracked open: the Norwegian “olfactory artist” Sissel Tolaas even created a scent by taking molecules from that leather-clad elevator, from old textiles and from the key notes of the fragrances worn by clients attending those final couture shows. “They really smell like the past,” Gvasalia says.
Binta is wearing a satin faille opera coat, antique brass earrings with Swarovski crystal rhinestones and jersey gloves by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Azenor is wearing a swing-back gabardine jacket and trousers, gloved jersey top and antique brass double-finger ring with Swarovski crystal rhinestones by BALENCIAGA COUTURE. Domed lacquer hat by PHILIP TREACYPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Gvasalia’s couture ateliers are based not at avenue George V but at Balenciaga’s headquarters on the Left Bank, a cruciform building that formerly housed a hospital, built around an old chapel. Surgery meeting religion feels very Balenciaga – and Gvasalia and the atelier workers all operate wearing white cotton coats, the face masks necessary for such up-close and personal work in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic giving the scene an undeniably clinical bent. Each garment is fitted on a new cabine of models who, like Cristóbal Balenciaga’s, are unconventional: a forty-something digital-marketing strategist named Susanne Theimer from Cologne, a collector of avant-garde art called Karen Boros, the contemporary artist Eliza Douglas (who opened this couture show and also Gvasalia’s first ready-to-wear show in 2016), and Kamala Harris’s fashion-conscious, newsworthy stepdaughter Ella Emhoff. Other faces are hidden under the collection’s many giant flying saucer hats by Philip Treacy. There are also men – Gvasalia proposing couture inspired not only by Cristóbal Balenciaga’s designs but his own attire. The house collaborated with Huntsman, Balenciaga’s Savile Row tailor, on suiting in crisp barathea and fresco wools, like he would have worn. One alone required three weeks of hand-stitching to perfect. “There is not a single machine stitch on it,” Gvasalia says. “That, for me, is kind of the epitome of craftsmanship.”
“We tried to step into those pictures from the past” – Demna Gvasalia
Couture on any model’s body is a proposition for a client – an unreality, even if it isn’t worn by a supermodel. Yet Gvasalia doesn’t intend this to be a vanity project: this is couture to be bought and sold. The house has engaged a directrice, formerly of Jean Paul Gaultier and Yves Saint Laurent. She was gardening when she received the call. “I think that’s the challenge of couture today,” Gvasalia says. “It’s far from dying out. Of course, if you see couture as something for old rich ladies and don’t dust it off, then it doesn’t have a future. But if you put that craft in the spotlight, it can have a relevance. Even for the younger generation – especially when everything is available, when every brand does a logo T-shirt, that’s exactly when people start to value other things. I’m not talking about masses, it’s a small circle of people who can appreciate this, but they are there. And it does balance the rest.” By the rest, Gvasalia means the rest of Balenciaga’s offering today – the ready-to-wear, the handbags, the trainers and logo T-shirts. But the couture – which has its own label and logotype, its own packaging, and shows independently from the ready-to-wear, and only once a year – stands alone. “I like the idea of it being two separate things,” he says. “There is more of an aesthetic influence that I believe will be transmitted to the ready-to-wear. This sophisticated elegance. But not trying to mimic the complexity of craftsmanship that I can have in couture. Because it will never be possible, within the price range as well. This is why I don’t even want to try that.” He pauses. “I’d rather have couture as an inspiration.”
Relaunching Balenciaga’s couture operation is a tricky business. Haute couture requires phenomenal investment – prices begin in the upper five figures, and soar, due to the hours of handwork invested in every piece. It is entirely made to measure, for each individual client, so no corners can be cut. Balenciaga has not only employed a directrice but has assembled, from scratch, workrooms devoted to tailoring and flou – the evocative French term for light dressmaking – in the most traditional and formal manner. Every sample garment is labelled with the name of the atelier in which it is produced and the model’s name it is specifically fitted to. As Cristóbal decreed, each model wears only garments specially made for them. The house has also collaborated with craft houses and fabric manufacturers who originally worked with Balenciaga to devise new weaves and techniques: the embroiderers Maison Lesage and Atelier Montex, the textile houses of Dormeuil, Jakob Schlaepfer, Taroni and Forster Rohner. “It’s quite touching to go back to the craft,” Gvasalia says. “It died out, in a way.”
Adama is wearing a belted Japanese cotton trench coat, knitted vicuña wool turtleneck, washed Japanese denim jeans, moulded polyurethane sunglasses, embossed leather tote and glazed leather boots by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Adama is wearing a belted Japanese cotton trench coat, knitted vicuña wool turtleneck, washed Japanese denim jeans, moulded polyurethane sunglasses, embossed leather tote and glazed leather boots by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
The archival references, by and large, aren’t the milestones that fashion dorks would expect Gvasalia to reimagine. There’s no rehash of the 1950 evening gown of two balloons of taffeta, the feather-embroidered extravaganzas of the 1960s, the extraordinary trapezoid four-sided cocktail dress of winter 1967 that made sitting impossible. There aren’t even the Spanish laces, the embroidered toreador boleros, the cocoon coats, those semi-fitted little skirt suits. “I didn’t use my brain so much, I used my instinct,” Gvasalia says of the design process. “Every time I listen to my gut, it’s always a decision that makes sense in the end.”
Back in the archive, off to one side, there is a massive, blown-up publicity portrait of Cristóbal Balenciaga propped against a concrete column. It is Balenciaga in the 1950s, when he was in his sixties – no longer matinee idol handsome, as when he first opened his house in Paris, but still good-looking, albeit with deep frown lines, one hand hiding a receding chin of which he was always self-conscious. Portraits of Balenciaga are rare – he was the first couturier who refused to bow after his shows and declined interview requests until after his retirement. He also never employed a press attaché. His photographic likeness seems to stare dispassionately at a beyond-life-sized mid-century portrait by Bernard Buffet of his wife, Annabel, regal in a 1959 Balenciaga ballgown. She looks like an infanta, albeit painted in a spiky, expressionist style rather than the faultless technique of Diego Velázquez, whose stately Las Meninas constantly echoes in Balenciaga’s clothing. He also admired Francisco de Zurbarán, whose work depicted not the richness of the Spanish court but the simplicity of nuns, monks and martyrs. Perhaps it was to emulate the almost sculptural draped fabrics of Zurbarán that Balenciaga challenged the Swiss textile firm Abraham to invent a new fabric, gazar, an architectural and crisp silk that held its shape like plywood. Inspired by cotton bandages, it took them three years to perfect. For a decade after its creation in 1958, Balenciaga carved shapes out with gazar, transforming women into walking bubbles, upturned pyramids or arum lilies of fabric.
An example of the latter, a sculptural wedding dress from 1967, will be revisited by Gvasalia as the finale look for his couture show. It’s an unconventionally direct homage – one of those well-avoided milestones. “I couldn’t not do it,” Gvasalia says. “It’s impossible without that. But we tried to do something else with it. We were like, ‘OK, let’s do it like this, or let’s do it like this. Let’s change the darts here.’ Trying to be more clever,” he rolls his eyes. “Or, I don’t know, like more construction conscious than Cristóbal. And we just ended up replicating the dress. There was no way it could be better.” They did change the fabric – the silk-wool mix has a worn feel, as if it had been drawn from the archives. “And we did change the hat, that particular hat, into a veil.” The headpiece, originally, was known as the “coal scuttle”, a helmet of fabric that resembles something out of Star Wars and has been ripped off endlessly since. “There is something quite absurd about the wedding dress in today’s context,” Gvasalia says. Which is strange, given that bridal gowns are often seen as contemporary couture’s raison d’être – if you’re going to spend six figures on a dress, it’s probably for holy matrimony. After all, that last dress Cristóbal Balenciaga ever made, after his couture house closed and just months before he died, was a wedding dress.
Boris is wearing a swing-back Japanese denim jacket and jeans, moulded polyurethane sunglasses and glazed leather boots by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Boris is wearing a swing-back Japanese denim jacket and jeans, moulded polyurethane sunglasses and glazed leather boots by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Gvasalia taps the box holding his newly made old-looking bodice, its neckline scooping shallow across an imaginary collarbone. It will later be attached to a wide skirt, worn over men’s wool trousers. “In that dress, I do reference Cristóbal’s silhouette of the Infanta, where he references Velázquez paintings,” Gvasalia says. “Luckily we do have this history, so we can build on that.” A reference to a reference – you find that elsewhere in the collection. Sometimes the reference is even to Gvasalia’s own work at Balenciaga, his translation of Cristóbal’s couture attitude into ready-to-wear bouncing right back to couture again. Take look 17, a hazmat-orange gabardine suit with the jacket shrugged off the shoulders, neck wrenched wide open – it’s an open reference to his debut Balenciaga show, where he pulled the necks apart on trench coats and padded jackets to emulate the shape of grandiose opera coats. “But this orange jacket, it required so much work that could never have been done in ready-to-wear,” Gvasalia says. “In my first collection for Balenciaga, when I started opening the shoulder line ... that was a very easy construction. You made a huge dart, basically, swinging the shape to the back. But when you wear it, it doesn’t behave the same way. This was like an upgrade, completely crazy, pattern-making acrobatics.” He smiles, shrugs. “It’s couture.”
“For me, it was the beginning of a new era. I’m not talking about Balenciaga, but about myself as a designer. It was a moment I have been looking forward to and been quite afraid of” – Demna Gvasalia
Two months later, the first Balenciaga couture show since 1968 – the 50th in total, a satisfying number – takes place at 11.30am on the 7th of July. The context is historical: the recreated salons are filled with spindly gold chairs, a carnation placed on each. The air does indeed smell old. “I wanted to underline the timelessness of couture,” Gvasalia said. “We tried to step into those pictures from the past.” The show was staged during the first physical haute couture presentations since January 2020. That was important for Gvasalia – he waited to showcase the collection until he could do so in person – what’s another few months when you’ve waited since 1968? “The screen makes everything so flat – and of course, you cannot see that broken embroidery, the craft,” he says. “There is something quite majestic about couture being worn.”
When the show began, no one really realised. It began without the thud of music common to most shows, and especially to those of Balenciaga under Gvasalia – his husband, Loïk Gomez, a French musician under the moniker BFRND, creates all the soundtracks. This collection, however, would be shown in silence, another unexpected homage to Cristóbal and to haute couture tradition. “Cristóbal loved silence,” says Gvasalia. It’s quite intimidating. “Here it’s all about the garments.” Silence, he says, makes the experience not less but even more intense. “I wanted to use microphones, to amplify. But that would be fake. With a lot of fabrics we’re using, you do hear them. There are trains, a carpet that rubs. It’s almost fetishistic.”
Sori is wearing a polka-dot swing-back silk shirt with bow corset, trousers and glazed leather boots by BALENCIAGA COUTURE. Her own earringPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Binta is wearing a silk wool wedding dress with train and technical knit veil by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
The collection dances between those different interpretations of attitude, between respect and repudiation. Models wear embroidered evening gowns, sure, but also the tailoring based on Cristóbal’s personal wardrobe, while Mona von Bismarck opera coats morph into the ski anoraks he sewed in his own ateliers. Male models walk in high heels – Gvasalia wanted them to change the posture and deportment of the wearers, many of whom had to be specially trained. “The gay guys were fine,” Gvasalia says. The collection’s striking, sometimes searing colours are even drawn from Balenciaga fabric swatches in the archive – the orange, the pink, an electric blue, sealed in cardboard boxes so untouched by time. Polka dots come from the archives too. Gvasalia’s couture T-shirt is in padded silk, with a matching stole. It’s an accessory he uses a lot, a couture gesture. There are also lots of gloves, sometimes built into tops to streamline and perfect. Jewellery is based on original pieces displaced, so elaborate spherical brooches can become earrings or perhaps cocktail rings. Pauline de Rothschild once stated that the wit was on the head chez Balenciaga – Cristóbal’s milliners were also his life partners, Ramón Esparza and Wladzio Jaworowski d’Attainville, so they were perhaps afforded more liberties than most. Here, the sole headpiece is a Treacy dome, like a shallow inverted fruit bowl, flocked with velvet or high-gloss lacquer. “It’s like a car varnish,” says Gvasalia. “I wanted to have some kind of almost futuristic touch. A bit alien.”
