"I’m interested in fashion because it has such influence on popular culture. Fashion is up there with pop music, it’s the everyday. These are things that affect all of us, regardless of whether you like it or not."
Music has always had an influence on fashion, just through performers adopting a certain look and attitude. Punk rock, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX – these are still influencing today’s fashion. For me, music and, more generally, sound are at the centre of a lot of the things I do."
“For a long time I have been working on different projects using onomatopoeias – mostly two-dimensional works, prints, collages, etchings, but also videos. They come from comic books, colourful, very expressive. What I love about onomatopoeias is that they’re not really words, they’re images. They’re more image than word. We don’t read them, we look at them and they express a sound. They’re graphically blending with the action and underlining it. Then, the idea of having these sounds on people’s bodies is also a beautiful image. They come to life, they’re like sound effects for everyday movements. There is a displacement, and the body becomes like a page to be read. Or a living sculpture. It was really a process of translation. I turn a collage into an etching or a video, then Hedi transforms these patterns into fabrics – printed, sequined or embroidered. It’s beautiful how, through the translation, the graphics get altered, become something different.
“When art directing these pages, I decided to crop the images, to show the texture, the richness and diversity of the material. Hedi can photograph a model wearing his clothes beautifully, I wanted to zoom into the fabric, show what it’s made of, rather than the silhouette. I have been zooming into things a lot lately – removing information, to allow the viewer to focus on a detail that might reveal something different. Collaging is often a process of isolating details. I want to show something we don’t normally look at. The viewer won’t know what the clothes look like, but hopefully these images will be intriguing. Cropping can make something more abstract and mysterious, and opens up the imagination. It engages the viewer more. We forget about the power of abstraction. When you listen to music it’s also completely abstract, yet it has the power to move you. And you can’t explain it.”
From a conversation between Christian Marclay and Alexander Fury.
This story originally featured in the Spring/Summer 2019 issue of AnOther Magazine, available here.
Celine’s new flagship on Madison Avenue, New York, and temporary space on Mount Street, London, are now open.
