I'm most interested in that moment when my entire perspective changes, and I have to reconsider everything.
Since I was a child, my whole life has revolved around music. It's often while listening to a song that ideas for my fashion collections formed.
In the future, fast-fashion retailers might change their philosophy toward real efforts to create a world of their own. One can only hope.
Fashion somehow, for me, is purely and happily irrational.
I only like luxury fashion. You have to decide where you stand. I like well-made, authentic clothes, well-crafted tailoring. I also like the dream and fantasy of luxury, the exception and rarity of it. I have no interest at all in fast retail. It is ambiguous.
Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.
My parents offered me my first camera for my birthday and I developed an exclusive passion for it over the years. Since I was not the most social kid on the block, the camera helped me to express myself, invent my own language - something like a secret garden. I decided early on I would not write in a diary but take silent photographs instead.
An athletic man, or whatever you want to call him, will only look good in a very classic suit, a pair of classic jeans, athletic clothes or simply naked. Forget fashion. This is not going to happen, unless you want to look like a Chippendales dancer in designer clothes.
I'd like men to think about evolving into something more sophisticated, more seductive. To explore the possibility of an entirely new masculinity.
When I was designing, I had in mind Jimi Hendrix, and I could hardly find skinny indie black kids to wear my clothes. I remember one telling me he had to swap his skinny jeans for baggy ones in the subway before going home, so he wouldn't get in trouble in his neighborhood.
I don’t like the collusion between high fashion design and high street. You have to know where you stand. I belong to luxury fashion. That’s what I’ve always felt and embraced. I like the best quality, the best fabrics and the most creative field in fashion. I will stay consistent. I belong to this world.
Music has shaped men’s fashion and transposed in a playful and witty manner its riding or military heritage. It is difficult to figure out who leads but music and fashion are connected genetically.
Men's fashion has a certain heaviness in the fabrics and construction. But also there is a heaviness in the mentality.
I love California. It has such a strong contribution to the history of culture, and popular culture. For better and worse, of course. Even the worst can be interesting to some degree sometimes for somebody creative.
Men are not supposed to be mysterious. That's what you say about women. But I think men can have a little of it, too.
People always want an explanation about everything and I cannot give it to them. Because I don't know myself. 'Why did you do a pair of pants like that?' I have no idea. I'm not going to have a 20-minute political discussion about the necessity for slashed, painted leather jeans. Basically, I don't know more than you.
I shared this idea that fashion starts with a movement, an allure: elusive, defined through perfect proportions.
I'm going to design again, but I come back when it's the right project, so I keep my passion for it intact.
I thought I should work more on the idea that you wear a suit or a jacket because of the fun it can provide, because it's a game, because it might even have a sexual quality.
David Bowie, for me, was the butchest guy in town. Jagger was like a truck driver.
The iPad needs to catch up with Flash before I put a hand on it.
Music defines decades, and quite clearly shapes the rhythm, vitality of fashion, attitude and social behaviors. The anthology, just like most of my work, from photography to fashion design, is about and around music.
I like it to stay very organic, and to remember a personal story behind all my subjects.
I'm so personally attached to all the characters I met and photographed over the years ... the anthology is like a photographic reliquary that could potentially preserve their grace, fierce joy, and restlessness.
Vulnerability is beautiful to me. There might be a need to fabricate your own beauty paradigms. I guess I never quite bought into any kind of 'standard'.