Jeans in Balenciaga’s couture salon are also alien and futuristic. Gvasalia’s denims are woven in Japan, riveted and buttoned in sterling silver, lined in silk. “People think I literally just take one thing and put a brand name on it,” Gvasalia says. “It’s not that at all.” There is, perhaps, a sense that Gvasalia – still, after six years – feels the need to prove himself worthy of the Balenciaga name. “Accepting the wedding dress – the ingenuity of how this wedding dress was made in the 1960s – was letting go of that fear of not being innovative in every look. Not transforming everything that I took for this collection as a reference from Cristóbal into something completely new,” he says. “For a designer like me, that’s difficult.” Following Gvasalia’s rumpled Astroturf-green opera coat and the fucked-up Infanta evening gown, Cristóbal Balenciaga’s wedding dress swept through the salons of his house. He hadn’t changed a thing.
After the show, a lull. The evening afterwards, there’s a dinner in the new art foundation established by the Pinault family in the centre of Paris. Gvasalia wears the high-heeled men’s shoes he had debuted barely nine hours earlier. There’s a performance by Bryan Ferry – “I thought he felt quite couture,” Gvasalia said, laughing. The next day, he travelled back to Zurich with his husband.
Gritli is wearing a silk taffeta opera coat, jersey top, antique brass earrings with Swarovski crystal rhinestones and jersey gloves by BALENCIAGA COUTUREPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
Marie Agnès is wearing a domed flocked velvet hat by PHILIP TREACYPhotography by Ola Rindal, Styling by Marie Chaix
“For me, it was the beginning of a new era.” Gvasalia sounds a bit fuzzy on the phone from Switzerland. But he’s pleased. “I’m not talking about Balenciaga, but about myself as a designer. It was a moment I have been looking forward to and been quite afraid of.”
Is he still afraid? “I feel at peace,” Gvasalia says. “I never really knew that feeling within the context of my work, to feel at peace. I always felt quite agitated, nervous, before the show, anxious. I had this anxiety before the show yesterday – I forgot how it feels, actually. It’s been over a year since I had to do a show in real life. It felt again like the first time – something physical, in your stomach, almost. I couldn’t understand if I liked it or not, and just before the show I realised I love it. It’s the tension – fashion is about a tension, and then you release. I felt like I released something that has been incubating in me for a long time. Not only one year, I think much longer. That release brought me to this feeling of peacefulness.”
Gvasalia breathes out. “It’s not really about that collection so much as my personal relationship with fashion. Through couture, I found peace with it.”
Hair: Akemi Kishida at Blend Management using ORIBE. Make-up: Anthony Preel at Artlist. Models: Binta Diacko at Fever, Marie Agnès Diène at The Claw, Adama Konate at Girl Mgmt, Azenor Le Dily at Supreme, Gritli and Sori at Keva Legault, Marius and Boris at Tomorrow Is Another Day and Lisa Williamson at The Face. Casting: Julia Lange Casting. Casting associate: Mathilde Curel. Photographic assistant: Léa Guintrand. Styling assistants: Emmanuelle Ramos and Matthieu Bertorello. Hair assistant: Yulia Pantiukhina. Make-up assistant: Azusa Kumakura. Production: TheLink Mgmt. On-set producer: Gwenaelle Wieners
This article appears in the Autumn/Winter 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale internationally from 7 October 2021. Pre-order a copy here.
Jackie Nickerson Captures the Season’s Boldest, Bravest Looks
See Jackie Nickerson and Katie Shillingford’s wild distillation of the Autumn/Winter 2021 collections – both in image and film
Louise is wearing a leather opera bubble dress by JW ANDERSON. Latex stockings by ELISSA POPPY. And upcycled deadstock trainers by MATTHEW NEEDHAM X HELEN KIRKUM.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing a quilted habotai cannage peacoat and ribbed cashmere jumper by DIOR. Crocheted plastic mask custom-made by JANINA PEDAN.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing an oversized technical cotton coat with contrast stripes by GUCCI. T-shirt yarn knitted balaclava custom-made by ELEANOR BUTLER-JONES.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Zinnia is wearing a ribbed cashmere and feather top and technical stretch wool and feather trousers by BOTTEGA VENETA. Latex gloves by ELISSA POPPY. And nylon and suede trainers by EYTYS.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Zinnia is wearing a viscose jumper and snood by KENZO.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing nylon tracksuit coats (as a coat and a skirt) and fleece sweatpants by BALENCIAGA. Latex gloves by ELISSA POPPY.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing a superfine wool jacquard bodysuit and gloves by PRADA. Oversized acetate sunglasses by TOM FORD. And nylon boots by RAF SIMONS.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing a quilted cotton coat by LOEWE.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing a quilted nylon jumpsuit and shearling mittens by MIU MIU. Crocheted plastic mask custom-made by JANINA PEDAN.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing a cotton jacket, midi skirt and trousers, wool turtleneck, cotton hood and velvet platform Mary Janes by MARC JACOBS.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing a laminated jersey body by SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO. Crocheted balloon mask custom-made by ELEANOR BUTLER-JONES.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing a nylon duvet jacket by RICK OWENS. Plastic head-dress custom made by JANINA PEDAN.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Zinnia is wearing a flag intarsia stretch jersey and velvet turtleneck body by BURBERRY. Ribbed cotton and mosquito net mask (worn as a balaclava) by DAVID WEKSLER.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing a printed velvet dress by LOUIS VUITTON X FORNASETTI. Cotton sweatpants by UNDERCOVER X EVANGELION C(KHARA). And leather boots by LOUIS VUITTON.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Louise is wearing quilted canvas salopettes by CHANEL. Hooded recycled polyester ribbon top by NANUSHKA.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Zinnia is wearing a cut-out ribbed cotton jumpsuit and cropped padded leather jacket by GIVENCHY. Latex gloves by ELISSA POPPY.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Zinnia is wearing an oversized nylon tabard with faux-fur lining by MARNI. Lacquered nylon trousers by MONCLER GRENOBLE.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Zinnia is wearing a technical linen coat by KENZO. Braided mask custom-made by JANINA PEDAN. Latex gloves by ELISSA POPPY. And Knot drop earrings in yellow gold with diamonds by TIFFANY & CO.Photography by Jackie Nickerson, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Hair: Soichi Inagaki at Art Partner. Make-up: Anne Sophie Costa at Streeters using MAC. Hair colourist for Louise Robert: Tasha Spencer at Bleach London. Models: Louise Robert at Viva London and Zinnia Kumar at The Society Management. Casting: Noah Shelley at Streeters. Digital tech: Christopher Blythe at Lightmill. Photographic assistant: Pierre Lequeux. Styling assistant: George Pistachio
This shoot appears in the Autumn/Winter 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale internationally from 7 October 2021. Pre-order a copy here.
Cover Story: Inside the World of Sarah Burton’s Alexander McQueen
Ten years after her first solo collection for Alexander McQueen was shown in Paris, the house’s creative director speaks on craft, community and the power of femininity
This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are making the issue free and available digitally for a limited time only to all our readers wherever you are in the world. Sign up here.
A little-appreciated fact: Sarah Burton first arrived at Alexander McQueen in 1996. She has been with the house for 25 years now, a quarter of a century and more than half her life. It remains the stuff of fashion legend that, back then, the Prestbury-raised, Saint Martins-educated designer – then named Sarah Heard – was on an internship, introduced to McQueen by Simon Ungless, her print tutor and his friend and collaborator. While she went back to finish her degree – she was diligent from the offset – she returned to McQueen in 1997. And never left.
Despite that background, this has undoubtedly been a formative decade for Burton. Her first solo collection for Alexander McQueen was shown during the Spring/Summer 2011 Paris season, exactly ten years before this one. Throughout that time, she has been widely celebrated – even loved – making the transition from first assistant to her mentor to creative director of an international fashion brand. She helms an awe-inspiring and closely guarded legacy that she helped to create, today perpetuating and reinventing it season after season. And she oversees absolutely everything – womenswear, menswear, accessories, campaigns, communications, retail concepts. Burton has created an educational studio space – home to presentations including Unlocking Stories and Roses – opening up the layered and complex process behind the creation of McQueen collections past and present on the top floor of the Bond Street flagship store. She conceived the design of that too, along with the architect Smiljan Radic, using a concept that has now been rolled out across the world to 65 McQueen stores. She has held workshops for students covering everything from research to sketching to draping. More recently, Burton has worked with young teenagers, producing smaller sizes of McQueen designs for them and giving them materials with which to customise their pieces, encouraging them to style themselves and be photographed with their contemporaries.
Burton does this because she is driven, and always has been, by a love of her work, by a dedication to her craft and a belief that a human being’s potential to create is vitally important. She says herself: “I think we are very lucky to have a creative way to express how we feel. Through our jobs, we say how we feel.” And there is great joy in that. And this despite any past sadness, though that was considerable too. She would like the act of creation to give children “a sense of release with no fear attached to it – and that’s a great thing”. She would like “to give something back”.
Burton’s Spring/Summer 2021 womenswear collection for Alexander McQueen marks something of a departure, both in its appearance and the way in which it was shown. In place of a catwalk presentation came a film, First Light – a collaboration with the director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin, Sexy Beast). It was shot, as the rather beautiful name suggests, at dawn, on the banks of the River Thames, against the London skyline and pale autumnal skies: a backdrop that feels meaningful to this fashion name above all others. Glittering modernist structures jostle for position by the magnificent 18th-century dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after the destruction caused by the Great Fire of London, it is a metaphor for the beauty that may come from tragedy. It feels apt today. In September 2010, St Paul’s was, of course, the location for a memorial service for the house’s founder, Lee Alexander McQueen, who died in February that same year. There are Victorian bridges in First Light, too: lovers embrace and picnickers recline beneath their heavy iron girders. McQueen himself and Burton with, and then after him, continuously looked to that era for inspiration. Victorian bodices, elaborate embroideries, savagely beautiful corsets and sharp gentlemen’s tailoring – for him, and for her – are constant McQueen references, all juxtaposed with modernity: experimental fabrication, proportion and cut. Like those skyscrapers next to Wren’s cupola, this evokes a sense of timeless beauty, a comforting familiarity alongside an arresting, exciting strangeness.
In First Light, a woman sits in the mud by the water dressed in a deconstructed corseted dress in softest pink with an asymmetric skirt in layer upon layer of raw-edged tulle. Said skirts are well and truly muddied, then, and this too is an image that evokes quintessential McQueen. The raw and the refined, the old and the new, the elemental and the urban, the fragile and the strong. Those contrasts – paradoxes – are central to the house’s handwriting.
Kiki is wearing a corseted Chantilly lace dress with Watteau back and leather Wander shoes (throughout) by ALEXANDER MCQUEENPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
A move forwards, perhaps, but Burton refers to this collection as “a homecoming” of kinds. That is at least partly a result of the circumstances in which it was created – McQueen himself famously started out with next to nothing in terms of resources – fabrics were sourced from anywhere and everywhere, often bought cheaply from market stalls, used to create magic. Alexander McQueen in 2021 is very different to Alexander McQueen in the early 1990s – yet this season, there were parallels. Certainly, Burton and her team had less immediately to hand than usual, in every sense. Without the initial inspirational research trip – Wales, Ireland, the cities and countryside of the north of England, the wilds of Cornwall and Wiltshire have all been visited in recent times – the McQueen team instead looked inwards. They made the collection’s initial toiles in their kitchens, dyed fabrics in their gardens, and cut, draped and sewed pieces from start to finish at home. Much of their work was done by hand.
Homecoming, at home. Sarah Burton was raised in the north of England, but home for the label means London. It has always been based in the city – though it usually shows as part of Paris’s biannual prêt-à-porter. That location emphasises the couture quality that characterises Burton’s work: by contrast, this is a collection inspired by the capital’s deserted streets, by the spirit of a city that is loved by all who work at Alexander McQueen. And it revealed hidden depths that may once have been taken for granted but that, at this point in its history in particular, shine. If Paris means the fantasy of couture, London means reality – not necessarily harsh, but with grit. Men’s City tailoring, workwear, denim, the leather jackets of punks, mods and rockers, the trench coats of the Great War – all, incidentally, modern wardrobe archetypes, ripe for study. Some are cross-bred, like Victorian botanical specimens: they become hybrids, that word is also a part of the McQueen vernacular.
