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Bouchra Jarrar haute couture fall winter 2015/2016

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Comme des Garçons men spring 2016

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Jil Sander men spring 2016

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Calvin Klein men spring 2016

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Giambattista Valli haute couture fall winter 2015/2016

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Miu Miu croisière 2015

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Self Portrait women spring 2016

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Victoria Beckham women spring 2016

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Narciso Rodriguez women spring 2016

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Derek Lam women spring 2016

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Anna Sui women spring 2016

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Mary Katrantzou women spring 2016

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Thomas Tait women spring 2016

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Prada women spring 2016

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Tod’s women spring 2016

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Jil Sander women spring 2016

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Colangelo women spring 2016

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Marni women spring 2016

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Krizia women spring 2016

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Missoni women spring 2016

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Courrèges women spring 2016

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Balmain women spring 2016

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Ann Demeulemeester women spring 2016

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Comme des Garçons women spring 2016

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Nina Ricci women spring 2016

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Giambattista Valli women spring 2016

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Moncler women spring 2016

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Miu Miu women spring 2016

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déc. 022015

Palace Costes – Décembre 2015
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Palace

Margiela

NOVEMBER 10, 2015 2:40 PM
by STEFF YOTKA

Today, Frédéric Sanchez is among the most respected sound designers in the world, but in 1988, he was a 22-year-old creative living in Paris who found himself at dinner with Martin Margiela on the eve of the Belgian designer’s debut collection. “It was really the beginning of the house. There was not an office; he was working with his partner, Jenny Meirens, in a little apartment in Paris; and he had just left [Jean Paul] Gaultier, where he was an assistant,” Sanchez recalls over the phone from his studio in Paris.

“We met through a friend. This friend said to Martin that he should talk to me because he was looking for someone to make his soundtrack for the show, so he invited me for dinner in his house. It was very interesting because he was living in a very bourgeois area in Paris, but in a courtyard, like in a very small place, where there were so many magazines and images and things like that. I remember that he had a table set with very, very beautiful white napkins and with chandeliers in silver. I thought to ask him what was the concept of what he was doing. The environment that he was putting together—like the table, which was very beautiful with the napkins and the silver chandeliers but with wax on the chandeliers—the idea of something that has lived, not something too polished, was, he explained to me, the idea behind what he was doing . . . and when I heard all this, it made me think about how I had this idea to do something with music and I was living with music. For me, music was almost like fragments of life, and there was something matching in his idea of the image and my idea of the sound.”

From there the pair began to collaborate on the soundtracks for Margiela’s early shows, really more like gatherings than traditional runways. “For the first show [in 1988], which was in a very old theater, we put some microphones backstage, so when people entered the venue, they were listening to what was going on backstage. It was a sort of introduction of what was going to come next. A sort of what is behind all this?” Sanchez explains. “We spent maybe two months working on this soundtrack and thinking of it. It was my first soundtrack and it was his first show, so it was important how we started. There was a lot of talking and we were spending a lot of time together. The process was quite long, and Martin was very involved in the process, but it was the beginning of my way of doing this and of his way of doing this.”

Remembering their early conversations, Sanchez recalls, “[Martin] also told me a lot about Warhol movies, of the way that Warhol treated the image, where he was scratching the image, almost like the cut of the editing was not very well done. Something that had lived. It reminded me of the way I was playing with records, where I liked very much 10 seconds of the song, and so I was repeating those 10 seconds with the needle. That was really how we started making the concept of what we were going to do for the soundtrack for this first show.”

The collaboration went beyond just the musical aspects of the presentations. “I have to say that not so many people know, but when I started working with him, I was doing the soundtrack, but I was also doing the casting, I was working on different things with him. It was only three or four people then, working on the preparation of the show.” Even in the beginning, all the staff would wear white lab coats, and even once, take a bow all together. “Actually, for the first show, at the end of the show, we all came out on the stage—the models, the people that were working in the house, Martin came on the stage. It was the first time that people saw him—and the only [time]—and I think there was a moment, I remember everybody was very moved, because there was so much energy in these things.”

Sanchez continued to collaborate with Margiela into the ’90s and again when the designer took the reins at Hermès in 1997. His personal highlight, he says, was Margiela’s Spring 1992 show staged in an abandoned metro station in Paris, where models sauntered down staircases lined with melting candles. For the soundtrack, Sanchez cut together snippets of people cheering and screaming from some 40-odd live recordings, creating a 12-minute collage of aahs! and woos! The clothes that season included midi-length skirts in plaids and florals whose prints were painted onto the forearms of models, the effect like that of a garment bleeding over onto flesh, blurring the line between the real and the surreal. “I like this soundtrack very much because it’s a composition with things that really exist,” Sanchez says.

Business of Fashion – 5 Novembre 2015

Frédéric Sanchez

PARIS, France — It was October 1988. In an old Parisian theatre playing host to a runway show, 22-year-old music producer Frédéric Sanchez was on the cusp of his fashion debut. He’d been invited to collaborate with a new acquaintance and a former Jean Paul Gaultier assistant named Martin Margiela. It was a seminal moment for both men — Margiela was also making his own debut. As the now-iconic Tabi boot made its first appearance, leaving its cloven footprint in red paint as the models walked along the runway, Sanchez provided the soundtrack.

“We had the same ideas about fashion, music, sound, how to create,” Sanchez recalls. To compliment Margiela’s unconventional design approach, instead of mixing, he made a sound collage using reel-to-reel tape. “I was editing music, like, in cinema,” he says. He also placed microphones in the backstage area, “so when people were entering the show, they could hear what was behind, what had been in the head of the designer.” It provided an unfettered peek into the mind of the elusive Margiela, who would come to be known as fashion’s “invisible man,” categorically turning down interview and photo requests.

Sanchez has since made a career out of collaborating with designers on a conceptual level, his carefully-curated, cerebral soundtracks cementing his place as one of fashion’s most respected show music producers. He’s matched Miu Miu with movie dialogues pulled from the films of Visconti and Fassbinder; he’s mixed Metallica and Beyoncé together for pop culture aficionado Marc Jacobs; played Britney Spears’ “Work Bitch” for an empowerment-themed Prada runway; and staged a Margiela promenade in half sound, half silence.

Sanchez is the master of a minimal soundtrack. He loves the idea of a “soundscape, layers that you don’t really notice at the moment of the show, but maybe a few hours later, you’re going to think about. Almost like a perfume that stays on your clothes. Sound is not like an image,” he continues. “It’s much more. If you have five people who listen to a sound, they might come away with five different impressions. That’s something I really like. There’s something quite magical about it.” The idea of audio-storytelling reverberates through Sanchez’s work. “Someone like Orson Welles when he was doing radio, sound illustrators in the ’50s and ’60s, they were almost doing films with sounds. This was very inspirational for me about how sound can be.”

Even at a young age, Paris-raised Sanchez intuitively connected with sound. His earliest childhood memory is his grandfather listening to Spanish radio. Abbey Road, the Beatles album his sister brought home from London when he was six or seven, acquainted him with the idea of music as a vehicle for storytelling. “I really fell in love with that record,” he says. “The second side, there’s no gap in between songs — it’s almost like you have one track.”

Music was also Sanchez’s gateway to fashion. As a teenager he “was really into” Joy Division and New Order, who had album covers by Peter Saville, the same graphic designer who worked on Yohji Yamamoto’s iconic lookbook-style catalogues in the ’80s. After dropping out of college, Sanchez dabbled in public relations work, first at a theatre and opera house, then as the assistant to fashion publicist Michèle Montagne. There, Sanchez recalls, “It was this environment of all these very creative people. She was working with Martine Sitbon,” who would soon be named creative director of Chloé, and “whose husband Marc Ascoli was the art director for Yohji [Yamomoto] at the time.” It was just before Sitbon started working with Helmut Lang.

“After three months,” he says, “I realised that public relations was really not my thing.” But a seed had been planted. “I was always playing music in the office. Once, Martine had a problem with her soundtrack, and Michèle told her, ‘Ask Frédéric — he knows music really well.’ She explained her collection to me, I pulled together a lot of records and ideas, and I started to think: maybe there is something to do with this.”

At the end of the ’80s, when Sanchez first delved into show soundtracks, “most of the shows were still in the format of the ’70s, which means a very, very long show,” he says. “There were 150 outfits, all with different themes. Usually there was one [type of] music by theme, so it was not continuous.” His first show with Margiela in 1988 was “25 or 30 minutes” long, he estimates. “Now, a show is eight or 10 minutes.”

The process of creating a show soundtrack depends on the client, Sanchez says. “With Miuccia Prada, it starts with incredible conversation about the clothes, the fashion, but also politics, what’s happening in the world. With someone like Rei [Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons], she’s not going to talk, but it’s very important for her to show me the clothes.” For her Spring/Summer 2015 show, Kawakubo simply gave him the word “red” as a starting point.

Sanchez characterises the process as a duet between the designer and himself, a creative back-and-forth that takes about 40 hours of work from start to finish. The working period can span months, a few days or, in an extreme case, overnight. “With Guillaume Henry from Nina Ricci, I’d only worked with him once before, so for the [recent] October show, we started working in July,” Sanchez says. “With [Miuccia Prada], we start maybe a week before the show. But it’s different. Because I’ve worked with her for 20 years, I’m looking for sound for her all the time. It’s not like I arrive a week before and say, ‘So, what are we gonna do?’ I already have all these things in mind.”