Necessity became the mother of invention, but also intention. The result of this work was a collection more essential, less embellished, though far from straightforward. Aesthetically, there are none of the fairy-tale embroideries more recently associated with the label – exquisite for sure, yet to the woman behind them, not as central to the fashion conversation for now. But the core of McQueen – its heart and soul – is evident throughout, is seen in every garment. That soul is, of course, the cut: this refers back to McQueen in its nascency, at which point pattern-making drove it, whether that pattern was cut in Prince of Wales check or indeed rubber, metal or wood. Perhaps with that in mind, the aforementioned toiles themselves, the process of fashion, became part of the final result: couture silhouettes realised in humble fabrics, every detail of cut, proportion, finish and, most importantly, shape emphasised in their purity. Decoration was replaced with structure, garments turned inside out to expose the labour – and love – that went into them. Today, they seem more lovely than any embroidery.
Leather biker jacket with open neckline, cotton poplin shirt and leather wrap skirt by ALEXANDER MCQUEENPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Cotton poplin dress by ALEXANDER MCQUEENPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
For Burton, who learnt first-hand from McQueen, there was a sense of liberation in going back to this way of working, to “stripping back”. She told this magazine in 2012: “I realised almost immediately – pattern-cutting, that was what it was all about. As the stories go, you’d go home in the evening and come back the following morning and there would be these incredible things that Lee had stayed up all night to make. It was never just a job. And I never stopped learning.” She describes this collection as “a study of clothing and a study of character”. Garments frame the faces and hold the bodies of the people wearing them, empowering never overpowering, characterful and revealing character indeed. The only motifs, meanwhile, are doves – symbols of love, birds of peace – and a digital and photographic print of an archive McQueen boned tulle corset: a dress on a dress, a skirt, a T-shirt. It feels like the ghost of a garment.
Today, Burton makes more than a few incredible things of her own. Working with a still relatively small and close-knit team of people – she calls it a creative community, and if she is proud of anything, she is of that – she cuts, sews and weaves her form of magic. Hers are instantly recognisable pieces, intense and exceptionally special – individual. Increasingly there is a reality to her designs that perhaps belies the workmanship that goes into them: even the most apparently simple garment may be toiled four or five times to ensure it fits precisely how its creator wishes. These are garments inspired by a belief in the value of handwork, in the emotional power of clothing and an unwavering conviction to keep going: “to perfect and perfect and perfect”. Burton is a shy and modest person, which, given her profession, might be considered unusual. She is brave too, though, and perhaps more McQueen in her sense of purpose and ability to make the seemingly impossible happen than she has ever given herself credit for. There is a sense of freedom in her more recent work that makes that all the more evident, a feeling of her own personality in the work that she does. While she is entirely sensitive to the foundations this modern, British house is built on – indeed she has long been pivotal to it – Alexander McQueen, the man, thrived on beautiful chaos and hers is a quieter, gentler universe. Still, “I’m a woman, but that doesn’t make me a fluffy romantic,” she says.
Burton’s allegiance to the house of Alexander McQueen runs deeper than mere respect for a world-renowned brand or excitement at the opportunity to examine and recode its meaning. Creating in her central-London studio – where at least some members of the team have been with McQueen as long as she has or “since he was here” – she produces work for the label that is a labour of love, inspired by craft, community and the power of femininity in every incarnation.
Leather jacket with strap and buckle detail and peg trousers by ALEXANDER MCQUEENPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Corseted Chantilly lace dress with Watteau back and dove lace appliqué embroidery and leather Wander boots by ALEXANDER MCQUEENPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
AnOther Magazine: Rather than talking to the press after you showed Jonathan Glazer’s film of your collection, you wanted people to make up their own minds, to have feelings this season. That was interesting because that’s how it used to be. People who wrote about and edited fashion didn’t talk to designers after each show. It all felt more remote in some ways, but freer in others. Do you think that the time we are living in – the distance created by the pandemic and the lockdowns – almost gives us more space to think in that way again. To have feelings.
Sarah Burton: I think this has been a year when there has been so much noise and so much constant media, 24 hours a day, that it felt to me like information overload. I felt numbed by it. I wanted to do a film that moved people and therefore wanted them to have their own opinion, to know what they really thought. Sometimes I think the system undermines that, undermines brilliant writers by telling them what to think. Lee always used to say he didn’t care what people thought as long as they felt something. It was important to me that people felt something this time.
AM: How was the process of shooting the film? How did it compare to staging a show?
SB: I loved working with Jonathan Glazer. I’ve always been a huge fan of his work and he has such a clear vision. It was very exciting, inspiring and creative, in the purest sense, to do something different in a year when everything changed. Making a film instead of a show made it somehow very important to talk about human connection, it was about a series of intimate moments and people coming together. It made me think about characters and clothes more, and how those characters moved in the clothes, who those characters were. It opened up a whole world of McQueen women and men.
AM: You talked about coming home, shooting in London, against the London skyline. Perhaps part of the reason for shooting here was practical, but it seemed to mean more to you than that.
SB: Pretty much the first thing that Jonathan and I discussed when I showed him the line-up was that we wanted to shoot the film in London. It was much more than just a practicality. It would have been easier to shoot in any park or in nature. Because I knew hardly anyone was going to be able to see the clothes in the flesh, it was more important than ever to give them a three-dimensional appearance. They had to look like a silhouette. I didn’t design them for a flat screen, they had to move. We always design like that. The clothes have to work from every angle.
AM: It’s a cliché maybe, but perhaps having so many things taken away from us makes us appreciate the things we do have more than ever.
SB: The whole situation with Covid-19 made me really appreciate my brilliant team and how amazing working in London is. Everything was shut and, even though I have lived here for years – for most of my life, in fact – I noticed things I hadn’t noticed before. It was as if an amazing peace had descended on London. Lee was born in London and the city is so integral to what the house is about that it felt like the right place to be. It has such spirit. We also went back to designing in the way we did when we very first started out, looking at the essentials of what we really needed to make something work. We made the film very early in the morning. It was magical. The sun was rising, which made everything look more sharp, more intense. The Thames is a part of London that has never changed, it’s a place where the old and the new come together, where St Paul’s is next to very modern structures but the overall effect is somehow timeless. It’s not perfect but there’s beauty in that too. Whatever else has happened, the Thames remains the same. It’s like a lifeline, a vein – it breathes. It makes you think of paintings and poems. And because it was so empty, everything seemed more intense – amplified.
AM: The idea of the old and the new coming together is also very much at the heart of Alexander McQueen, the past informing the present and the future, and a sense of history being embedded in the clothes has always been part of the storytelling process.
SB: I think it’s exactly that. We always look back to go forward, whether it’s looking back at a period in history or looking back at McQueen’s own history, looking back at a show or a technique or even a pleat or a dart ... The important thing is that it then twists and becomes relevant to people now. Especially at the moment, you want to understand that there are things you can rely on, things that are familiar. The whole world is in chaos, so you want a sense of stability. So, taking a trench coat and subverting it, or taking a white shirt and changing it to the point where it becomes McQueen enough to be a piece in itself.
AM: You showed menswear and womenswear together in the film. Why?
SB: The process of designing the collections was very much linked. It was about characters and the way they interact, about how characters – and people – relate to one another. Increasingly we are bringing McQueen womenswear and menswear closer together, there is an ongoing conversation between the two. There are references to women’s in the men’s and vice versa. We’ve been doing that for some time now.
Cotton poplin dress with puffed sleeves and cotton piqué belt by ALEXANDER MCQUEEN. Shoes as beforePhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Compact wool and polyfaille coat with puffed sleeves and draped skirt and chained antique silver double ring by ALEXANDER MCQUEEN. Shoes as beforePhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
“Making this collection was pretty much the one thing that I wasn’t worried about when we first went into lockdown. Then, once we finally came back into the studio, these characters appeared. The clothes themselves were almost like characters – individual. Maybe because people had more time to work on one piece, they almost became more special. You had to be more decisive about what you wanted, about what you really wanted to say” – Sarah Burton, January 2021
Corseted Chantilly lace dress with Watteau back and dove lace appliqué embroidery and leather Wander boots by ALEXANDER MCQUEENPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Leather biker jacket with tulle sleeves and peplum and tulle skirt by ALEXANDER MCQUEENPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
AM: In some ways the collection marks a return to the spirit of early McQueen – the relatively humble fabrics, the stripping of embellishment, the idea of London, inspiration from street culture and British tradition. Did you feel that?
SB: It was about stripping back. It felt right to do something very pure in silhouette, something about form and construction. For me, this is not the right time for ostentation or fantasy in clothes. You want something that is very human, very real. It’s like, this is where we are, this is our reality, and you can’t escape from that. It felt wrong to flee. We still had access to incredible fabrics but it felt really good to use more straightforward materials – polyfaille, denim, cotton poplin. And upcycled fabrics – parts of some garments were made in stock fabric, others were made out of remnants of lace and tulle from past collections. And the way we saw it develop wasn’t about a girl in a field but in a studio, against a plain white background, with no one on the streets outside. It’s actually much harder to make things that aren’t embellished look beautiful, because there’s nothing to hide behind – you are reliant on pattern-cutting, you can see every single detail, every single mistake. We had to perfect and perfect and perfect.
AM: You began the collection during the first lockdown. How do you think that affected the end result?
SB: During lockdown, when we were all working separately from home, I saw the team’s ability to cut patterns and make beautiful things on the stand. Lee was always about pattern-cutting and I learnt how to do that from him. Lee very much taught me how to pattern-cut and how to sew. There was something refreshing about going back to the way we worked at the beginning, about working with things that we already had. It was like, OK, we’ve all got a mannequin at home, we can all talk to each other. Let’s drape. It was very three-dimensional in approach.
AM: There is something about this moment, in a wider sense, that harks back to the early days of McQueen, to the Hoxton Square era. You were, of course, very much part of that. Do you remember that time fondly?
SB: I remember it very fondly. And the situation now heightens the fact that that was a very special time, heightens the sense of creative freedom that time represents. We were in a basement in Hoxton Square, the fabrics and looks were made on the stand with what you had to hand. Lee could make something out of what appeared to be nothing – a piece of wood, rubber, metal, inexpensive lace. We couldn’t afford to make endless toiles. We made one, draping fabric on the stand, and then the garment in the real fabric. It made you think outside the box – made you focus on pattern, shape. I remembered being part of that when we went into lockdown and felt very lucky to be used to making clothes and creating, just making things that we really believed in. I learnt so much from being in the studio with Lee. I don’t even know if those jobs exist any more, it was so hands-on. You got to touch the clothes, touch the fabric, and it’s easy to forget how rare that is.
AM: There’s an engineered tulle toile print of a McQueen dress in the collection, almost as if the ghost of a dress is printed onto another dress.
SB: I always have the feeling that clothes should be timeless and, if they’re beautifully made, stripped to the bare bones and essential, that will hopefully be the case. It’s also nice to look at the insides of clothes, which are often as beautiful as the outsides, and at how to make clothes feel relevant for today. How do we make clothes that are more considerate to the wearer, more emotionally resonant? With London feeling completely deserted – bereft – I wanted people to be able to relate to the clothes. I also wanted the collection to be bolder and stronger. I wanted to say, “It’s OK – we are carrying on.” I wanted to be brave, to make things I love and to challenge myself.
AM: You have opened up the processes behind your work in the educational space at Bond Street to students in particular. Why is that important to you?
SB: I was fortunate enough to be a student when Lee took me on and Simon Ungless, my tutor at Saint Martins, introduced me to him. I had an amazing opportunity to work as a team, as part of a creative community. It was very much like that at Hoxton Square. I wanted to show students that there are so many roles you can play within a team that are important, I wanted to demystify the idea of fashion being unapproachable as an industry. Sometimes, to work in fashion can be challenging, but I want young people to feel that anything is possible.
AM: You also work with younger communities who maybe aren’t used to being immersed in fashion. I’m thinking about your recent project in Wales in connection with your Autumn/Winter 2020 collection. You sent young teenagers looks from the collection in smaller sizes and your team travelled there and held workshops to help and inspire them, sent them packs of embroidery so they could customise their clothes, style themselves and then take pictures.