Sanchez is constantly researching. “We have over 100 hard drives [in my studio] covering every kind of music: classical, opera, experimental jazz, music scores,” he says. “Plus, I’m buying records, films, books almost every day. In the beginning [of my career], I was always going to record stores, but now with Amazon and eBay, it’s nonstop. I’m always reading about experimental music from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s; when I read something I don’t know, I go on the Internet and then, maybe this artist is related to this artist… suddenly you have a huge vast world [to research and discover].”

With Kawakubo, a sort of kismet happened this past season. Sanchez had been watching David Lynch’s Blue Velvet when he saw “this band I really like, Tuxedomoon, was going to release a record about Blue Velvet. I got a copy from the record label, listened to it and thought, ‘Maybe I should keep that for Rei.’ When I arrived at her studio a month later, I showed her the record, and she said, ‘You’re kidding. That’s something I’ve been thinking about also.’”

Often, Sanchez and the designer will decide on the base of the soundtrack — a general direction — and make tweaks as the show nears. “We build up the soundtrack as the collection and the styling [are decided],” he says. “The hair, the makeup, the attitude you want to give to the models, the venue — all these things are important to creating the soundtrack.”

“You have to be flexible,” he maintains. “It’s something you learn with fashion — it’s better to be quick and flexible. With theatre or film, you have something like eight months [to work through the creative process]. Two years. [With fashion,] it’s really quick and there’s no rehearsal. Often it’s a little bit like by magic that things happen.”

Indeed, sometimes shows don’t happen as planned. A few seasons ago at Marni, there was an unexpected power failure. “We had to do the show with no lights and no sound,” Sanchez says. A similar situation happened at a Givenchy men’s show in 2011. “I pushed the button, and everything stopped,” he recalls. “That’s the interesting thing about fashion — everything is last-minute. You can’t control everything.”

Flexibility can also mean having to change an entire soundtrack immediately before a show. “Once, for a Vuitton show with Marc Jacobs, we had the soundtrack almost finished the day before, when I realised that Gucci had done the same thing. We changed the soundtrack completely, overnight.” Sanchez prides himself on creating “made-to-measure” sound for each show. “For me, it’s very important to give this exclusiveness,” he says.

To that end, he sometimes composes an original piece for a show. At Calvin Klein this past season, “I had the sound moving in the space — it’s something that I do for my personal work, and so Francisco [Costa] asked me if I could do it for the show,” Sanchez says. “They built four huge speakers in the room, and with computers, I made it so that in a certain part of the space you could hear certain elements of the soundtrack — the sound was moving the whole time.” Each person in the room heard something different.

In a way, the runway soundtrack is one of the last pieces of fashion to remain exclusive to the people sitting in the show venue. Because of music licensing and copyright issues, the soundtracks Sanchez creates are often replaced in the videos of shows that appear online. “What people are listening to on the Internet is not what people are experiencing at the shows. [Only] during the livestream can they listen to [my soundtrack online]. Usually the sound is changed, because the rights [to the music] would cost a fortune.”

Thus, Sanchez creates his soundtracks “for a live performance,” he says. “The way you experience the show live in a big room is not the same thing as when you experience it on the screen. What you see is very different, which means that when I look up my work on the Internet, I [usually] wish to do something else.” Indeed, when it comes to the soundscape, Sanchez thinks designers should do more to consider the experience of the online show viewer. “I think there’s a lot of things still to be done with this.”

An Other Mag – 6 Octobre 2015

AnotherMag-CommeDesGarcons347852

The Sensational Sorcery of Comme des Garçons

Rei Kawakubo presented a powerful meditation on blue witches for her fearless and extraordinary S/S16 collection

There are fashion designers and then there is Rei Kawakubo, occupying a space all of her own: a space filled with power, emotion, fearlessness and even love. She is both mythical – an inspiration to every generation that comes after her – and a sorceress, working her magic in the creation of ever more extraordinary garments (to use the word loosely). How apt, then, that her latest offering was a meditation on « blue witches ». Every season, those privileged enough to witness her collections are given one or maybe two words to describe them and that is what she said. She likes her audience to come up with their own interpretation of her show and these gnomic statements only serve to fuel that fire.

In fact, this is not the first time she has explored the subject. In this designer’s eyes, witches are strong women, often misunderstood, who use their force for the greater good. The fact that she clearly identifies with them is poetic but not surprising. Rei’s blue witches appeared preternaturally in tune with the elements, the natural, the supernatural, the mystic… And it says quite something that such grand themes were explored and evoked in the Comme des Garçons S/S16 collection – within only 16 looks.

The Magnificence of Fabrication

What magnificent looks they were. Crafted principally in faux fur, from astrakhan to leopard, they sprouted tubular extremities, and were so huge that models’ slender frames were dwarfed by them. What looked like wet – or possibly oil damaged? – feathers enfolded narrow torsos. Huge cotton ruffles wound their way round circular structures, and even huger crossover straps gathered garments to the body from behind. The pointed toes of shoes – flat and in black patent leather – were directed to the heavens. Plasticized wigs, as big and fluffy as passing clouds, only added to the monumental nature of it all. The designer’s brief to Julien d’Ys, long responsible for the hair and make up of the house, was simply « red » – and how brilliantly that worked.

The Magic of Coincidence

The original swatches of faux fur, sourced in a factory specialising in the material in Spain, just happened to be blue, and Kawakubo fell in love with them. She then started thinking about Blue Velvet, David Lynch, and Isabella Rossellini – and about how such a beautiful woman ended up central to an intrinsically evil world. That brings us to the soundtrack, put together by Frederic Sanchez the day before the show. Call it (almost unbelievable) coincidence, or just witchcraft, but the music he brought with him was the yet to be released Blue Velvet Revisited, an album of tracks by young musicians all inspired by the film. From romantic, classical interpretations, to strangely unsettling animalistic sounds, it couldn’t have been more perfect. The music then moved on to Julee Cruise’s mesmerising Mysteries Of Love, and then ultimately to Rossellini’s performance of the film’s eponymous song. Like Shakespeare’s fool, that final unashamedly nostalgic gesture released the tension, bringing a smile to the lips of all in attendance.

The Alchemy of Kawakubo

Five seasons ago now, there was a revolution at Comme des Garçons. The woman behind it all made the unprecedented decision that she would no longer set out to make clothes for the runway and that, instead, her women’s ready-to-wear presentations would work more as an exhibition – from which a full collection (on display in the label’s Place Vendôme showroom for the days following the show) would spring. And so, here were presented fuzzy blue velvet separates, the black tailoring that the name is known and loved for, knitwear, bags, footwear inspired, as it always has been, by the masculine wardrobe all of which will go on sale in Comme des Garçons stores and in Dover Street Market – a retail concept transformative in its own right – six months from now. The catwalk looks themselves sell for five-figure sums and are bought mainly by collectors.

It is surely significant that the venue of choice this time around was the loud, proud Le Centorial (headquarters to financial powerhous Credit Lyonnais). However Rei Kawakubo presented her collection not in the splendid upper storeys of the building, where other designers have shown in the past, but in its depths – the smallest, most humble space available, and with exposed piping overhead. The plywood runway was so narrow that models struggled to pass each other and the audience could – and in at least some cases did – reach out and touch the clothes. The symbolism of this location alone – and its relationship to a woman behind a multi-million dollar name who, after more than 45 years in the industry, remains at the height of her creative power – needs no explaining. Magic.

anothermag.com

An Other Mag – 30 Septembre 2015

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Palimpsest: The Absence and Presence of Miuccia Prada

Jo-Ann Furniss explores the autobiography of Mrs Prada’s newest collection, and how she is the perfect imagineer for the fashion universe

Photography Federico Ferrari – Text Jo-Ann Furniss

Miuccia Prada was not present at the showing of her Spring/Summer 16 womenswear collection in Milan – and yet her presence could be felt everywhere. It was a Prada collection and show par excellence – both strangely familiar yet strangely strange. In OMA’s floating set, suspended sheets of curved and corrugated fibre glass and plastic were a ghostly mimic for a rougher, metal, real world version of events. So too were the clothes, where the bourgeois tweed suit became almost a delicate apparition, reworked in transparencies, sometimes intercut with aprons of original, traditional tweed. Then time would almost be literally sliced, in clothing made from strips of fabric in patent leather, fur, or the finest couture fabrics. Were these 20s Art Deco stripes? 60s youthquake signifiers? Signs of the sportswear of now? Or was this simply something of the future built on the many iterations of the past?

« Miuccia is always looking for the ‘tipping point’ – something slightly uncomfortable and unconventional. She has no fear in challenging people’s perceptions of beauty » – Guido Palau

What was taking place in fact seemed to be a rushing together of the past, present and future, an almost autobiographical overview from the person of Miuccia Prada – who was herself both there and not there (a personal emergency meant that she wasn’t physically present at the show). Her long-term collaborator Frederic Sanchez’s auditory accompaniment was composed of ghostly snatches and layers of jazz, which he defined as “A disorientation of time, where your head is full of memories – fragments of a life.” The stylist of the show, Olivier Rizzo, described “Miuccia’s life as an eccentric clash of culture and knowledge. Where there are so many years of her looking at the world and of her being in the world.” The show’s hairstylist, Guido Palau, created hair that purposely traversed the lines of kiss-curled flapper, skin girl rebel and ‘baby-fringed’ scally girl, “There is an idea of tricking the eye – it could be seen as nostalgic but it isn’t, » he explained. « There is always something else at work, something strange. Miuccia is always looking for the ‘tipping point’ – something slightly uncomfortable and unconventional. She has no fear in challenging people’s perceptions of beauty.” For Fabio Zambernardi, Miuccia Prada’s design director, “There were so many layers of information, but Miuccia ultimately thought it should be beautiful and chic. We simply wanted to do something chic for a Prada woman with experience and knowledge who likes beautiful clothes. That’s why Miuccia became obsessed with suits. Of course she gets bored of suits in a second! But that is why they also became an obsession for her.”