SB: I felt like we’d been to Wales and been inspired by their culture, their history and their narrative and, in the first instance, we wanted to invite some of the schoolchildren there to the show. By the time it happened, Covid-19 had kicked in so it wasn’t possible. We had already made and sent them the clothes. They customised them and styled themselves and each other and we worked with Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James, who had been photographing them for a while, to document this project with us. I think we are very lucky to have a creative way to express how we feel. Through our jobs, we say how we feel. We wanted to help children understand that you don’t have to go into fashion or art but you can be creative, you can draw a picture, you can take a picture, you can style your friend. You don’t have to want to be a fashion designer, it’s a way of being heard without having to be literal. It’s a sense of release with no fear attached to it, and that’s a great thing. I also think that by the time you get to college you are already in a position of privilege and you want to be a fashion designer, but it’s not just about my job, the designer, that hierarchy. I wanted to reach out to younger children to show them what’s possible, to show children who might not otherwise understand that there are lots of different roles in fashion – whether that’s in embroidery, styling, photography. It’s not just about being a designer.
Leather jacket with strap and buckle detail and peg trousers by ALEXANDER MCQUEENPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
Swing-back cropped denim jacket and flared denim dress with topstitch detail by ALEXANDER MCQUEENPhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
“Lee could make something out of what appeared to be nothing – a piece of wood, rubber, metal, inexpensive lace. We couldn’t afford to make endless toiles ... It made you think outside the box” – Sarah Burton
Polyfaille dress with engineered tulle toile print and butterfly-draped skirt by ALEXANDER MCQUEEN. Shoes as beforePhotography by Craig McDean, Styling by Katie Shillingford
AM: You also work with specialists in highly specific techniques – many of them have been in their fields for generations. William Clark, one of the last linen beetlers in the world, for example, who treated the linen in your Spring/Summer 2020 collection.
SB: What was really great with William Clark and the work we did with linen was finding an old tradition and making it new. We asked them to beetle whole garments, which they hadn’t done before, taking the technique a step further. We produced so many of the black beetled linen jackets that they bought a new beetling machine especially for us. These crafts are becoming extinct and it’s so important to keep them alive.
AM: You often talk about community and creative community in particular. What does the word mean to you?
SB: It means my team and working together. We are a community.
AM: I’m interested in the idea of the character of women – or men – and the character of clothing, which seems to be the way you are thinking when designing collections now. Can we talk more about that?
SB: At the beginning of this process, I thought about how it is not just one woman or man we are dressing. There are all these different characters, in the studio and in the collection. The garments become these characters. They needed to live and breathe, which goes back to the idea of making a film. Each garment is an individual. The fact that people are so complex, their vulnerabilities and strengths, brings clothes to life.
AM: This collection is about wardrobe archetypes too – a trench coat, a trouser suit, a shirt dress, a pink party dress, a lace dress, a denim jacket ...
SB: It’s a study of character and a study of clothing. McQueen is always about taking something and subverting it, and I hope there’s always a sense of beauty in what we do too, a sense of reinvention and beauty in the unexpected. We are designing hybrid garments but it’s not just about two things – two familiar garments – being forced together, but about things we can immediately understand and relate to becoming something else.
AM: You often talk about the McQueen woman – your McQueen woman – being grounded. Is that part of the same conversation or something different?
SB: As a woman you have to be able to do so many things. I love that and the layers of complexity it involves. I always want to empower women, not in the obvious ways, but in ways that speak to all sides of them.
AM: Over the past decade you have done so much. You have completely rethought the collections and how they relate to each other, the campaigns, the retail concept, the social media platforms. I know that you have your team, but you are personally involved in absolutely everything, in every last stitch in a garment, every last image in a lookbook, every last comma in any written communication. When you look at what you have achieved at Alexander McQueen, how do you feel?
SB: McQueen is like my family and my life. It is like my home. People really care about each other here. My team is incredible, they’re all such different, strong personalities. Throughout this whole situation, I’ve felt that I am so fortunate to work with people I really love and respect and it’s a conversation, a conversation about making things that mean something. It is a community and quite a lot of people have been part of it since Lee was here. And that also goes back to the whole thing about not throwing away the past. It’s about constantly evolving, not discarding. It’s not about changing things as much as finding my voice in them.
Hair: Christian Eberhard at Management Artists using ORIBE. Make-up: Hannah Murray at Art and Commerce. Model: Kiki Willems at Viva London. Casting: Noah Shelley at Streeters. Manicure: Laura Forget at Artlist. Digital tech: Nicolas Fallet. Photographic assistants: Paul Jedwab, Loc Boyle and Margaux Jouanneau. Styling assistants: George Pistachio and Christelle Owona Nisin. Tailor: Sebastien Pleus. Production: Julie Sanchez at Works Production. Production assistants: Julie Rondeau, Bertrand d’Amiens and David Smit. Post-production: D-Factory
This article originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale from 8 April, 2021. Pre-order a copy here and sign up for free access to the issue here.
Cover Story: Adwoa Aboah & Jeremy O Harris In Conversation
AnOther Magazine brings the model and playwright together over Zoom, where they discuss shifting gears, seeking pleasure and finding community
This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are making the issue free and available digitally for a limited time only to all our readers wherever you are in the world. Sign up here.
As her one million Instagram followers know, there are few subjects Adwoa Aboah won’t talk about. Her candour and willingness to be openly fragile have fuelled an outpouring of overdue conversations – about mental health, social justice, sexuality and more. Her platform, Gurls Talk, founded in 2016 following Aboah’s own struggles with depression and drug addiction, is a taboo-busting, judgment-free space for young people to grapple honestly with issues large and small, both online and – pre-pandemic – in the all-welcome forums she has held around the world.
It’s a sign of Aboah’s increasing reach with her Gurls Talk mission that, these days, mention of her phenomenally successful modelling career sometimes runs a close second to her activism. A born and bred west-Londoner (albeit with an unhappy stretch spent at a Somerset boarding school), Aboah grew up around fashion – both her parents work in the industry. She signed to a model agency at the age of 16 and, a decade later, was immortalised in plastic as a Barbie, complete with her now-unmistakable freckled skin, tattoos and shaved head. It was partly that liberating buzz cut – a rebellion against the looks-driven world she was working in, and a venting of frustration after years of feeling she had to tame her ginger Afro for the camera – that catapulted Aboah onto magazine covers and into campaigns for the likes of Chanel, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs and Dior. She has used her position in the public eye to hold her industry to account, campaigning for safer spaces, greater inclusivity and body positivity. (She will happily swerve the filter and post a bad-skin day.) But there’s an equally important flipside to Aboah’s vocal advocacy: her ability to listen. That skill is frequently put to use in her raw and intimate Gurls Talk podcasts, during which she guides guests such as the Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo and Black Lives Matter international ambassador Janaya Future Khan through a kaleidoscope of topics with empathy and humour.
Aboah finds an unguarded, kindred spirit in Virginia-raised, New York-based playwright Jeremy O Harris. Around the same time the seeds of Gurls Talk were planted in London, Harris was writing Slave Play while still a student on Yale School of Drama’s MFA playwriting programme. The ferocious, funny and profoundly uncomfortable interrogation of the ghosts of white supremacy that resulted from his fevered late-night writing sessions found its way well beyond Harris’s classroom and even the intellectual circles of the New York theatre world – towards the end of its sold-out run off-Broadway, the likes of Rihanna, Madonna, Anna Wintour and Jake Gyllenhaal could be spotted in the audience. A few months later, his play Daddy – an exploration of the relationship between a young Black artist and an older white collector that unfolds beside a Bel Air infinity pool – also opened off-Broadway, while Harris commuted back to Yale for classes. In 2020, Slave Play caused a small cultural earthquake when it transferred to Broadway and was nominated for 12 Tonys, the most received by a non-musical play in the awards’ 74-year history.
Much like Aboah, Harris immediately set about sharing the spotlight, using his success (including a handsome deal with HBO) to support grants for young Black playwrights and donating works by Black writers to libraries across the US. He has an indefatigable way of persuading others to support his causes – he once challenged the talk-show host Seth Meyers in front of a live audience to buy and distribute 20 tickets to Slave Play; Meyers duly coughed up.
Aboah and Harris had never met in person before AnOther Magazine brought them together over Zoom, but Aboah had already identified a like-minded soul. “What I’m always wanting in a conversation is someone completely unfiltered and unafraid, and I see that not just in Jeremy’s work, but also his Instagram and the way he presents himself,” says Aboah. “I just knew our conversation would flow in a different direction.”
Adwoa is wearing a cropped silk jersey top and leather and metal necklace (throughout) by CHANEL. Stylist’s own satin choker (throughout)Photography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
Photography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
Jeremy O Harris: I’m so excited you asked me to do this, because I try to do things where I’m following pleasure, and from everything I know about you, you also seem to be a pleasure-seeker. It’s also wild, because I’ve been on two shoots with your sister. What is it like to be in a family that is celebrated for its beauty? That feels like an interesting family to grow up in. Did you guys always know?
Adwoa Aboah: That’s such a good question. I think you do know, because you hear grown-ups say things like, “Your daughters are so pretty.” But the way I looked at myself was so blurred and confusing I didn’t link that to, “I feel pretty and beautiful.” So I was aware that was a conversation going on around me, but it wasn’t how I felt at all.
JOH: Also, growing up anywhere in the west, it’s going to be difficult for a Black person to feel completely beautiful all the time.
AA: It was when I moved to boarding school that I felt, “I need to start dressing like that,” or, “I need to relax my hair.” Before that I don’t remember caring. But this idea of beauty has taken me a long time. Now I’m like, “Yeah, I’m fit!” It’s not even the modelling, it’s a feeling now.
JOH: You’re about the same age as me – late twenties, early thirties?
AA: I’ll be 29 this year.
JOH: I think that’s the moment you start to feel, “This is the face I have and either I’m going to love it or not.” And choosing to love it is the thing that took me into my thirties.
AA: You’re so right, it’s a choice. I have an acceptance there’s never going to be a week where, every day, I feel gassed about myself. But more often, as I’ve got older, I’m happier to be myself. Don’t get me wrong, I can be trailing through my phone and say, “Fuck, I wish I looked like that.” But there’s something reassuring about deciding that this is what I have to work with.
Silk crepe dress with feathers by CHANEL. Leather gloves by RIINA OPhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
Photography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
“The most important thing for young artists is to stay sensitive and open and vulnerable, even in a dark time. It can be very alluring to be closed off right now” – Jeremy O Harris
Strapless tweed and chiffon dress by CHANEL. Choker and necklace as beforePhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
Photography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
JOH: I’ve started collecting photographs of writers I’m obsessed with at the same age as I am now, and other pictures of them older. And I’m getting excited about leaning into the fact of being a writer, and less into the worlds I’ve also been a part of, like acting or modelling. I’m really starting to appreciate the idea of ageing gracefully as an artist. My biggest insecurity is the bags under my eyes, which are evidence of the fact that I live a life where I stay up for close to 18 hours a day. If I got rid of those, the evidence would be gone, I wouldn’t look like a writer any more!
AA: I love that idea. It’s the same with smile lines. When I see them on other people, I think it’s so sexy – I think they’re a happy, fulfilled, expressive person.
JOH: So what have you been doing during quarantine to keep up? I know this is the question everyone asks, but I’ve become obsessed with my friends who got new hobbies or really engaged with reading again. What did you do?
AA: I’ve gone through different phases. I tried to paint by numbers. I tried arts and crafts, but I didn’t like it at school and I don’t like it now. Reading, I’ve always been obsessed with, so I’ve thrown myself into that. I’m such a night owl, I’d much prefer to stay up all night and sleep half the day. Having three-hour phone calls with friends has been nice, because I never had the time to do that before. And cooking – I cooked an amazing curried crab soup the other day.
JOH: I feel like a 1950s housewife when I go food shopping. I’ll be in the aisle and get overwhelmed by all the choices and my heart will start beating really quickly – I feel like I’m in a Todd Haynes movie with a camera coming down the aisle at me. I’d rather go to a restaurant and have someone do that for me. I spent the first lockdown in London, so I got to imagine I was some writer with agoraphobia in a new city. But I had a secret, small birthday party where someone came and cooked for me. That was the ideal gift in the pandemic because I hadn’t eaten food I hadn’t made in seven months.
AA: I’ve been spending a lot of the day dancing, from the moment I get up to the moment I go to sleep, with really, really loud music.
JOH: That’s something I miss the most – being in a nightclub, cooped up in the corner, drinking and gossiping, but having that energy of being around other people dancing.
AA: I hope we can do that soon. I also rewatched Game of Thrones for the second time.
Long tweed vest with muslin piping by CHANELPhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
Muslin jacket with sequin embellishment by CHANELPhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
JOH: I watched the first season begrudgingly. Then I got hit by a car walking through West Hollywood –
AA: What?!
JOH: Yeah, someone hit me, left me for dead and kept driving. This was how I found out my body rejects OxyContin – I’m really allergic to opioids. So I had to take ridiculous amounts of weed gummies instead. And being as high as I was, in a cast from my knee down, the Game of Thrones universe made sense to me all of a sudden. But I don’t think I could watch that final season again. Speaking of weird endings, how are you feeling about the fact that, this year, everything in your job – the filmmaking, the modelling – has slowed down? Have you started to think, “Maybe this could be a graceful exit for me. I could say goodbye to that and do something else when the world picks back up.”
AA: In the beginning, I needed the break. I felt quite poisonous in my body, and I had no sense of reality because I’d been on a plane and hadn’t stopped for so long. So it was a moment of calm and clarity. But it was quite uncomfortable because I haven’t known me without work for a long time. I had to start rethinking who I was without being busy. And now it’s not necessarily an exit, it’s more that I know what parts of my job I enjoy and I know I need to give space to other things. If I want to pursue acting, I have to say no to more modelling jobs and not let my ego get in the way by thinking I won’t be ‘relevant’ any more. It’s a compromise I’m willing to make. I don’t want my life to only be work any more. I need to have room for my personal life.
JOH: You mentioned ‘relevance’ – I wonder what relevance means to you? Because I had to have a big confrontation with that in the midst of Covid-19. The pandemic started right when I was supposed to have the London premiere of Daddy, which was going to lead into me announcing that Slave Play was coming to London. Then I was going to do a brand new, experimental play in New York that I thought was going to continue elevating some sense of me being ‘the voice of new, exciting theatre’. And in lockdown I was forced to think about myself and my work, and I started to realise that all the ideas I was having weren’t coming from that same, free place that Slave Play or Daddy came from. They were coming from a place of, “What else can I do to freak everyone out? Or stay in front of the conversation?” I realised relevance was the thing I was actually addicted to. What does relevance, or a lack of relevance, look like for you?
AA: In the fashion industry, and definitely being a model, relevance is quite warped and a bit poisonous. The moment when you get your break happens so fast, you’re straight on that hamster wheel. And because it’s so quick, you’re completely terrified that if you don’t say yes every single time, you’re going to lose it. Relevance to me is definitely associated with ego. Recently I’ve said no to things so I can do my acting classes, or my American-accent classes, or things related to Gurls Talk. But then ego gets in the way. I go online and watch a show I’ve said no to and think, “I should have been in that! People will think I’m not relevant any more!” I think relevance is also related to having an opinion. But it got to a point in lockdown where I didn’t necessarily have anything to say. With the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, I felt I should speak, but I was processing so much I didn’t even know how to articulate it all from a personal position.
JOH: My ears pricked up when you talked about your personal life. This year my partner moved in with me, so this relationship that could have fallen apart during Covid-19 got really close, really quickly. But because I was an ocean away from my family, my personal life as a son, as a brother, as an uncle, took a hit. And I felt that even deeper with Black Lives Matter. I felt, if Black lives really mattered, why the hell am I not living in Virginia with my family and my cousins and helping them build their lives differently? Do you think taking a moment to make sense of these questions around Black Lives Matter also brought you to thinking about your family in different ways?
AA: Oh, 100 per cent. It was definitely a much-needed conversation with myself, and one I have a lot with my sister and my dad. But it was really uncomfortable. I had let a lot of things slide for too long and I felt my soul had been chipped away. I had to look at people around me, and it was like the blinkers had been taken off. I was looking at what it meant to be both Black and white, and I was feeling quite alien. There were days when I felt, “I have no idea who I am.” Situations came up where I didn’t feel Black enough and I didn’t feel white enough. Having to look at my identity in that way was really painful and uncomfortable. But it was good, actually, because I took a step back. And going back to relevance, I think relevance is the thing that keeps you trapped. So when life slowed down, I had the time to say, “I don’t need to test myself.” I’m quite an overachiever and I love a challenge, but I thought, “We’re all in fragile states and I don’t need to test myself right now.”
Silk organza blouse by CHANELPhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
Cropped silk jersey top and metal earrings by CHANEL. Choker and necklace as beforePhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
“Keep that empathy. I think we’re allowed to feel what we feel right now. There is so much uncertainty for all of us and it comes in many different shapes, so sit with that and don’t push it away. Be frank with yourself and don’t feel like you’re not justified in feeling whatever emotions you’re feeling” – Adwoa Aboah
Cotton tweed vest, skirt and metal and leather bracelets by CHANEL. Choker and necklace as beforePhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
Long tweed vest with muslin piping by CHANELPhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
JOH: I’m trying to shift gears and figure out how I can make this year different for myself. I have this space where I come every day for five hours straight to journal, read and write whatever the fuck I want to write. Do you have any plans?
AA: That thought didn’t even cross my mind until February. January was dire – I was binge-watching, not sleeping, I overdid the exercise and fucked my knee. I was not in a great place, isolated and living by myself. But now I feel more willing to figure it out. I have daily talks with myself – I say, “It’s OK if today wasn’t good, tomorrow will be better.” There are little things I can do – I’ve been mood-boarding projects, going on Pinterest and creating a jewellery collection or a made-up fashion brand or a documentary idea, just putting things together. Because what I’ve found hard is I always felt like I had lots to talk about. But in January I felt I didn’t have anything to offer – “Today I stared out the window, I have nothing to report back on.” So now I’m just trying to be curious.
JOH: I was so negative at the top of this year. I could go into deep detail about how everything anyone liked had no worth. But I thought, “Jeremy, you were gifted with a critical mind, don’t waste that criticality on negativity.” I realised so much of that was about me feeling upset about the work I wasn’t doing or wasn’t able to do. And shifting those paradigms in my mind helped me feel better. My chest lifted, but it was really dark for a while. And it’s a darkness I was seeing a lot on Twitter.
AA: Really? What were the conversations about?
JOH: Every week it was, “The worst film ever came out and these actors should know better.” And a lot of it was about Black work, which really enraged me. Because I want us to feel excited about people being able to fail publicly again. The most important thing for young artists is to stay sensitive and open and vulnerable, even in a dark time. It can be very alluring to be closed off right now. Finding those people in your community who can be an extra arm to lift you up, and you can be that for them, is the most important thing. That’s what Gurls Talk is about too, right? One of the things that social media and the search for relevance does to a young artist is make it feel like this is a one-sum game, and a game you can only win by yourself. But I know that if I hadn’t had the committed friendships I’ve had for the past decade, none of the stuff that’s happened with me would have happened. It seems so lame to say, but make good friends, cut out the ones who don’t matter.
AA: I think so. Keep that empathy. I think we’re allowed to feel what we feel right now. There is so much uncertainty for all of us and it comes in many different shapes, so sit with that and don’t push it away. Be frank with yourself and don’t feel like you’re not justified in feeling whatever emotions you’re feeling.
JOH: Adwoa, I could Zoom with you all day.
AA: I could with you too. This is exactly what I thought would happen – we went nowhere and everywhere.
Silk crepe dress with feathers by CHANEL. Leather gloves by RIINA OPhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
Long tweed vest with muslin piping and tweed trousers by CHANEL. Choker and necklace as before. And stylist's own leather glovesPhotography by Jack Davison, Styling by Nell Kalonji
Hair: Virginie Moreira at Management Artists. Make-up: Celia Burton at JAQ Management using Rouge Allure Laque and Le Lift Lotion by CHANEL. Model: Adwoa Aboah at Tess Management. Casting: Noah Shelley at Streeters. Set design: Alice Kirkpatrick at Streeters. Styling assistant: Rebecca Perlmutar. Production: Mini Title
This article originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale from 8 April, 2021. Pre-order a copy hereand sign up for free access to the issue here.
Cover Story: A Portrait of Lila Moss
In a story titled Moonage Daydream, the artist and filmmaker Sharna Osborne and the stylist Robbie Spencer capture the model in Miu Miu’s Spring/Summer 2021 collection
This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are making the issue free and available digitally for a limited time only to all our readers wherever you are in the world. Sign up here.
Photography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Photography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Lila is wearing a striped bouclé roll-neck, chenille briefs, embellished cady miniskirt, metal and crystal earrings (throughout), patent leather belt and embellished metallic technical fabric sandals by MIU MIUPhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Photography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Photography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Photography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Viscose turtleneck, nylon briefs and Plexiglass drop earrings by MIU MIUPhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Printed chenille turtleneck and embellished satin Miu Sassy bag by MIU MIU. Earrings as beforePhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Luxe-fleece coat with embroidered collar, viscose turtleneck, nylon briefs and metal and Plexiglass earring by MIU MIU. Stylist’s own rollerbladesPhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Zip-up shirt, embroidered cady miniskirt, patent leather belt and metallic leather kitten-heel trainer mules by MIU MIU. Earrings as beforePhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Striped bouclé shirt by MIU MIU. Earrings as beforePhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Striped bouclé shirt, embroidered cady miniskirt and patent leather belt by MIU MIU. Earrings as beforePhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Embroidered cady halterneck top, chenille briefs, embroidered cady miniskirt, embellished satin Miu Sassy bag and patent leather belt by MIU MIU. Earrings as beforePhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Embellished leather coat and chenille turtleneck by MIU MIUPhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Photography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Embroidered silk gazar dress by MIU MIUPhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
Striped bouclé shirt by MIU MIU. Earrings as beforePhotography by Sharna Osborne, Styling by Robbie Spencer
This story originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale from 8 April, 2021. Pre-order a copy hereand sign up for free access to the issue here.
Cover Story: Virgil Abloh & Shayne Oliver In Conversation
The designers – and longtime friends – discuss risk-taking, representation and a future renaissance, alongside visuals of Abloh’s Autumn/Winter 2021 collection for Louis Vuitton created by Paolo Roversi and Ibrahim Kamara
This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are making the issue free and available digitally for a limited time only to all our readers wherever you are in the world. Sign up here.
It was a T-shirt that predicted fashion’s future.
That T-shirt was an off-the-cuff collaboration in 2012 between upstart New York label Hood by Air, founded in 2006 by Shayne Oliver and Raul Lopez, and Been Trill, the art and DJ collective that included Virgil Abloh (then best known for his label Pyrex Vision), Heron Preston, who launched his eponymous brand in 2017, and Matthew Williams, who founded 1017 Alyx 9SM in 2015 and, last year, became creative director of Givenchy.
Black and emblazoned both with Been Trill’s dripping Rocky Horror-font branding and HBA’s logo, it had an effect that, spurred on by still-fledgling social media and it being seen on Kanye West, soon snowballed beyond the garment’s intended audience, placing its creators firmly in the spotlight. An expression of downtown New York’s melting pot of music, culture, clothing and nightlife that was the backdrop for its creators, its hype-generating design foreshadowed what was to come in fashion, both literally and figuratively.
In a matter of years, graphic-driven ‘streetwear’ would dominate the industry, with luxury houses running to keep up. Oliver would win acclaim for HBA’s collections, showcased at New York Fashion Week, while Abloh would go on to found Off-White and lead Louis Vuitton’s menswear.
Despite establishment approval – Oliver has taken home the LVMH Special Jury Prize and a CFDA award, and Abloh’s Off-White, bolstered by partnerships with the likes of Nike, has become one of the most coveted brands of the past decade – the two designers, both Black and American, struggled to have their work taken seriously at first, let alone understood. Oliver’s output – a confrontational blend of conceptual high fashion, hip-hop, club world and ballroom culture that resulted in voguers, Pornhub logos and double-footed cowboy boots appearing on his label’s runways – was often categorised simply as disruptive. Comments directed at Abloh, meanwhile, centred on his perceived unoriginality, or snidely accused him of not being a ‘real designer’.