View Gallery 19 images
Prada perfection: Even when it’s wrong, it must be absolutely right
“’Who is this woman who wears a suit? Is it too old? Is it wrong?’ Very often she likes to hate things. She hates things so much it suddenly becomes what she likes!” So says Fabio Zambernardi, of Miuccia Prada’s spin on the Socratic Method that is her design process. In the world of Prada, perfection is paramount, but this is a perfection that is not easily won: even wrongness has to be absolutely right.

“The sensibility, knowledge and knowhow at Prada – a creative, sensitive and emotional combination – is like nowhere else,” says Olivier Rizzo. “To work for somebody so incredible, so legendary and larger than life as Mrs Prada, together with the wonderful Fabio Zambernardi – it’s like heaven. With the fashion show you are constantly challenged in a good way; every fibre of your being is challenged creatively, emotionally and mentally. You question yourself so much and Miuccia Prada encourages rebellion as a state of mind – she is constantly questioning and challenging herself, she sets the example. It is her detail, thinking process and freedom that opens up everything, that looks at and creates all the possibilities. Everything has to gel for a show, everything – and the openness of mind and courage it takes for her thought and word process blows my mind.”

« Miuccia Prada encourages rebellion as a state of mind » – Olivier Rizzo

Of course, Miuccia Prada knew every finite detail and process of her latest show and collection – she was there until its ultimate completion. But perhaps where her spirit was most present was in the rebellious, chic, wrongness of it all – the sort of wrongness that only Miuccia Prada as a designer can make seem absolutely right, and right now. The figure of Tutankhamen and the 20s Egyptian revival could be found in those coats made of strips of gilded python and delicate suede, as well as in make-up artist Pat McGrath’s gold lips; the ghostly versions of 90s Prada past, made transparent in brown and orange stripes; the fabric veils draped across the models’ chests, original fabrics from the 20s, unique and rare with a finite supply fully utilised for the show; the purposely plodding knits and prints layered underneath and throwing everything off… “When I was eight years old my grandmother decided to make me a sweater and asked me to choose the colours,” says Fabio Zambernardi. “I was very excited, so excited I actually could not choose… In the end I chose brown and yellow! As a kid Miuccia was also attracted to things that were so horrible and ugly, colours so wrong they become right.”

In the latest collection such wrongness of colouration was everywhere present, but particularly in the home-style domesticity of the knitted sweaters layered under elegant flapper dresses, or the ornately embroidered suiting of the finale. A touch of childlike domestic glee that could also be found in the key print of the show, again layered under elegant suiting or dresses, yet looking like a child’s bedspread or wallpaper. Here the details are a race car, a rabbit and a rocket – Miuccia Prada’s eldest son is a race car driver, the rabbit is for luck and the rocket for the future. Such autobiographical signs and symbols of Miuccia Prada can be found everywhere in the collection, as they can be in all of Pradaland – including one of its newest attractions: Fondazione Prada.

Prada-art-land: Fondazione Prada
On the outskirts of Milan, towards Linate Airport, lies the Prada Foundation. In a former industrial complex – a distillery dating back to the 1910s – Rem Koolhaas’ OMA has designed a home for the Prada Foundation and an art collection as idiosyncratic and personal as the S/S16 show. While other corporations present a fundamentally idealised, power view of themselves through art acquisitions to the outside world, Prada’s is distinctly different.

Weird, domestic, warm and witty – while at the same time displaying impeccable personal taste – it is perhaps the most revealing corporate art collection in the world; so wrong at projecting power, it’s absolutely right. Full of blind alleys, staircases to nowhere, nooks and crannies, it is almost as if the art is happened upon by accident at times in this diverse complex of buildings, giving the distinct feeling that you are exploring somebody else’s world, with particular clues to who these people actually are. And, quite frankly, they are mad people – in the best possible way. Less concerned with an ostentatious display of cold, blank power and more with a funfair flair for aesthetics as entertainment, the complex is dominated by a golden tower, only accessible at set times for restricted numbers, called the Haunted House. The Haunted House is home to a Louise Bourgeois installation from 1996 called Cell (Clothes). With traces of the artist’s life through clothing – from ghostly children’s clothes to elegant, grown-up eveningwear – it is perhaps the clearest link in spirit to the present Prada collection: an oddly moving, mixed media biography.

Downstairs, in one of the adjacent gallery buildings, is another clue to the present collection. In David Hockney’s Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head from Thebes (1963) is a figure seemingly wearing a coat from the show: a gold and green striped tunic, not unlike model Molly Bair’s look. In the Prada Foundation it is clearer than ever that Miuccia Prada is one of the great ‘brand auteurs’ and a ‘fashion imagineer.’ If any designer is making pop art today – and at this point it makes far more sense for it to occur in the realm of fashion than fine art – it could be credited to Miuccia Prada. With her synthesis of high and low, her unashamed embracing of the consumer experience mixed with a little bit of poisonous doubt in the sugar-candy desirability of her clothing, this commercial, self-referential form of pop becomes post-pop, and she is the Disney queen of it.

anothermag.com

Madame Figaro – 25/26 Septembre 2015

Madame-Figaro

Olivier Saillard – Historien de la et directeur du Palais Galliera
« Je l’ai connu par l’intermédiaire de son compagnon ,Gaël Mamine, l’un de mes plus grand ami, archiviste chez Balenciaga. J’ai eu un coup de foudre pour Olivier. Il est tellement brillant ! Nous avons la même sensibilité artistique, on peut parler des heures d’Azzedine Alaïa, de Rei Kawakubo ou de Martin Margiela. J’aime cette passion qui l’anime quand il monte des expositions de mode pour le grand public, cette envie de sortir du microcosme. Il m’a encouragée avec tact lors de ma première collection , en me disant: « j’aime profondément ce que tu fais. Tu es une auteur pas une suiveuse ni une copieuse. Alors vas-y ! »»

Frédéric Sanchez – Illustrateur sonore
« Il conçoit les bandes sonores de mes défilés. Nous avons croisé nos univers artistiques avec beaucoup de douceur et de fluidité. Je n’imaginais pas, derrière son personnage plutôt réservé, l’immense poésie qu’il a en lui. Il m’inspire énormément et je trouve merveilleux qu’il s’exprime aussi à travers  ses photos et ses vidéos.

Il a aussi effectué un travail sublime comme commissaire de l’exposition Gainsbourg à la Cité de la musique, en 2008. Il voit les choses sans hiérarchie; seule la dimension artistique l’intéresse. Récemment, il m’a dit qu’il aimait travailler avec les femmes créatrices, et il m’a citée aux côtés de Miuccia Prada et de Rei Kawakubo. »

Kamel Mennour – Galeriste
« J’admire son histoire, son parcours, la façon qu’il a eue de suivre dès le départ une ligne droite, représenter des artistes qu’il aime sans s’éparpiller. D’ailleurs, le fait que Daniel Buren soit fidèle est un signe. Depuis notre rencontre à la Fiac, nous nous sommes liés d’une douce amitié, et j’aime sentir sa présence à mes défilés. Récemment, il m’a fait un joli cadeau :  il m’a invité, en pleine effervescence de la Fashion Week, à visiter en privé sa galerie. Ça m’a fait un bien fou de m’échapper de ma bulle de travail et de sentir cette belle énergie qui circule autour de lui. »

Véronique Nichanian – Directrice artistique de l’univers masculin Hermès
« Avec Rel Kawakubo, elle est l’une de mes créatrices préférées, je regarde ce qu’elle fait depuis toujours. J’aime sa constance, ça vision et le fait qu’elle a dépassé l’idée même de mode pour installer un chic intemporel. J’adore la passion qu’elle met dans son travail, sans esbroufe, avec un côté structuré et souple à la fois. Je la rejoins sur cet amour qu’elle porte à la matière, point central de l’édition d’une collection. »

VÉRONIQUE NICHANIAN
Je ne rate aucun de ses défilés. J’adore sa rigueur, ses choix de couleurs, son sens des lignes. C’est une fille enthousiaste, sincère, fidèle aux gens, avec du discernement. Bref, c’est une belle personne !

KAMEL MENNOUR
Ce qu’elle crée est assez proche des lignes plastiques que je défends. Elle fait des vêtements justes, purs, sans excès ni subterfuge, avec une trame personnelle qui se renouvelle chaque fois.  Notre rencontre a été une sorte d’évidence.

FRÉDÉRIC SANCHEZ
Notre histoire est précieuse. Nous avons un rapport privilégié. Un vrai dialogue s’est instauré, facilité par le fil directeur de ses collections. J’aime sa sensibilité, sa poésie, sa détermination. Bouchra m’inspire, elle est comme une musique de film, un parfum.

OLIVIER SAILLARD
J’aime son exigence et sa pugnacité. Ses collections sont toujours très bien réalisées. Elle est comme un tailleur pour dame. Derrière cette volonté de fer qui la caractérise, c’est aussi une fille qui aime la vie, qui danse et qui rit. chaque été, je l’emmène à la fête foraine des Tuileries; aux autos tamponneuses, j’adore lui rentrer dedans !

BOF Prada Printemps/Été 2016

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A Spacey Flight of Fancy at Prada
Miuccia Prada wove more of her eerily dissociative magic, but will it cast its spell on a market that seems increasingly resistant to such blandishments?