While Abloh has blazed a trail at Louis Vuitton, Oliver has partnered with brands including Helmut Lang and Diesel, and has just relaunched HBA, which he had put on hiatus in spring 2017. He’s also been working on Leech, a shapeshifting concept that simultaneously combines and transcends music, art, fashion and performance, and Anonymous Club, the multidisciplinary creative studio and talent incubator that develops all of HBA’s visuals and content – as well as collaborating with resident artists and other partners. But all Abloh and Oliver’s work is a continuation of the conversations they started years ago, when discussions of race and identity remained conspicuously off the fashion industry’s radar.
Through it all, they have stayed friends. And when AnOther Magazine asked Abloh who he would like to be in conversation with for this issue, he had just one suggestion.
Cheikh is wearing a padded wool vest, striped cotton poplin shirt and tie (throughout), crushed felt fedora and newspaper- print leather document holder by LOUIS VUITTONPhotography by Paolo Roversi, Styling by Ibrahim Kamara
Ottawa is wearing a single-breasted wool suit with jewel buttons and cotton jersey durag by LOUIS VUITTON. Shirt, tie and hat as beforePhotography by Paolo Roversi, Styling by Ibrahim Kamara
Virgil Abloh: Legitimately, when this came through, I was like, there’s only one person I can talk to [Laughs.].
Shayne Oliver: That’s what I was thinking too. Obviously, we’ve known each other for so long.
VA: We’ve been at this exact space – let’s not call it fashion, let’s just call it people producing ideas – for the past ten years. And now there’s been value placed on ‘fashion’, placed on ‘Black’, and there’s been value placed on what we identify ourselves with, and we’ve just been outputting, consistently true to ourselves, when no one was watching, all the way until now. Any questions people would have asked us ten years ago, we would answer the same now – the only thing is now it’s recorded on Zoom.
SO: We met at a time in New York when everyone was crossing paths. Through meeting Matt [Williams], and really just being in the arena where ideas usually flourish, which is downtown. Not because of the cachet of downtown, but because of people just being open to each other’s ideas – everyone was sort of figuring out what they wanted to interact with, and what made sense for their worlds. With fashion, you enter it and it’s like, all for fashion. I think that was what was intriguing about that space – we had ideas to bring to fashion, but not specifically for fashion.
“For 2021 the pressure’s off. There’s nothing more satisfying than instead of looking for acceptance, or looking for a fairy-tale existence, all of a sudden realising there’s no gatekeeper” – Virgil Abloh
VA: When we both started, we were kind of the outsiders making noise. And then the industry started paying close attention to it. We were telling our own stories. And when people find things viable in that, they’ll call it a word, they’ll take control of it, they’ll try to make a trend.
SO: And in the beginning, everyone thought it was gimmicky because no one really understood what the reference points were. Fashion likes to have pop words and things they can grab onto, to feel like they’re building a moment. So people can link adjectives to clothing, you know what I mean?
VA: Right. Obviously, we’re both Black and American, which are characteristics that are important to our story, as that transcends time. It could be trendy in a moment, it could be at the forefront, then there could be an attempt to unravel it by calling it streetwear or whatever, and the cycle keeps on going. In a year like 2020, when the outside world was trying to say, “Hey, we want to be inclusive, we want to be diverse,” you could forget about the existence of the narratives that we were telling. These talents were coming through in the years before 2020, and we’re still here, we’re still creating.
SO: A lot of times, fashion has dealt with Black conversations only through trend conversations. But the conversation that a Black person is having is not a one-time conversation.
Ottawa is wearing a single-breasted wool suit with jewel buttons and cotton jersey durag by LOUIS VUITTON. Shirt, tie and hat as beforePhotography by Paolo Roversi, Styling by Ibrahim Kamara
VA: Right.
SO: It’s like, we’re here, we’re creatives, we’re not going to be here and then go away. There are multitudes of European designers and there are multitudes of Black conversations. These conversations are valid because they’re continuous, actually, and we’ve been here for a while, trying to create that landscape for those kinds of things to be taken seriously.
VA: What you see, between you and me, is two of a multitude of approaches to bearing the weight of, “You’re the trend for the moment,” or, “You’re the outlier,” or, “We’ll let you in to occupy this space.” Or, “We’ll try and trend-ify your movement.” Or, “We won’t really count it next to the European canon, but we’ll let it live just to spice it up.” What people fail to realise is that we’re often not understood. We have a huge weight to bear for our own community and our own sets of minorities that we represent. But also, on the other hand, we are often slighted, or not given the proper space to just have the idea sit.
SO: That’s partially why I took a hiatus, because I want to be able to create a space for myself so that people can have a chance to speak about the world of what I represent in a more serious way than season by season ... I think that, now, I’ll be able to have more of a language and conversation via my work, because people will be educated on it.
VA: We could sit here all day and recap on the nuances of what the media or the critique [of our work] misses, or just its bias. The right mind can see the adjacency between myself, Kanye, Jerry [Lorenzo, of the label Fear of God], or [rising label] Bstroy, these kids in Atlanta. It’s like, we see Air Force 1s as a Tabi boot, do you know what I mean?
SO: [Laughs.] Yes!
VA: We see the barbershop, we see kids get shot, we see police, we were born with a different eye to the world. And then we each individually – Kanye to his, you to yours – packaged up our DNA of design. There’s a lineage between us that maybe a journalist just hasn’t put the categorical term on, but we can’t be preoccupied with that.
From left: Djily is wearing a tailored windowpane wool suit and acetate sunglasses by LOUIS VUITTON. Shirt, tie and hat as before. Rayan is wearing a striped cotton poplin shirt and tie, tailored wool trousers, crushed felt fedorawith mixed-stripe ribbon and cotton jersey durag by LOUIS VUITTON. Kestelmann is wearing a striped cotton poplin shirt and tie, tailored wool trousers and crushed felt fedora with mixed-stripe ribbon by LOUIS VUITTON
SO: What’s so funny is, even when it comes to design, it’s a physical feat, like a struggle, in a sense, where within the production routes you’re working with, no one even understands the things that you’re inspired by. So there’s this uphill battle of, “Why is this important? Why is this being made?”
VA: Arthur Jafa broke it down in a very simplistic way. He was like, Black people are born conceptual artists.
SO: Yeah. Mmm.
VA: He was like, pressure creates diamonds, right? So when you’re born, you just hop on Earth at a young age and don’t understand, you don’t know, the systemic rules of the world. You only feel those when you go to school and some kid says, “You must behave like this, you must talk like this, you’re a different human being.” And then that pressure, as you grow older, it just keeps crushing down and it creates diamonds. So when we output, we conceptually do this calculation that inherently comes through our skin and our perception of our skin. So for me, instead of being hardened or pessimistic, driving myself crazy, as a profession like this can make you, that idea just sort of reorganised my operating system.
“There are multitudes of European designers and there are multitudes of Black conversations. These conversations are valid because they’re continuous, actually, and we’ve been here for a while, trying to create that landscape for those kinds of things to be taken seriously” – Shayne Oliver
VA: Now I always want to centralise this conversation about the missing documentation of a new voice within fashion that predominantly comes from Black culture, from pop culture, that has never been documented in a profound way. I never went to school and found a book that taught me about that in the same way I know about Leonardo da Vinci, or Yves Saint Laurent, or the way I know about Margiela. In January, I started making this sort of oracle book – it’s a figurative book, not a literal one – called Black Canon, a textbook that no one has ever made, or read, to understand why Black culture is fascinating in an artistic-production sense.
SO: It’s also this idea that there is a line of people who are using the same modes of communication, and every time [one] gets broken, that research library gets erased. So we always have to redo that library and, right now, it’s about keeping that library consistent. So when kids are coming up who aren’t surrounded by those same influences, they understand that there’s...
VA: ...A bible that you can’t erase. Not an Instagram video, right? Like, shit happens and then it disappears. And then someone can say it didn’t actually happen, because it’s not there any more. When we were teenagers, we obsessed about shit on the internet, music videos, websites, and you realise if you type in those URLs now, they’re not there.
SO: Totally.
From left: Djily is wearing a padded pinstriped wool vest, tailored wool trousers, crushed felt fedora with mixed-stripe ribbon, plastic corsage and newspaper-print leather document holder by LOUIS VUITTONShirt and tie as before. Ottawa is wearing a padded wool vest, tailored wool trousers (throughout) and plastic corsage by LOUIS VUITTON. Shirt, tie and hat as before
Djily is wearing a double-breasted tailored wool coat, double-breasted pinstriped wool jacket and acetate sunglasses by LOUIS VUITTON. Shirt, tie and hat as beforePhotography by Paolo Roversi, Styling by Ibrahim Kamara
VA: If it’s not frozen on the internet for 30 years, people will just rewrite it. So that’s what really woke me up. It’s not about what’s popping today. It’s that our archives are strong, that they are built, printed, verbalised and contextualised – that they can't be erased. It’s like, shit, I’m at Louis Vuitton. I’m not gonna make it to Louis Vuitton and be like, “I’m not gonna come out at the end of the runway because I just don’t want that pressure.” I’m gonna do that because I want other people to see that we’re active and given the opportunity. There’s a responsibility that I have to my whole community.
SO Where we’re coming from, you produce so young – the diamond pressing. We get so used to that high level of producing. Because anything that we present has to be stellar, you know what I mean? What you’re saying with this book is, whether it’s physical or not, it’s very, very important.
VA: And when you zoom out, you’ll see that I was making this book this whole damn time, right? All of a sudden HBA is linked to Ye, is linked to the countless soldiers from all the parties, you know, from Total Freedom, Arca to Venus X, everything. It’s this web. People think my career might be just me, I’m just scribing in other people’s books, it’s graffiti. It’s like, we have to write graffiti on every wall. That’s the learning of a steep ten years of understanding.
SO: But if it’s not documented well, the next person will have to start over, regardless of where we’re at. Period.
VA: I talked to Dapper Dan and it disheartened me. This man is still alive and there’s a 14-year-old in Chicago who doesn’t know who he is. I go to Instagram, and I say, “How many kids have read this Willi Smith book [Willi Smith: Street Couture]?” They’ll be like, “What are you talking about? Show me the Raf book!”
SO: In this hiatus, I was like, I need to make this moment work for me. What do I need to know about myself? Back in the day, I would be like, “Oh, it would be great if I can work with this artist.” Now, with this new phase I’m moving into, I can’t wait on that person to exist – I have to be that artist, I have to be that musician. Those years [at HBA] were my youth. People didn’t understand that that was actually my twenties. And I didn’t realise that I was the artist at the time. It took me until this year to understand that.
VA: When you don’t have access to production, everything is a ready-made. I know the canon of HBA, so I know that there’s a platform Air Force 1. I’ve said it 30 times but the Air Force 1 is a Duchamp urinal. It’s a loaded object and we know what it means. We know what it means in Harlem, we know what it means downtown, we know what it means all white, we know what it means all black. We know what it means. What we’re saying is that streetwear, as a collective consciousness of production, has already run its course – it’s on its hero’s journey. I said streetwear was dead for a reason. To give me space. But also to give space to those of us who are sitting in our studios, seeing a scene that we partook in ten years ago now evolving into a multibillion-dollar business – seeing fashion houses that were trying to say that we weren’t fashion adopting our DNA. Now we’re slipping into our 2.0 mode of production.
From left: Ismael is wearing an oversized tailored wool coat with jewel buttons and striped cotton poplin shirt and tie by LOUIS VUITTON. Ottawa is wearing a tartan wool kimono padded coat with corsage and cotton poplin shirt by LOUIS VUITTONRayan is wearing an oversized tartan wool coat, padded wool vest, striped cotton poplin shirt and tie by LOUIS VUITTON. Kestelmann is wearing a tailored leather coat, striped cotton poplin shirt and tie by LOUIS VUITTON
SO: Mmm.
VA: Now we realise that we can tap into the furthest extremities of our creative brains. It doesn’t need the wow factor of 2020, which is, “Oh shit, he collaborated with, you know, ‘legend brand’, or something we didn’t think of,” because that shit is tired.
SO: [Laughs.] Yes!