MILAN, Italy — At first, the jacket and skirt looked like a bourgeois suit. Tweed and plaid. The conservative norm. But such a thing only exists for Miuccia Prada to turn it on its head. The skirt turned sheer, the jacket went pyjama, a mystery veil appeared from somewhere and stayed (for the record, they were real antique veils, the last stock of a company that specialised in such items in the 1920s and 30s).
There were sheer dresses with dropped waists that suggested the 20s — the Art Deco undertow was reinforced by the hair and makeup, gold lipstick and perfectly pasted-down bobs suggesting creatures from a Chiparus sculpture. The striped jacquards evoked Prada’s turning-of-the-tide “pretty/ugly” collection from Spring 1996, the prints of rockets, rabbits and cars, carried over from the last menswear collection had a spacey naiveté. The metallic bauble on a pointy flat? Straight outta Ballets Russes… There were layers upon layers of associations — which soundtrackist Frederic Sanchez (Miuccia herself absent due to a death in the family) artfully defined as “fragments of life”.

Which was just like his music, another of his signature hallucinatory blurrings of eras and sounds: Belgian chanteuse Viktor Lazlo crooning « Cry Me a River », Lydia Lunch’s no-wave anomie, the big band of Carla Bley matched to the edgy atonality of Siouxsie Sioux. The resulting aural stew was like post-apocalyptic cocktail music. Before the show, negronis with a significant kick were served. Afterwards, the passed canapés included specific items that Mrs P remembered from her parents’ parties in the 1950s.

How convincing — or even relevant — is such a cumulative mass of detail? Does it rationalise the co-existence of a cricket sweater, sore thumb in this context, and sensationally striped leather suits? The lack of a seamless whole must have delighted Miuccia. She has always loved kicking against the traces. But in so doing, she opens the doors of perception to multiple interpretations. That seems appropriate to a fashion proposal as wilful as Prada’s.
So, here goes. Think of the new Prada collection as a cocktail party for the strung-out wives of space jockeys. That rocket print was one cue, the neat little suits another. Consider the bauble earrings, the flat silver boots, the thicket of flying saucer paillettes enveloping shoulders, the canapés wrapped in plastic like astronauts’ freeze-dried food… booze and barbiturates accounted for the narcotised music. And then, a finale with more paillettes, translucent and luminous — like starlight, viewed through the bottom of a tumbler.

Business of Fashion – 21 septembre 2015

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New Calvin meets Old Hollywood
Francisco Costa’s distressed glamour was a wonderful blur of sensuous sequinned slips, silken floor-length florals and sensational silk trousers.

NEW YORK, United States — Francisco Costa was working on womenswear at Gucci in 2001 when Tom Ford stirred up controversy with his “Marilyn Monroe” collection, and even more with the Kate Moss campaign that accompanied it. So, Costa has form with blonde bombshells.

For his latest Calvin Klein Collection, he was thinking about Jean Harlow, the original 1930s bombshell, whose publicity shots often featured her in a silk charmeuse slip dress that could, in another era, have slunk straight off Calvin’s catwalk. One of Harlow’s most famous movies was Dinner at Eight. Costa imagined her the morning after such a social event, a little worse for wear, a little déshabillé. “Distressed glamour,” he called it. “Deconstructed, decadent.” It was obvious why they were called slip dresses. These examples slithered and drooped over the models’ bodies, deemphasising their natural assets. Decadent, maybe, but also oddly naïve — an impression that was reinforced by the unfinished hems and seams. Julia Nobis’ chain-mail knit was laddered to rags. Even the silk sneakers were frayed. The coats were so big and raw they looked like a child’s idea of a coat, like a work in progress. Same with those dresses loosely suspended from straps.

Costa claimed he didn’t usually pay much mind to evening-wear, but this collection had some of the evening before the morning after in the long, sensuous lines of slips lightly glossed with sequins, or silken floor-length florals and some sensational “silk garter belt” trousers. Costa outlined the dresses with slender chains, to which he’d attached little charms and found objects. Jean Harlow? No, Joan of Arc, he said. Martyrdom, medievalism… where did they come from? But then, Costa has always been snappy with an obscure reference.

Frédéric Sanchez contributed a perfect musical counterpart in a soundtrack that mixed Nina Simone, Massive Attack and the Orb into a narcotic blur. The morning was, in the end, all a beautiful dream.

www.businessoffashion.com

Dazed digital – 24 septembre 2015

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Backstage at Thomas Tait SS16
Photography Daisy Walker

Stream London Fashion Week’s most electrifying soundtrack
Cult composer Frédéric Sanchez offers up his twisted take on Thomas Tait SS16 with a synth-ridden mix

Nobody epitomises the sound of fashion more than Frédéric Sanchez, the cult Parisian producer who has been lending his musical talents to the runways of Prada, Comme des Garçons, Margiela and Miu Miu for over 25 years. This season, the synth hero crafted a hard and bass-heavy mix for young, agenda-setting designer Thomas Tait, who’s cosmic-inspired SS16 show took London Fashion Week and made it face firmly to the future.

Speaking about the soundtrack to Dazed, Sanchez explained: “Thomas Tait is full of energy. Before making the soundtrack, he sent me emails with a lot of images of what he’s doing as well as the fabrics he’s using, so he gives you a lot of mental images that can be really great to create a soundscape. Like space itself, we wanted to create something that was quite tough and electronic, but at the same time had a lot of poetry.”

“Because his collection was so contemporary, we thought we should look less to the past and talk more about what is happening now, and in the future. There’s an interesting new wave of electronic artists around at the moment, although many of them are inspired by incredible artists from the 70s and 80s like John Carpenter, Kraftwerk, Brian Eno and Alan Vega. The artists I have used are very strong, and the soundtrack is quite cinematic. It is about the future, but also about today.”

dazeddigital.com

Numéro – 18 septembre 2015

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La playlist de… Bouchra Jarrar et Frederic Sanchez
Bouchra Jarrar et Frederic Sanchez, le célèbre illustrateur sonore des défilés de la créatrice, partagent avec Numéro une playlist délicate et poétique.

numéro.com

Document Journal Automne/Hiver 2015

Cover

Document Journal Fall/Winter 2015, guest edited by Olivier Rizzo
Document launches its FW15 issue with a special guest edited edition by Olivier Rizzo and 12 covers by Willy Vanderperre, Alasdair McLellan, Guido and Harley Weir, Craig McDean, Jamie Hawkesworth, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Document launches its FW15 issue with a special guest edited edition by Olivier Rizzo and 12 covers by Willy Vanderperre, Alasdair McLellan, Craig McDean, Jamie Hawkesworth, Wolfgang Tillmans and Harley Weir.
In this, the seventh issue of the magazine, Document collaborates with the legendary stylist and explores all facets of Rizzo’s inspirations and collaborations, including conversations between Miuccia Prada and Alexander Fury, Willy Vanderperre and Alix Browne, Giorgio Moroder and Deborah Harry, Boyd Hollbrook and Kris Van Assche, as well as revealing conversations with Jo-Ann Furniss and Raf Simons.
Additional profiles include Frederic Sanchez in conversation with Laurie Anderson, Vaginal Davis by Bjarne Melgaard, Delphine Arnault by Jo-Ann Furniss, Roselee Goldberg by Shirin Neshat, Andrea Rosen by Miranda July, and superteens Jack Andraka and Adora Svitak in conversation.
Additional features include an oral history of the legendary skateboard brand Powell-Peralta, who heralded the movement for the past four decades, and an unreleased screenplay by enfant terrible Bruce LaBruce.
Original artist portfolios include Wolfgang Tillmans, Jenny Holzer, Peter De Potter, Berlinde De Bruyckere, and Francesco Vezzoli. The 300+ pages of fashion include Willy Vanderperre in an epic 100+ page portfolio, Alasdair McLellan, Guido and Harley Weir, Craig McDean, Jamie Hawkesworth, and Gareth McConnell, alongside a special exclusive project with Fabio Zambernardi.

Document Fall/Winter 2015 launches October 3 and will be available exclusively at The Broken Arm Paris, Dover Street Market London, 10 Corso Como Milan, Dover Street New York, and Bookmarc Los Angeles. The issue will be available at all stores October 8th.

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Dazed – Aout 2015

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The cult composer behind the most iconic runway moments
With his sounds shaking up the speakers of Prada, Comme des Garçons and Miu Miu, we look back on the legacy of Frédéric Sanchez

With his carefully curated soundtracks blasting out from the speakers of Prada, Comme des Garçons, Margiela and Miu Miu, Frédéric Sanchez has become a catwalk icon in his own right. Whether he’s transporting you to another time with his live compositions or mixing up Metallica and Beyoncé, his vast and varied tastes have changed the game for fashion soundtracks. After speaking to Editorial Director Tim Noakes about his already formidable legacy at the Dazed Fashion Forum this weekend, we pick out some of his career-defining moments.

MIU MIU AW09

To accompany Miu Miu’s sultry 2009 show, Sanchez dusted off his 70s cinema collection – scrapping music for soft-spoken European dialogue. Setting a disquietingly sensuous scene, the show featured scores and sex-fuelled conversations from a number of romantic classics (including the films of Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Barbet Schroeder).

PRADA AW14

With two sunken orchestra pits hidden away in the shadows, this marked a dark and mysterious start to Prada’s AW season. Once again inspired by the German noir aesthetic of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Sanchez used cult actress Barbara Sukowa’s vocal talents to resurrect the gloomy spectres of 20s composers Kurt Weill and Arnold Shoenberg.

MARTINE SITBON AW97

Combining the sleek raven-chic of Parisian designer Martine Sitbon with the drones and thrashes of experimental band Hovercraft, Sanchez claims this was one of his all time favourite fashion collaborations. “I really loved that show,” he remembers. “The music, very violent and poetic, had no reference at all. An important side in my work, beside creating mental images, is to take the audience on a sound journey.”

COMME DES GARÇONS SS15

The eerie drones returned for this bloodthirsty Comme des Garçons’ show, with Sanchez creating an atmosphere so heavy it was almost suffocating. Given just the word ‘red’ by Rei Kawakubo as a starting point, he ended up pulling together tracks from metal bands Earth and Sunn O))) to add another, darker layer to the already savage show.

dazeddigital.com

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Dazed – July 2015

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We admit it; the fashion industry has a pretty bad reputation for being hard to crack. You’re interested, sure – but how do you actually get an internship? Or start your own label? Or get your work seen by the right eyes?

Introducing the Dazed Fashion Forum, a day long event coming soon to the Amazon Fashion Photographic Studio in Shoreditch, designed to break down the barriers and bring the best names in fashion directly to those who want to find their feet in the industry. Happening on the 25th of July, the day will feature the likes of Louis Vuitton’s menswear style director Kim Jones unpacking the subcultural references behind his collections; designer Gareth Pugh explaining how he went from squatting in a Peckham department store to getting his graduate collection on the cover of Dazed; our co-founder Jefferson Hack going head to head with Diesel creative director Nicola Formichetti on youth culture tribes; make-up alchemist Isamaya Ffrench on pushing the boundaries of beauty for designers like Junya Watanabe; and much more from AnOther Magazine Fashion Director Katie Shillingford, filmmaker Ruth Hogben, writer Susie Lau, designer Ryan Lo, editor Reba Maybury and others.

There’ll also be a chance to hear from fashion’s unsung heroes who have the jobs you never knew you wanted (like composer Frédéric Sanchez, who’ll be revealing what it’s like to make mixes for Miuccia Prada and Rei Kawakubo to use in their shows) and live demonstrations throughout the day, including Rankin shooting members of the audience – styled by Senior Fashion Editor Emma Wyman – for the pages of Dazed. London designer Claire Barrow will be painting portraits, which you can get printed on your very own custom t-shirt, and set designer Gary Card will also be getting his hands dirty.

“Dazed Fashion Forum is open to all young creatives who want to break into fashion and media,” explains Jefferson Hack of the event. “It’s about leftfield thinkers, sharing radical ideas, opening up new possibilities and showing how youth can break into the industry and make a mark.” “Amazon Fashion is proud to be partnering with the Dazed team to bring the Fashion Forum to life,” adds Juliet Warkentin, Director Brand and Creative at Amazon Fashion EU. “This is a unique opportunity to bring creative role models together with young people just breaking into the industry. We believe in nurturing emerging talent and this is an inspiring project to be involved with.”

If you fancy covering the event for Dazed, tell us, in 200-300 words, what you think is this year’s biggest fashion moment so far and why. Send your answer to fashionforum@dazedgroup.com – winners will have the opportunity to interview any of the line up for a piece to be published online, and runners-up will also get free tickets.

dazeddigital.com

Numero – July 2015

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Bouchra Jarrar Couture show fall-winter 2016 collection
FASHION WEEK July 10th 2015
Numéro talked to Bouchra Jarrar and her sound designer, Frédéric Sanchez, just after her couture show at Paris’s Lycée Henri IV.

Numéro: Let’s talk about the importance of sound in Bouchra Jarrar runway shows. Each season, rather than a classic soundtrack you use a collage of music and spoken words, taken from film clips, that are essential for telling the story of your show.

Bouchra Jarrar: Yes indeed, they’re compositions. Frédéric Sanchez is someone I talk with a lot when I’m preparing my collections. He’s influenced me enormously – he’s like an artist brother. I talk to him a lot about sensations, about feelings… He’s someone I need so as to be able to tell my story. When I’ve found my central theme, once I’m at the stage of pure creation, that’s when we start to exchange ideas, four to five weeks before the runway show. We imagine a story, but without necessarily translating it into words, and we borrow from the words of authors we like. Today it was Agnès Varda.

Frédéric Sanchez: Our exchange is crucial, but the venue is also very important. The question is, how can you inhabit this space with sound? This was my high school, so my school memories from the 80s are mixed in with the story. I remember that at the time Jane Birkin was playing in a production by Patrice Chéreau, and that simultaneously Chéreau had also produced a Mozart opera. This mixture of things is woven into the story we tell – it’s a collage of memories and emotions.

Bouchra, in this collection, you give place of honour to two colours, champagne and azure, both of which are evocative of a rather 1970s, Studio 54 sensuality, and are very refined and very chic.

Bouchra Jarrar: I created my own textiles for the collection, so I also created these exact colours. They tell a story that is both strong and diluted at the same time. To say it very simply, they’re the colours of the sky.

Among the outfits that stand out are those that combine a sleeveless trench coat with trousers – we’re a long way here from the flouncy cocktail dresses so typical of haute couture.

Bouchra Jarrar: Cocktail dresses are a reality, and I can do them, but I wanted to show something else too, something that’s closer to our everyday experience. So this season I treated my trench coats like dressing gowns, like men’s terrycloth robes.

Interview by Delphine Roche

www.Numero.com

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Dazed – June 2015

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Frédéric Sanchez’s Synth Hero mix
The enigmatic Comme des Garçons soundtrack master digs deep into his dark electronic archive
Text Tim Noakes

Every month I invite a different artist onto my Synth Hero radio show to mix up an hour of their definitive electronic influences. This time it’s the turn of Paris based composer and producer, Frédéric Sanchez. Since 1988 he has created some of the most innovative soundtracks for the world’s biggest fashion shows. In the past year alone he has scored runway collections for Prada, Jil Sander, Comme des Garçons, Calvin Klein, Miu Miu, Alexander Wang, Thomas Tait and many more.

Designers come to Sanchez because he is an expert in creating the perfect atmosphere to compliment their clothes. Unlike other show DJs who may go for obvious hits of the moment, Sanchez’s soundtracks feature everything from Sunn O))) and Psychic TV to Sigue Sigue Sputnick and Nana Mouskouri. He uses unexpected sounds to help elevate the catwalk into an unforgettable spectacle, whilst simultaneously giving the fashion industry a musical education. On his Synth Hero mix, Sanchez explore the dark recesses of electronic music. « The way I understand my relationship with the sound and the music has always been autobiographical, » he says. « For me sounds and music are like fragments that I put together in order to create an organic and personal feeling.The way I proceed is always the same either if I use existing tracks or if I compose original music as my starting point has to do with storytelling in order to create mental images. This mix is a journey in my own world and my memories. » Sit back, put your headphones on and let Frédéric Sanchez open up your mind. You might be afraid of what you find…

CHRIS WATSON – “EL DIVISADERO” (from EL TREN FANTASMA, 2011) (00ʼ00 – 02ʼ20)
« In Mexico Chris Watson was one of the last passengers to travel cross country on the train line connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts just before the railroad was cancelled. He recreated the journey of this ‘ghost train’  by capturing the atmosphere, rhythms and sound of human life, wildlife and the journey itself, ‘evoking memories of a recent past’. »
DAVID TUDOR – “PHONEMES” (from THREE WORKS FOR LIVE ELECTRONICS, 1996) (02ʼ07 – 02ʼ35)
« I often use audio generators in my work. I got familiar with them by listening to the work of some composers such as David Tudor. This piece was commissioned for a Merce Cunningham ballet.
ROBERT ASHLEY – “THE PARK” (from PRIVATE PARTS, 1977) (02ʼ12 – 06ʼ00)
« Robert Ashley’s voice is so evocative and enigmatic. You immediately picture situations and landscapes with his speech-songs. »
ELIANE RADIGUE – “TRANSAMOREM-TRANSAMORTEM” (from TRANSAMOREM-TRANSAMORTEM, 2011) (04ʼ04 – 07ʼ30)
“The journalist and director Anais Prosaic did a very intimate film portrait about Eliane Radigue, one of the pioneers of electronic music. In it she says that the meaning of her work is to play with the natural performance of the electronic sounds using all the possibilities the synthesizer ARP 2500 can offer.”

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CLUSTER – “LERANDIS” (from QUA, 2009) (05ʼ51 – 07ʼ35)
“Most of German electronic musicians from the 70s explain their work by saying that the war has destroyed the past. I have always found it fascinating that most of these electronic and avant-garde musics were not created in an industrial environment but in the middle of the countryside.”
GHEDALIA TAZARTÈS – “MERCI STÉHANE” (from DIASPORAS TAZARTÈS, 2004) (07ʼ29 – 10ʼ00)
“I only saw Ghedalia Tazartès perform once. It was maybe 20 years ago. What he is doing is so physical that I have never considered him as a musician.For me he is much more than that: somewhere between a singer, an actor and a dancer.”
ALESSANDRO CORTINI – “FANTASMA MODULAZIONE” (from SONNO, 2014) (08ʼ11 – 12ʼ10)
“You get everything by reading the title of this piece. It is always nice to watch videos of him playing with his Buchla music easel.”
GORDON MUMMA – “MEGATON FOR WM. BURROUGHS” (from ELECTRONIC MUSIC OF THEATRE AND PUBLIC ACTIVITY, 2005) (09ʼ45 – 13ʼ45)
“I chose this piece because of the connection between sonic art and the William Burroughs cut-ups. It’s a great lesson in how to create new form of compositions and how to put sounds together.”
SECTION 25 – “C.P.” (from ALWAYS NOW, 1981) (12ʼ50 – 15ʼ10)
“I remember that I bought this record because of the cover. I still own an original copy of it and will never give it away. I also remember the great impact the music and the sound had on me. Whenever I listen to it I feel the same emotion. It is timeless.”
FRÉDÉRIC SANCHEZ – “FILM SONORE 17” (15ʼ10 – 18ʼ20)
« An extract from my last piece. »
LAWRENCE ENGLISH & WERNER DAFELDECKER – “MAPPING PEAKS” (from SHADOW OF THE MONOLITH, 2014) (17ʼ05 – 21ʼ29)
“I recently discovered the work of Lawrence English and found similarities with my approach to sound design. I empathise with his ability to infiltrate and occupy the body and also how to listen to things in a creative way.”
ZBIGNIEW PREISNER – “LAMENT” (from DIARIES OF HOPE, 2013) (18ʼ47 – 21ʼ20)
“I find it interesting when a composer is so close with a film director, like Preisner was with Krzysztof Kieslowski. For me the soundtrack has a big part in what you remember of Kieslowski’s movies.”