VA: That came from when we had no access and needed those ready-made modes of production. That’s passé now. And what I’m excited for is Leech, seeing what that is, because I have no reference for it. Or Anonymous Club, which is like mutual aid, it’s community service to the highest degree. So that younger kids don’t feel like they have to go through the gauntlet to express themselves.
“I want to see this as a renaissance. I want to see some non-genre-defining amazingness, because I believe that our generation has that. I can’t wait to see what the pressure from 2020 built” – Virgil Abloh
SO: What I’m hoping for with Anonymous – and speaking openly about that process – is that the kids can become more comfortable with making mistakes. I think that, right now, with Instagram, it’s just about perfection. Meanwhile, the people they look up to have flip-flopped all over the place throughout their careers. Me doing fashion concepts and all that stuff in the club world allowed me to learn about myself and learn my practice, so that I could then formalise it and do it in more of a fashion context.
VA And in our ecosystem, there is no sort of discipline, and that’s what makes it unique. As long as there’s space for these ideas to exist – your music project, whatever I do – I’m happy and confident, you know? For 2021 the pressure’s off. There’s nothing more satisfying than instead of looking for acceptance, or looking for a fairy-tale existence, all of a sudden realising there’s no gatekeeper. I know what I need to create with my time.
SO: It sounds so backwards to say, but you have to break a lot of disciplines in order to create a new version of a discipline.
VA: Like if you have a modern car, you don’t put the key in to turn the engine on. You just push a button. Fashion is still trying to start the car with a key.
From left: Ismael is wearing a tailored windowpane wool coat and jacket and striped cotton poplin shirt by LOUIS VUITTON. Kestelmann is wearing a printed leather motorcycle suit by LOUIS VUITTONRayan is wearing a cotton trench coat and cotton poplin shirt and tie by LOUIS VUITTON. Ottawa is wearing a sheer knit jumper with intarsia detail by LOUIS VUITTON. Shirt, tie and trousers as before
SO: To me, that wonky old key is taste, right? And it’s this idea of, “Oh, no, that couldn’t work because it doesn’t look like this key that’s in our hands, so it couldn’t be the way to turn it on!” But fashion needs to make what might be considered ‘distasteful’ moves. When conglomerates first began to invite younger designers in, it was very, “Whoa, what is that decision?”
VA: What fashion before this era had was real renegades, whether that’s Gaultier or Alaïa, Galliano or Marc Jacobs, who is the forefather for me – they’re exuberant, plus, “Hey, I can do the conglomerate thing.” Those young talents are here today. You are one of them.
SO: Take Margiela at Hermès. For me, that’s what started these conversations that are now so mainstay, you know, and no one’s taking those risks.
VA: I think if fashion becomes a hotbed for the conversation, rather than the consumer and the trend centres dictating what’s cool, it can make those risky moves and find avant-garde, true talent that’s in the shadows. You know, there are amazing kids coming out of London, I’m sure – RCA, Central Saint Martins. But there are also kids coming from Atlanta. There are kids coming from New York, Brooklyn, the Bronx, who are Black kids, maybe with no formal training.
SO: When things are running amuck, people tend to go traditional, and it’s weird to see when people take that route. We have to reflect the times. We have to create that renaissance.
VA: What I’m excited about is the non-judgmental space. I don’t believe in genres, or disciplines of creativity, I like when they blur. I want to see this as a renaissance. I want to see some non-genre-defining amazingness, because I believe that our generation has that. I can’t wait to see what the pressure from 2020 built.
From left: Cheikh is wearing a ribbed shearling cardigan, sheer knit roll-neck jumper, striped cotton poplin shirt and tie, tailored wool trousers, crushed felt fedora with mixed-stripe ribbon and cotton jersey durag by LOUIS VUITTONOttawa is wearing a cable-effect fur jumper and cotton jersey durag by LOUIS VUITTON. Shirt, trousers and hat as before
Hair: Odile Gilbert at Atelier68. Make-up: Hiromi Ueda at Art and Commerce. Models: Cheikh Dia at Models 1, Djily Kamara at Bananas Models, Ottawa Kwami at Premium Models, Rayan Lazac and Ismael Savane at 16Men, and Kestelmann Toussaint at Success. Casting: Mischa Notcutt at 11c Casting. Set design: Jean-Hugues de Chatillon. Manicure: Alexandra Janowski at Artlist. Digital tech: Matteo Miani at Dtouch. Photographic assistants: Clara Belleville, Chiara Vittorini and Carolina Beccari. Styling assistants: Felix Paradza and Mark Mutyambizi. Hair assistants: Taan Pham and Hugo Raiah. Make-up assistants: Miki Mastunaga and Camille Basson. Production: Studio Demi. Post-production: Dtouch
This article originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale from 8 April, 2021. Pre-order a copy hereand sign up for free access to the issue here.
Cover Story: Rei Kawakubo on Anger, Passion and Dissonance
The Comme des Garçons designer and mother of all fashion disruptors discusses working throughout lockdown, digital media and her new collection
This article is taken from the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are making the issue free and available digitally for a limited time only to all our readers wherever you are in the world. Sign up here.
In September last year, a new prime minister was elected in Japan for the first time in almost eight years. The Tokyo Olympics, planned for summer 2020, were postponed: while they are scheduled to take place in July, even now no one is quite sure whether that will happen and, at time of writing, no singing or cheering will be allowed. Japan was among the first countries struck by the global pandemic – a state of emergency was declared there in April 2020. At a profoundly unstable moment in the history of that country – and the world at large – it feels important to listen to the voice of one of its great creators, a woman who has followed her own, highly unconventional path, without compromise. And if Japan is compelled to listen to Rei Kawakubo, so too is fashion. Her business, founded in 1969, is 52 years old, and there are few, if any, names that are as universally respected – even revered. In 2017, she became only the second living designer to be honoured with a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute in New York, following Yves Saint Laurent in 1983. Both names have fundamentally altered the way we look at fashion: Saint Laurent revolutionising women’s wardrobes, Kawakubo reconfiguring our perceptions of our own bodies in clothing, notions of status and, again, the way we choose to dress. So much do we take that for granted that we may no longer even be aware that our boiled-wool sweaters, our oversized dresses, our unlined, deconstructed jackets and even our wearing of head-to-toe black, other than for periods of mourning, started life here. The collective fashion memory is a short-term one but it is testimony to Kawakubo’s courage as a designer that, for many years, while she preached to a small audience (the converted), she ruffled the feathers of the establishment to the point where people left her shows confused and even disturbed. Other commentators simply ignored them: the shock of the new indeed.
The first time I met Kawakubo was at the Comme des Garçons showroom in Paris’s Place Vendôme in October 1996, a few days after she had shown one of her most famous – and controversial – collections. Featuring padded lozenges of fabric placed everywhere from the shoulder blades to the buttocks and hips, it was explained, in a statement from the label at the time, as Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body and has been ever since. For years the collection was described in more mainstream circles, and none too poetically, as ‘lumps and bumps’. And – inevitably – more than a few wondered: did their bums look big in this? Here is Amy Spindler, then fashion critic of the New York Times reviewing the show in that paper: “At one point, as a model emerged, her shoulders stuffed, a photographer yelled out ‘Quasimodo’ into the deathly silent presentation, with no music and certainly no chatting.” While there is often still no music or chatting at Comme des Garçons, no one would be as gratuitously ill-mannered today. It is all too easy to forget, though, how hard Kawakubo has fought to express her point of view. When I, meanwhile, asked the designer in person what the thinking behind this collection might be – and I have since repeated the anecdote many times – she picked up a pencil, drew a circle on a scrap of white paper and walked away. Perfect. I have been lucky enough to communicate with Kawakubo on several occasions over the two decades since then. While she is not shy – or certainly reclusive – she does insist that the clothes she designs speak for themselves. Or as she herself once said: “In normal everyday circumstances, of course I’m not reclusive, but this fascination with every nosy detail is so astonishing. It would be much better to know someone through that person’s work. With a singer, the best way is to listen to his song. For me, the best way to know me is to look at my clothing.”
In the autumn of last year, however, so affected was Kawakubo by the global crisis, she felt driven to vocalise her thoughts maybe more than ever before. In October, immediately following the showing of her Comme des Garçons collection in Tokyo at the company’s headquarters – it is the first time she has staged the show for her main line in her native country since the early eighties – she agreed to be filmed for the Japanese television programme News23. This, as far as we know, while clearly not intended as Kawakubo’s answer to Keeping Up with the Kardashians, is unprecedented. Previously, her voice has been recorded in interview – notably in a little-known and remarkable four-part documentary from 1998 called Un-Dressed: Fashion in the Twentieth Century, written and conceived by Sally Brampton, in which she talks over images of clouds moving across a blue sky – but she rarely agrees to appear in person. The conversation for the monograph that accompanied the aforementioned Costume Institute show begins: “I hate interviews.” (If Kawakubo is a woman of few words, no one would ever accuse her of mincing them.) Now though, speaking through a mask, her delicate features belying her resolve: “I wanted people to see how important the power of creation is at such a difficult time like this.” The term she used to describe the collection in question, meanwhile, was fukyo-waon. It translates as dissonance. Kawakubo continues to keep any discussion of inspiration to a minimum, preferring people to make up their minds for themselves. But, from her hands, and out of dissonance, for more than half a century, unparalleled creativity has come.
If the prevailing mood in fashion decrees that eased collections (lovely, maybe, but aimed squarely at the endlessly expanding market described as athleisurewear) are the order of the day – for the most obvious reasons – Kawakubo was never likely to follow that route. Instead, hers was a courageously iconoclastic collection and one that, despite any apparent discord, resulted in something extraordinary, as the designer herself says. Kawakubo was also intent on “disrupting the spirit of couture” – given that this is the mother of all fashion disruptors, that was something of an understatement. In fact, she turned that spirit on its head. Kawakubo speaks of anger, of difficulty, of fear, but her clothes are transportive, enchanting. Hugely generous in their depth of content, craft, ideas and often extreme beauty, they are a sight for Zoomed-out eyes.
Top and skirt with tied bow by COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Oversized textured dress, cotton and nylon logo socks and transparent sandals by COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
In a small space flooded with crimson light (a bordello? Hell?) and to an audience smaller even than that in Paris – Kawakubo famously shows to no more than a few hundred guests – out came the voluminous, abstracted silhouettes that Comme des Garçons is known for. A whisper of an 18th-century pannier or a bustle, a fairy-tale cloak, over-blown dresses and skirts decorated with lace, knots and bows: festooned. But where, in the haute couture atelier, these would be cut in silks and satins, in Kawakubo’s hands they are padded, unapologetically acrylic and in places more rope than ribbon-like. At least some of these designs were wrapped in plastic. Imagine a vacuum-packed, punked- and popped-up Madame de Pompadour for this messed-up modern age.
Mickey Mouse was among the stars of the show this time, perhaps significant because Kawakubo went to school while the American army still occupied Japan. In his 1990 monograph on Comme des Garçons, the first extensive English-language text on the label, the writer and curator Deyan Sudjic observes: “By the time [Kawakubo] graduated, the country had decisively emerged from the ranks of the developing world. The ferment of those years provided unique opportunities for the members of a generation that was ready to make the most of them. They enjoyed the fruits of an economic success story which enabled Japan to look at the outside world in objective terms, to make its own creative contribution and, in the process, to assert its own identity as a mature, modern state.” Among the names that went on to do just that are the architects Tadao Ando and Arata Isozaki and Tokyo-based fashion designers Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo.