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FRANÇOIS BAYLE – “EROS BLEU” (from ARCHIVES GRM LE SON EN NOMBRES, 2004) (21ʼ17 – 23ʼ24)
“It is fascinating in this piece how Francois Bayle manipulates the voice with the help of the computer. Just with a reverb and a filter module you can get endless possibilities.”
BRUCE GILBERT AND BAW – “THE VOID” (FEAT BRUCE GILBERT, A. DAVID CRAWFORTH, NAOMI SIDERFIN) (from DILUVIAL (FEAT BRUCE GILBERT, A. DAVID CRAWFORTH, NAOMI SIDERFIN), 2013) (22ʼ18 – 25ʼ20)
“WIRE was one of my favorite bands from the post punk era because of their cross-disciplinary edge. Each member of the band was also commissioned tocreate variety of film music, art installations, dance projects. One of my favourite collaborations was between Bruce Gilbert and the choreographer Michael Clark. »
JOHN T. GAST – “SHANTI-ITES” (from EXCERPTS, 2015) (24ʼ17 – 26ʼ19)
“This is an outstanding new artist who describes sound as ‘An ambient enigma steeped in post-hypnagogic tristesse’. So haunting.”
CABARET VOLTAIRE – “HALLUCINATION SEQUENCE” (from JOHNNY YESNO (THE ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK FROM THE MOTION PICTURE), 1983) (25ʼ21 – 30ʼ06)
“What a hallucinatory soundtrack for the Peter Care’s movie.”
TUXEDOMOON – “BLIND” (from TIME TO LOSE- BLIND, 1982) (29ʼ32 – 37ʼ03)
“In the 80s I used to spend a lot of time in Brussels which was a crossroad for musicians coming from all other the world. There is always something very sentimental for me while listening to this.”
JOHN GIORNO – “GIVE IT TO ME BABY” (from 10 + 2: 12 AMERICAN TEXT SOUND PIECES, 1975) (36ʼ42 – 37ʼ48)
“A few years ago I went to visit John Giorno at his place in New York. He was living in the Bunker: William Burroughs’s place on the Bowery. He showed me all his recordings of texts and the editions he uses to make of them. You must check out Big Ego – A Diamond Hidden In The Mouth Of A Corpse.”
BILL NELSON – “THE SHADOW GARDEN” (from FROM BRUSSELS WITH LOVE, 1986) (37ʼ10 – 39ʼ43)
“One track from one of the outstanding compilations made by the very stylish Belgian record label: Les Disques Du Crepuscule.”
WALTER DE MARIA – “OCEAN MUSIC” (from DRUMS AND NATURE, 2000) (38ʼ26 – 40ʼ26)
“Two songs from renowned sculptor Walter De Maria featuring a tribal drumming pattern and the sounds of nature. He used to play drums with The Velvet Underground and on Henry Flynt & The Insurrections’ « I Don’t Wanna ».”

 

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EDGARD VARESE – “POEM ELECTRONIQUE” (from ELECTRONIC MUSIC SOURCES VOL 2 (1937 – 1959), 2012) (39ʼ26 – 40ʼ12)
“This piece is connected to the architect Le Corbusier who was commissioned in 1958 to design the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Art Fair.”
JON HASSELL – “MAP OF DUSK” (from THE MYTHS COLLECTION PART 2, 1990) (39ʼ26 – 43ʼ13)
“The Myths Collection are the very first production by outstanding Belgian record label Sub Rosa.”
MARTIN HANNETT & STEVE HOPKINS – “CONCORDE DRONE” (from THE INVISIBLE GIRLS,2015) (41ʼ23 – 43ʼ48)
“Steve Lillywhite, Brian Eno, Chris Thomas, Martin Hannett, Gilles Martin… producers have always been as important as musicians for me. How to work in the studio, how to make the sound, how to record, how to mix the music.”
JEAN NEGRONI & PIERRE HENRY – “IL Y EUT DANS LE CIEL UN SILENCE” (from APOCALYPSE DE JEAN, 1999) (43ʼ40 – 46ʼ09)
“I am not a religious person but when I listen to this Pierre Henry Oratorio with the very special voice of the actor Jean Negroni I can see angels.”
DIAMANDA GALAS – “DELIVER ME FROM MINE ENEMIES” (from THE DIVINE PUNISHMENT & SAINT OF THE PIT, 1988) (45ʼ03 – 47ʼ11)
“Derek Jarman used this music for his movie “The Last of England ”: a beautiful moment with Tilda Swinton.”

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SCOTT WALKER – “THE DARKEST FOREST” (from POLA X (ORGINAL SOUNDTRACK FROM THE MOTION PICTURE, 1999) (47ʼ10 – 49ʼ55)
“After the release of his masterpiece Tilt Scott Walker did this collaboration with the French director Leos Carax.”
ASH RAM TEMPLE – “SILENCE SAUVAGE“ (from LE BERCEAU DE CRISTAL (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK FROM THE MOTION PICTURE, 1976) (49ʼ33 – 52ʼ03)
« Very poetic soundtrack from the Philippe Garrel movie starring Nico, Anita Pallenberg, Dominique Sanda, Pierre Clementi. »
EDGAR FROESE – “THE 31ST FLOOR” (from KAMIKAZE 1989 (ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK FROM THE MOTION PICTURE, 1982) (51ʼ27 – 53ʼ46)
“A cyberpunk thriller movie with Rainer Werner Fassbinder playing a detective investigating a string of bombings that lead to a corporate media conspiracy.”
FRÉDÉRIC SANCHEZ – “FILM SONORE 17” (53ʼ35 – 54ʼ39)
« Another extract from my last piece. »
JOHN CALE – “RISE, SAM AND RIMSKY KORSAKOV” (from MUSIC FOR A NEW SOCIETY, 1982) (54ʼ32 – 56ʼ45)
“I always find fascinating voices, sounds and music through airwaves. Most of the time you can listen to them clearly but sometimes they are just snatches. It is very similar to watch the stars in the sky at night, you have no idea about their distance, you see them appear and fade away but the all experience is so poetic.”
LOU REED – “PART 1” (from METAL MACHINE MUSIC, 1975) (56ʼ39 – 59ʼ36)
“In a world sometimes so plain and politically correct maybe this record should get visible again. When it came out the big joke was how many people could get to the end. On the other hand this record opened so many doors that other artists have been beyond. What I appreciate with this work is how the sound becomes more and more organic and mental.”

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www.dazeddigital.com

AnOther Magazine – Mai 2015

Frederic Sanchez on Miu Miu’s Afrobeat Inspirations
May 26, 2015

The illustrateur sonore discusses collaborating with Mrs Prada and the afrobeat influences for Miu Miu A/W15

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Text Olivia Singer

The soundtrack to a fashion shows is an element that can completely transform the atmosphere of a collection, and Frederic Sanchez has spent his career as an illustrateur sonore collaborating with everyone from Margiela to Marc Jacobs to achieve maximum impact. Since 1994, he has worked with Miuccia Prada – and for Miu Miu A/W15, his mash-up of Afrobeat-inspired eighties classics like Talking Heads and the B-52s, combined with the faux advertisements that littered Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s first album, gave a brilliant insight into the thought behind the collection.

« I work in a very special way with [Mrs Prada], » he explained. « It’s always very intimate. We speak a lot about very different things; what’s happening in music, what’s happening in the world in general. This season, there was this idea of a collection that was autumn/winter but with this idea of summer, and a certain idea of Africa – but Africa seen through the eyes of someone European. When we started talking about it, it reminded me of seeing that sort of thing happen in music at the beginning of the 80s. »

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he music of the early eighties – of Brian Eno and the B-52s, Talking Heads and David Byrne – was a time where Afrobeat and tropical influences were brilliantly combined with synthesisers. Eno and Byrne’s trips across the ocean saw a new and devoted engagement to Afrorock’n’roll, to Fela Kuti and Faycal Helawi, and resulted in what Frederic Joignot and Jean-Pierre Lentin described in Actuel 1981 as a period that « sought fusion between the breaths of Africa and electronic technology. »

As Sanchez explains, this issue of Actuel featured a cover with Brian Eno, David Byrne and Jon Hassell, « and the background was this piece called The Lighting Fields by Walter de Maria. It’s this giant structure in the middle of the mountains in New Mexico, with these poles that attract lightning and they set it almost on fire. You can go to see it, and it’s like seeing a living painting. So, I thought of those different elements – and then the Talking Heads record, Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, where David Byrne sampled different recordings from African radio, and made what became called world music. It became so trendy. And that was the idea of the show. »

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Combined with Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s spoof advertisments for Tempo Magazine and EMI, the soundtrack also gave a hearty nod to the consumerism of the 80s (something clearly explored through the heavily-sparkling costume jewellery adorning the ears and necks of models). « The African elements, combined with electronica, became like an urban schizophrenia. So then, we thought of Sigue Sigue Sputnik who had all that fake advertising in their records, » explains Sanchez. « And, you know the B-52s have that hairdo? I put the advertising for L’Oreal Shampoo right in the middle of their track. It’s kind of mental… like a manipulation. »

It is this wonderful sense of manipulation that arises throughout Sanchez’ work; we are taken on a strange yet brilliant journey through not only his mind, but the mind of the designers with whom he collaborates. « Because of copyright issues, my work can’t appear online, » he laughs, « the rights would cost a fortune! But it makes the show quite special and unique. Maybe it’s the last thing that we can call haute couture… »

 

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Track Listing for Miu Miu A/W15

Mea Culpa by Brian Eno & David Byrne
America Is Waiting by Brian Eno & David Byrne
The Jezebel Spirit by Brian Eno & David Byrne
One In A Lifetime by Talking Heads
Burning Down The House by Talking Heads
Deep Sleep by B-52s
Advertisement Tempo Magazine by Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Advertisement Network 21 by Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Advertisement Pure Sex by Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Advertisement The Sputnik corporation by Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Advertisement ID Magazine by Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Advertisement Studio Line From L’Oréal by Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Advertisement EMI records by Sigue Sigue Sputnik
Advertisement Love Missile F1-11 by Sigue Sigue Sputnik

Acne Studios Women’s Automne/hiver 2015 Composition originale

Les Inrocks – Mai 2015

LesInrocks2015Frédéric Sanchez © Renaud Monfourny

Souvent cité par les journalistes de mode, Frédéric Sanchez s’est fait un nom en signant les bandes-son qui rythment les défilés des marques les plus prestigieuses. Son activité est pourtant loin de se limiter à cet exercice de style. Portrait de cet explorateur du son.

C’est une rencontre avec Martin Margiela, en 1988, qui amènera Frédéric Sanchez à travailler dans le milieu de la mode et du son. Avant cela, rien ne le destinait à cette carrière :

“J’ai toujours écouté beaucoup de musique, sans savoir exactement ce que je pouvais faire de cette passion. Elle a toujours eu une place extrêmement importante dans ma vie. La découverte de musiciens comme Brian Eno, qui a commencé par des études d’art pour ensuite envisager le studio comme un lieu où on travaille la matière, m’a vraiment influencé. J’ai beaucoup regardé du côté des producteurs, des gens qui façonnaient le son. C’est la musique qui m’a amené à m’intéresser à la mode : quand Comme des Garçons à fait défiler John Cale et David Byrne ou encore quand Peter Saville a réalisé un catalogue pour Yohji Yamamoto… Toutes ces interactions entre les disciplines m’ont amené à me questionner, à découvrir qui j’étais.”

Pasted-Graphic-1« Le Café de la gare » © Courtesy Frederic Sanchez

L’approche du créateur belge fait écho avec la pratique de Frédéric Sanchez :

“La première fois que Martin m’a invité à diner chez lui, il avait une nappe blanche parfaitement repassé sur la table. Il a froissé le tissu entre ses mains, ça a créé de la texture, fait couler la cire des bougies. Il me parlait de l’usure des vêtements, c’est cette vision qui l’intéressait. Tout cela résonnait avec la manière très concrète avec laquelle j’ai pu aborder la musique : écouter des morceaux par fragments, jouer avec le bras de la platine, faire des cassettes avec un seul morceau…”

De nouveaux arrivants qui parviennent toujours à susciter l’excitation.
Fort de cette première collaboration, Sanchez enchaîne les commandes. Il travaillera par la suite avec Hermes, Prada, Balmain, Ann Demeulemeester, Alexander Wang ou encore Marc Jacobs. La narration reste sa marque de fabrique : “Je cherche avant tout à raconter une histoire. Cela ne passe pas forcément par la musique. Il m’a arrivé uniquement à partir de bruitages.” Pour le défilé Jil Sander automne 2015, présenté en février dernier, il a mélangé les interprétations de My Funny Valentine de Chet Backer et de Nico, mettant en lumière les dissonances et les points communs.
Quant on lui demande si son travail a changé depuis ses débuts et la période faste des créateurs stars, il répond qu’il y a toujours de nouveaux arrivants qui parviennent à susciter l’excitation.
“Après avoir travaillé avec Martin, il n’y avait qu’une personne avec laquelle j’avais envie de travailler, c’était Rei Kawakubo. Je le fais depuis un an maintenant : il a fallu 25 ans pour que ça se réalise ! Depuis 3 ans, je regarde à nouveau les jeunes créateurs. À Londres, j’ai commencé à travailler avec Thomas Tait qui fait quelque chose de très fort.”

Pasted-Graphic-2« Silver » (travail photographique) © Photo Frédéric Sanchez

La musique, élément primordial dans la compréhension d’une collection.

On le sait, la musique des défilés est un élément primordial dans la compréhension d’une collection, tout comme la lumière, le maquillage ou encore la coiffure. Elle permet d’appuyer l’imaginaire développé par les vêtements. Le processus pour créer cette poignée de minutes musicales est toujours le même :
“Tout part d’une discussion avec le designer, cet échange provoque des images. Nous parlons beaucoup, ça me permet de comprendre l’esprit de la collection, que je vois rarement. Nous nous rencontrons souvent un mois avant le défilé, parfois un peu plus tard, mais tout se fait toujours très vite, souvent dans l’urgence. Avec la mode, il n’y a pas de répétition. Le défilé en lui-même est une répétition. Ce moment disparaît tout de suite après.”
Ce côté instantané est à l’opposé du travail de Sanchez que l’on peut découvrir en galerie ou en institution. Une autre temporalité s’installe :
“J’ai besoin de ces deux opposés. L’un nourrit l’autre. Mes recherches personnelles sont plus expérimentales, elles me demandent beaucoup de temps pour aboutir. J’ai fait des choses très différentes. Par exemple, Une Utile Illusion, présentée en 2010 à la galerie Serge Le Borgne utilisait des didascalies tirées de pièces de Maurice Maeterlinck. Toutes ces formes questionnent les principes de composition, de spatialisation, de narration… Aujourd’hui je travaille beaucoup avec des filtres, des générateurs de son, mais c’est très long.”

Pasted-Graphic-3« Le soldat sans visage », video still, 2007 © Frédéric Sanchez

Lorsqu’on lui demande s’il se sent plus proche du milieu de la mode ou de celui de l’art, il répond, après une longue pause, que ce dont il a vraiment envie aujourd’hui, c’est d’écrire. Un désir pas si éloigné de sa pratique actuelle que l’on ne demande qu’à découvrir.

Frédéric Sanchez en 5 titres

Bill Nelson – The Shadow Garden

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John Cale – Risé, Sam and Rimsky-Korsakov

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Robert Ashley – The Park (Part 1)

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The Stranglers – La Folie (Album Edit)

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Max Richter – Iconography

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Vogue Collections Automne Hiver 2015-2016

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Par PIERRE GROPPO. Photographe JONAS UNGER.

SOUND MAN
C’est l’un des hommes invisibles de la fashionweek – mais l’un des plus importants aussi.FREDERIC SANCHEZ signe depuis vingt ans les bandes-son des plus beaux défilés. Rencontre avec un story-teller musicalunique, dont le talent a séduit Miuccia Prada et Rei Kawakubo, Marc Jacobs …

C’est un grand studio tout blanc, quelque part du côté de la gare de l’Est. Dans la bibliothèque qui grimpe jusqu’au plafond, il y a des CD, bien sûr, des dizaines de vinyles – à moins que ce ne soit des centaines. Sur le bureau, on dénombre 23 disques durs externes – «mais il y en a beaucoup plus en bas», s’amuse Frédéric Sanchez. La quarantaine élégante, l’oeil pétillant, pantalon gris et pull sombre, l’ex-môme des années 80, arrivé à la mode par la musique, vient de terminer le marathon de la saison automne-hiver 2015/2016. À son actif, des big names ( Prada, Comme des Garçons, Marc Jacobs, CalvinKlein .. .) et des new-comers (Marie Katrantzou,Thomas Tait…), pour qui il travaille la matière la plus impalpable qui soit : le son. Egalement aux commandes d’installations sonores personnelles, commissaire d’exposition, du Louvre à la Cité de la Musique – on l’imagine «à la mode», exubérant. C’est un créateur discret qui vous propose un café, se réjouit de n’avoir, pour l’instant, aucun projet en cours, et n’hésite pas à confier son rapport complexe à la ville, de laquelle il s’échappe pour travailler dans son studio installé en Normandie.

Un défilé dure en moyenne dix minutes.
Comment raconte-t-on une histoire en un laps de temps si court?

Ça dépend des maisons. Pour chacune, j’ai une quarantaine d’heures de travail, et de deux à quatre rendez-vous. Au-delà du travail de studio, je parle beaucoup avec les créateurs.

Vous voyez les collections avant tout le monde?

Pas forcément. Parfois je ne les vois pas. Cette saison, j’ai travaillé avec Guillaume Henry: pour sa première collection chez Nina Ricci, il m’a surtout montré des photos, des objets … Mais chez Comme des Garçons, j’ai droit à un véritable défilé, pour lequel j’arrive avec une centaine de propositions différentes.

Pour l’automne-hiver, la tendance serait …

Une poésie chaotique. Pas mal d’entrechocs, sous tendus par une envie d’être créatif en allant jusqu’aubout. J’ai eu envie de recommencer à travailler avec des ruptures, des non-mixages, comme les collages chez Miu Miu, ou cet enchantement un peu acide du show Prada.

Ce goût du non-mixage, c’est l’inverse d’un travail de DJ?