Top and skirt with tied bow by COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Top and skirt with tied bow by COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
Like Coca-Cola, Disney’s Mickey Mouse is among the most instantly recognisable symbols of American culture. In the Spring/Summer 2021 collection, the clothes were teamed with snub-toed platform-soled shoes, not dissimilar to those he wears, and he appears as prints, repeated and overlapping to the point of abstraction, scribbled across surfaces like graffiti. Kawakubo has used this reference – and the childlike innocence it expresses – before. For her Autumn/Winter 2007 women’s collection, models wore candyfloss pink and parma violet dresses and Mickey Mouse ears, their bodies hugged by padded gloves reminiscent of Mickey’s embedded in the clothes. When asked about that particular collection, which appeared to concern itself with a young woman’s rites of passage, Kawakubo said simply that it was about “curiosity”. Kawakubo’s own curiosity is inspiring. She continues to ask questions – endlessly interrogating herself, questioning the world. Such restlessness drives her. Alongside the Disney character in last October’s show was Bearbrick, a collectible toy designed and produced by the Japanese company MediCom Toy Incorporated and ubiquitous in Japan, the Mickey of Tokyo. For Spring/Summer 2018, Kawakubo juxtaposed that other great Japanese toy – Hello Kitty – and blonde, blue-eyed manga princesses with digital prints of works by the 16th-century Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, painter of unsettling portraits made out of vegetables and fruit. Dissonance there too, then, not to mention a deep-rooted irreverence that decrees high culture and low culture are equally important and that Kawakubo takes such apparently separate worlds and makes the most beautiful sense of them.
Of course, fashion has changed immeasurably since Kawakubo started out, for better and for worse, but this great designer remains unswervingly committed to her craft. From small beginnings, she today heads up a fashion empire that includes not only many Comme des Garçons lines but the labels of Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya. In recent years she has been more willing to speak to a broader audience, not least with that 2017 retrospective. If, as she continues to argue, anger motivates her, so too does passion. And that passion to create and to communicate via creation has rarely felt as meaningful as it does now.
Oversized textured dress by COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
AnOther Magazine: I understand you worked non-stop throughout lockdown. Is that right?
Rei Kawakubo: I am afraid I won’t be able to create any more unless I keep going. Once I stop, that would be it. It is that fear that keeps me moving forward.
AM: While many people are showing collections digitally, you are filming live presentations, if necessarily shown to a small audience. What is the thinking behind that?
RK: I always want people to look at the clothes themselves and for the audience to see clothes on real people. Clothes deliver our messages better when they are worn. It is difficult to explain in words, but once the clothes are put on people, all their elements come into harmony and start showing their strength. That is because people and clothes step closer to each other, I think.
AM: So there are things digital media just can’t convey?
RK: Digital media would not be able to convey half the things I want to express. At a live show, you are able to feel things – the power of the clothes and the effort that has gone into making them, the atmosphere and the presence of people wearing them in front of you. Some people may believe otherwise, but for me to express something digitally would be a different thing – a deviation.
AM: This is the first time you have shown the Comme des Garçons main line in Tokyo for decades. How did you find that? How was it different and did you feel there was anything positive about it?
RK: To travel to Paris is physically very difficult right now. For business, however, we must do a show one way or another, and I feel strongly that I must constantly keep putting out new things too. So we must cope with this situation somehow. In Paris, people come from all over the world to see our show and they do not always say good things. They make negative comments sometimes. Also, in Paris, there is invisible competition with other designers. Tokyo certainly isn’t that kind of place, but all our staff work hard and the clothes we make and the process of making them are exactly the same as when we show in Paris. The only difference is that while, for Paris, you put the clothes on the aeroplane, in Tokyo you carry them up to the seventh floor.
AM: You have a big company. How does that responsibility affect you?
RK: Closing the stores for about a month last year caused a lot of damage to our business. It was not something I could solve no matter how much I struggled thinking about it. There were no customers from overseas either. There were things I could do during the 2008 financial crisis but this time everything was closed, including the factories. The question is how we recover from the loss now.
Twisted top with string netting details and long fringe dress with underskirt by COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
“The human brain always looks for harmony and logic. When harmony is denied, where there is no logic, when there is dissonance ... a powerful moment is created which leads you to feel an inner turmoil and a tension ... that can lead to finding positive change and progress” – Rei Kawakubo, October 2020
Twisted top with string netting details and long fringe dress with underskirt by COMME DES GARÇONSPhotography Willy Vanderperre, Styling by Olivier Rizzo
AM: What are the particular difficulties that the pandemic has caused you personally and how would you say that has affected you creatively?
RK: Like I said, what made this crisis different is that there was nothing I could do about it. Before, there were a few things I could do to hold out. Today, there are many agendas to tackle in order to solve the problem. Our work is to make clothes, we have the next collections, exhibitions coming up, and we cannot stop that. Telecommunications are suggested as an alternative way forward but there are things that cannot be done that way. Manufacturing in particular. Not everything can be done with computers. There are things it is only possible to make by touching and feeling and using all the five senses. Human beings are creatures with sensibilities. I value the things people make with their hearts more than digitally fabricated things. There are obstacles and uncertainties under these circumstances, but as long as we can make things, there will always be a future.
AM: Your new collection features plastic wrap, Mickey Mouse and Bearbrick, as well as perhaps more familiar oversized and sculptural black designs. Can we talk about that a little?
RK: It is about dissonance, things that don’t match very well, but that feel good. I’m interested in dissonance because I believe good things come out of it, something curious, unexpected, something that feels new and that could lead us to the next step. In classical music, too, early works composed with dissonance were often heavily criticised but that invention is still valid today. Some people may find it repulsive when things of a contrasting nature crash into each other, but there is a chance we may find something different there. If things are neatly put together and positioned in a regular way all the time, there won’t be progress.
AM: And why did that interest you now?
RK: As the pandemic is interfering with our lives, the spirit of moving forward is also fading. And that very thing, I am afraid, may become an excuse for not challenging ourselves, reaching higher goals and making new creations – taking risks to move forward. The economy is down and life is hard but we must bear the hardship and look forward. There is no easy solution. I believe we should never stop.
AM: Do you feel that people are maybe less passionate now than they once were? And how has that affected fashion?
RK: Maybe not to feel and think is easier. People maybe don’t understand what there is to gain by struggling hard. They have less and less desire to be themselves and would rather be comfortable and blend in, wear safe clothes.
AM You neither wear nor design safe clothes. Is your drive to design intended to make the world a better place – or a more interesting place, certainly?
RK: I feel anxious I may lose that power any time soon. But for me, to live is to work, to create. Nothing else. I can only do what I can. I direct my anger to creation. I am happy if I can make something that inspires some people. If you want to make something you must make an effort and never stop. I believe that is true for other kinds of work too. Comme des Garçons owes what it is now to those who have dedicated their lives to manufacturing, at times at a cost to their personal lives. It is their work and efforts that form the foundation upon which we have built what we have today. We must carry on to advance further. What I am afraid of is that if this situation continues, people might start to feel like giving up, they may stop expressing themselves and vocalising their presence. In that case, a mood for being the same as everybody else would prevail and then the world becomes infertile.
Hair: Anthony Turner at Streeters. Make-up: Kathinka Gernant at Unspoken. Model: Rianne Van Rompaey at Viva London. Casting: DM Casting. Manicure: Lynn Meyer. Lighting technician: Romain Dubus. Digital operator: Henri Coutant. Photographic assistant: Samir Dari. Styling assistants: Louise Pollet, Jasmien Van Loo and Niccolo Torelli. Hair assistant: Claire Grech. Producer to Willy Vanderperre: Lieze Rubbrecht. Production: Mindbox. Producer: Isabelle Verreyke. Project manager: Lise Luyckx. Post-production: Triplelutz Paris
This article originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale from 8 April, 2021. Pre-order a copy here and sign up for free access to the issue here..
Cover Story: The Modern Beauty of Malick Bodian
The Senegalese-Italian model stars in a story by Casper Sejersen and Ellie Grace Cumming, wearing Dunhill’s Spring/Summer 2021 collection
This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are making the issue free and available digitally for a limited time only to all our readers wherever you are in the world. Sign up here.
Linen and wool kimono jacket, panelled sleeveless wool sweater vest, linen and wool trousers with canvas strap (throughout) and leather Link loafers (throughout) by DUNHILL. Cotton ribbed dress socks (throughout) by PANTHERELLAPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Malick is wearing a linen and wool kimono jacket and short-sleeved striped wrap shirt by DUNHILLPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Wool-silk ottoman half-wrap evening jacket, short-sleeved duchesse silk wrap shirt and Lock bag by DUNHILL. Trousers, socks and shoes as beforePhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Wool jacket with contrast stitching, short- sleeved duchesse silk wrap shirt and leather trousers with zips by DUNHILL. Shoes as beforePhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Leather trench coat with reverse detail, V-neck jumper, polished leather trousers and Lock bag by DUNHILL. Socks and shoes as beforePhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Wool-silk ottoman half-wrap evening jacket and pinstripe duchesse silk wrap shirt by DUNHILLPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Panelled wool jumper by DUNHILL. Trousers, socks and shoes as beforePhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Panelled sleeveless wool sweater vest and leather trousers with zips by DUNHILL. Socks and shoes as beforePhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Wool-silk ottoman half-wrap evening jacket by DUNHILLPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Short-sleeved duchesse silk wrap shirt and leather trousers with zips by DUNHILL. Socks and shoes as beforePhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Silk half-wrap evening jacket with contrast lapels and short-sleeved duchesse silk wrap shirt by DUNHILL. Trousers, socks and shoes as beforePhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Linen and wool kimono jacket and panelled sleeveless wool sweater vest by DUNHILLPhotography by Casper Sejersen, Styling by Ellie Grace Cumming
Hair: Yuji Okuda at Artlist. Make-up: Mathias van Hooff at Management Artists using BYREDO. Model: Malick Bodian at Success Models. Casting: Jess Hallett at Streeters. Set design: Jabez Bartlett at Streeters. Digital tech: Niklas Bergstrand. Lighting assistants: Dani Bastidas, Etienne Oliveau and Iris Guillaume della Roca. Styling assistants: Jordan Duddy, Isabella Kavanagh and Christelle Owona Nisin. Set-design assistants: Camila Perna and Sati Faulks. Production: Western Promises for Artistry Paris. Post-production: Freddie Heide at She Pos
This story originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale from 8 April, 2021. Pre-order a copy hereand sign up for free access to the issue here.
Cover Story: Kim Jones’s Debut at Fendi Couture
Alasdair McLellan and Alister Mackie join forces once more to capture the British designer’s first collection as artistic director of women’s collections at Fendi
This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we are making the issue free and available digitally for a limited time only to all our readers wherever you are in the world. Sign up here.
Eliot is wearing a woven cashmere jacket, cotton shirt with macramé lace cuffs, à jour embroidered scarf and cameo brooch by FENDI COUTUREPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Aged palladium book clutch with embossed cameo and pearls by FENDI COUTURE. Painted dining chair from 1929 by ROGER FRY for OMEGA WORKSHOPS, portrait of Angelica Garnett c 1939 by VANESSA BELL and The Waves by VIRGINIA WOOLF, all from KIM JONESPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Ivan is wearing a lace mesh cape and gown embroidered with pearls by FENDI COUTUREPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Eliot is wearing a marble design hand-beaded suit and pleated silk tulle shirt with pearl embroidery by FENDI COUTURE. Vintage leather boots by DR MARTENS from THE CONTEMPORARY WARDROBEPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Ivan is wearing a Persian lamb floral intarsia coat and silk satin beaded gown with à jour embroidery by FENDI COUTUREPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Ivan is wearing a silk cady and satin tunic embroidered with Murano glass beads, organza flowers and pearls and fur and satin slippers embroidered with beads and glass pearls by FENDI COUTUREPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Ivan is wearing a mohair half jacket and panelled pleated georgette and silk dress embroidered with organza flowers and Murano glass beads and fur and satin slippers embroidered with beads and glass pearls by FENDI COUTUREPhotography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Photography by Alasdair McLellan, Styling by Alister Mackie
Hair: Anthony Turner at Streeters. Make-up: Anne Sophie Costa at Streeters using Forever Foundation and Capture Totale Super Potent Serum by DIOR. Models: Ivan Ogilvie-Grant at Supa Model Management and Eliot Sumner. Casting: Piotr Chamier at Streeters. Manicure: Lorraine Griffin. Photographic assistants: Simon Mackinlay and Matt Healy. Styling assistants: Vincent Pons and Edward Frith. Hair assistant: Claire Grech. Make-up assistant: Chiharu Wakabayashi. Casting assistants: Benedikt Hetz and Nico Cormandaye. Production: Ragi Dholakia. Production manager: Claire Huish. Production assistant: May Powell
This story originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of AnOther Magazine which will be on sale from 8 April, 2021. Pre-order a copy hereand sign up for free access to the issue here.
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