Je ne suis ni DJ, ni disquaire, ni programmateur! Ce que je fais, c’est de la mode. De la mode sonore, mais de la mode avant tout. Il faut savoir être humble pour accompagner les collections. Après, je fais une différence entre mon travail de commande et mon travail personnel.

Quel a été votre projet le plus fou?

Une collaboration avec la fondation Prada, à Venise, pour l’exposition «Art or Sound». Miuccia Prada m’avait demandé d’orchestrer 250 oeuvres sonores – et elle ne voulait pas de casques. Il y avait tout un travail sur l’espace, la manière dont le son se diffuse, se répercute, se mélange – ou pas.

Quels sont les lieux que vous aimez?

Les endroits qui résonnent. Les endroits imparfaits, comme le Grand Palais, où j’ai travaillé à deux reprises. J’aime cette idée de réverbération, de délai, que le son prenne du temps pour se faufiler dans les imperfections de l’espace. Le son, c’est une histoire, un cheminement, c’est remonter le fil du souvenir.

Et les musiciens qui vous inspirent?

Ça a beaucoup à voir avec les années 70. John Cale m’a fait découvrir la musique minimaliste américaine, Brian Eno l’électro allemande ainsi que la nouvelle scène anglaise, Gavin Bryars, Cornelius Cardew. Et Robert Wyatt, pour la poésie sonore.

Un coup de coeur sonore – ou musical?

J’aime tout. Comme j’utilise pas mal la synthèse modulaire, je m’intéresse à des musiciens qui utilisent des systèmes appelés «West coast», les ancêtres du synthétiseur nés au début des années 60. Eliane Radigue, une artiste française, s’en servait: je l’ai insérée dans le défilé Nina Ricci… Et puis je me penche sur les nouvelles artistes femmes, comme Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, qui a sorti récemment Euclid, un très beau disque.

Et le silence?

Le silence, c’est une illusion utile…

Comme des Garçons – Dazed – April 2015

Dazed-CommeDesGarcons-April2015
Photo: Jeff Bark

Love, lust, life and death with Comme des Garçons

Taken from the Spring 2015 issue of Dazed:

In a season defined by an obsession with placid beauty, Rei Kawakubo – one of fashion’s most defiant and cryptic figures – hit us with a collection that raged violently against the surface level. Inside a derelict warehouse in Paris, she sent out an aggressive procession of explosive silhouettes rendered in an overwhelming, all-red colour palette. Red has always been a powerful signifier, but in the hands of the Comme des Garçons figurehead, its conflicting associations with rage, suffering, love, lust, life and death all came into emotional consciousness.

Kawakubo’s signature is to create clothes that demand an extreme reaction, but this season’s show felt powerfully unnerving, set to a jarring soundtrack curated by Frédéric Sanchez featuring drone metal bands such as Earth and Sunn O))). “With Comme des Garçons it’s different because Rei doesn’t tell you about a theme,” says Sanchez. “What was interesting – and something I hadn’t experienced in a long time – was that she really wanted me to look at the clothes very intensely beforehand. The moment I saw the collection, violent and emotional images came into my head. I thought of Derek Jarman movies, like The Last of England, and the Countess Elizabeth Báthory (the infamous female serial killer known for bathing in her victims’ blood). It was violent and passionate, but without the feeling of horror. The final idea was to do something subtle. Something that felt like no music, but which filled the space.”

Backstage, the notoriously elusive designer gave the words ‘roses’ and ‘blood’ as her explanation for the show. It was an interesting pairing: two disparate ideas that came together in this most conflicted of collections. “There was something almost operatic and theatrical because of the red,” says Sanchez. “It gave a feeling of unreality, while also expressing something about the violent world we live in at the moment. It’s not real, but it is – that’s what makes it so special.” For Kawakubo, clothes alone have never told the whole story. What she achieved this season was to trigger an emotional response that stayed with us, reverberating far beyond the catwalk. Fashion could do with more of that.

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Frédéric Sanchez – Style.com – March 2015

Style.com Fall 2015 Interviewprada-f

Fashion Month Behind the Music: A Conversation with Frédéric Sanchez Style.com

“One of the most aurally stupendous soundtracks to ever bend these ears at a fashion thing,” is how our own Tim Blanks described Frédéric Sanchez’s score for the Thomas Tait Fall 2015 show. The mix included “Holy Land Explosion” by Francis Kuipers, “Le Saint Guidon” by Monolithe Noir, and “Red Sex” by Vessel—a strange combination of experimental rhythms, electronica, and grinding industrial beats if there ever was one.

The first thing to know about Sanchez is that he’s highly organized and dedicated, with his thousands of albums categorized to the nth detail, from engineer to art director to producer—something his 25 show clients this season, from Alexander Wang and Calvin Klein in New York to Comme des Garçons and Miu Miu in Paris, surely appreciate. But more than just a good set of ears and a hyper-organized discography, the thing that keeps brands like Prada interested in him is his undying sense of fantasy. “Sometimes I get ideas like I don’t know how,” he began over the phone. “It’s like a moment of life in a way, and it’s what I bring to the people I work for. When I arrive in front of the person I work with—and you really need to know the person really well—I bring all my thoughts and what I’ve dreamt about and my ideas from the last two months. For example, with the Prada soundtrack, I had listened to this artist called Alice Coltrane, and I was listening to that for two months and I brought that to Prada. I had the same process with Thomas Tait and with all my clients: I listened to his story and I mixed it with my own story and my own fantasy in a way.”

Among Sanchez’s Fall 2015 fantasies were several that were covered in our reviews. Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs” got first mention at Calvin Klein; the thumping sounds he crafted for Thomas Tait came up in London; and his Fantasia samples at Prada, “My Funny Valentine” covers at Jil Sander, use of Max Richter’s Blue Notebooks at Comme des Garçons, and quirky ad mash-ups at Miu Miu cemented him as the aural experimenter to watch—or listen to—this season. While such prowess might allude to a systematic approach to creating a soundtrack, Sanchez’s methods are much more surreal in their efforts, emphasizing a holistic method over a pragmatic one. “To be very precise, it takes me three or four appointments and maybe 40 hours [to create a soundtrack],” he explained of the process as a whole, adding, “But what takes longer is to get the idea of things.”

The few hard-set rules he sticks to are: Don’t use music that’s been in other shows and don’t overdo it. He explains his process of mixing music for a soundtrack as something akin to mixing perfumes, combining the strange with the familiar in unexpected ways. “It’s a little like when you smell perfume and you don’t know really what it is, but at the same time you can understand where some elements come from and have some mental images that it calls to mind. That’s always the way I’m working.”

There’s also a deep sense of the personal in his work. “I like the idea of [the soundtrack] being made-to-measure,” he explained. “I think that fashion is so, in a way, mainstream. Everybody is talking about fashion and all that, and maybe the show soundtrack is the thing that gets special-er and more exclusive,” he said with a laugh, in reference to the fact that many of his soundtracks are not heard outside of the show environments they accompany. “It makes it a little bit like what was haute couture in a certain time—it feeds the fantasy of the people who don’t have access to this.”

style.com

Thomas Tait – Style.com – February 2015

Thomas Tait Women Fall 2015 Style

February 23, 2015
The shoe in Thomas Tait’s show was a stiletto skewering a crystal ball. Was that a comment on the impossibility of prediction with this designer? After all, who can ever really tell what’s going to happen with—or to—Thomas Tait? That was a point he made very clear with his show today, the first since he scooped the first edition of the LVMH Prize: 300,000 euros and a year’s worth of mentoring. It’s already paid off. « The money helped me get out of trouble and catch up on production, and the mentoring found me three factories in Europe, » Tait bottom-lined.

But his show hardly felt like a celebration. It was more like a deadly serious statement of intent: I refuse to be a cliché. As the audience filed down stairs into the subterranean gloom of an abandoned car park off Marylebone Road, an absence was obvious. There was no baying pit of catwalk snappers. No photographers at all. (The house would supply images later.) But there was noise: a grinding industrial throb that acted as an overture to one of the most aurally stupendous soundtracks to ever bend these ears at a fashion thing. (For the record—because a record really must be kept—Frédéric Sanchez mixed « Holy Land Explosion » by Francis Kuipers, « Le Saint Guidon » by Monolithe Noir, and « Red Sex » by Vessel.) And then the models began to emerge, at first in total darkness, and then following bridges of light that lit up as they walked, kind of like the way Michael Jackson illuminated pavestones in the « Billie Jean » video. But he danced, while these women moved through the shadows at the glacial pace of some eldritch ritual. « I wanted to slow things down, » Tait explained afterward. « My shows were always so fast. » And that’s also why he’d shed all the other hurry-up of a conventional fashion show.

And so to the clothes. They loaned themselves to the darkness. Tait’s not so given to talking about influences, but he did mention the photographer Gregory Crewdson, « for the way he elevates a semi-colloquial feeling into eeriness. » A reference point that seemed even more fitting might have been Crewdson’s kick-starter, David Lynch. One of these looks—a mink coat over a cashmere sweater and satin wrap skirt—could have been plucked from the closet of Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet. And Tait’s appetite for exaggerating the average—a giant-collared taffeta blouse, a huge-cuffed poplin shirt, trousers that swept the floor, enormous coats that dwarfed the body, utility jackets writ über-large—felt Lynchian. So did the collection’s struggle between restraint and release. There were tight little Pleats Please moments: Micro-pleated satin printed with screen grabs from Dario Argento films contrasted with those profligate volumes. And then there was the straightforwardly fetishistic lure of fitted leather coatdresses, festooned with zippers attached to oversize ring pulls. Their underarms were lined with mink. Think that mink, pull that ring…and ponder that skewered crystal ball.

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