Interview

Forget about artists working in the age of mechanical reproduction: fashion victims in the age of digital reproduction are looking harder than ever for that aura of uniqueness. This is the challenge for German designer-duo Christian Niessen and Nicole Lachelle, both of whom worked for Helmut Lang: for collectors or those suffering from a copycat complex, their video art-meets-fashion label offers one-off items.

The pair starts by making a short film, capturing the weather, the streets, and local forests. They digitally flatten the image and the colors, and blur out all the details. Sixty consecutive shots of the footage are printed, one after the other, onto a collection of sixty items. The film is never used again; the items are individually numbered and labelled and become part of on an online archive. The result resembles a flipbook: looking quickly at the pieces side-by-side,you can see the passing clouds or windy forests of the original footage.

"Today, nothing is ever really unique," explains Lachelle. "Sometimes it's in limited editions, but that's it." Surely, the use of digital film to create absolute uniqueness is a way of showing the finger to 2.0 pessimists. As for the clothes, they are primarily loosely draped cardigans and dresses in tech-looking fipers, with inspirations like the straight waists tightened by a kimno-style belts, and Chris Marker's classic art film La Jetée in his rapid succession of images and grey tints. They are made of improbable combination of leather, wools, and clear silk nylon moving between the fabrics as if they were one, fully imprinted piece—or just one unit in a mysterious story.

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PHOTOS BY GILLES UZAN

Californian photographer Todd Selby is sitting on a bed in the window of Parisian boutique Colette, in the midst of recronstructed teenager's room. Unaffected by a crowd giggling around him, he orders room service and answers interviews. It's the picture of a master of his domain—or at least someone so terribly fascinated with the idea of a domain that he brings it around with him.

Selby was in the store from March 1–6 promoting his new book, The Selby in Your Place (Abrams). In keeping with the store's ethos, the book is in limited release there until worldwide release April 1. At Colette, the photographer who has made a career photographing the curated clutter of other people's homes without revealing his own, offered a peek into his bedroom—or at least a vision of it.

Selby has been around as a fashion and lifestyle photographer for years, but only started his popular interiors web site, the Theselby.com. He made his name by shooting the stuff—the collections and the "matter out of place," rather than the space, of creative people worldwide. This wasn't MTV's "Cribs"; this was serious people whose homes might be seriously interesting. All of it was told with a bit of fun: these people had a lot of stuff, but not an embarrassment of it, and they were willing to share and dress up in different clothes for the occasion.

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PHOTO BY GILLES UZAN

Oliver Zahm, magazine publisher, love machine, and night creature has devoted his life to building the Purple brand. In the space of twenty-odd years, the Frenchman has mutated his magazine from Purple Prose to Purple Sex, to its current incarnation, and Purple Fashion—which includes some prose and sex in spades. For the last year, Purple's blossomed as an online form, blending friends and beautiful women and a passion for debauchery into a glamorous and messy lifestyle guide to the worldof the man and his magazines. Now, he's returned his photographs from the blog to the realworld (whatever that means), with a show of his work at Colette. Here he talks about 2.0 generation, the democratization of photography, and rumors of a Purple venue.


ALICE PFEIFFER: When you created purple-diary.com, the blog extension of Purple magazine, a year ago, you also began publishing your own photos online on a regular basis. How do you feel the presence of your shots have changed the blog's identity?

OLIVIER ZAHM: It's in blogs' nature to have photos. You can't have one without the other. When people go on to blogs, they want to look at pictures, pictures you took yourself, so it's in the essence of the medium.

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Launch Mediaplayer »

Forget Fashion Week: the hard news is broken at Première Vision. Paris's bi-annual salon predicts trends, colors and fabrics a year ahead of the fashion cycle. It tells you what you'll be seeing throughout the sartorial cosmos—from Wal-Mart to Willhelm.

Created 35 years ago, the salon is now present in smaller incarnations all over the world, from New York to Moscow. The gigantic French mother fair is obligatory for anyone in the garment industry—or anyone interested in spotting Paul Smith flicking through fabric samples side-by-side the designer of Abercrombie and Fitch.

The latest edition opened last week, and it seems that in 2012, we will still be looking for ways to flash prudishly, thanks to the coarse lace pattern known as Guipare. This special type of thick embroidery results from being dipped in acetone—and is going to be on all the best backs and bottoms. One pioneer of the fabric is Swiss embroidery house Forster Rohner AG, present at the salon, who's recently worked with  Chanel, Dior, and Marc Jacobs. "Guipare makes total sense after the return of transparency in recent collections," said Pascaline Wilhem, head of fashion for Premiere Vision.

The increased prominence of artificial fiber will change the relation to fabric and perceptions of quality, says Willhem: "It's the end of the 100 percent hysteria. For a long time, people were reassured by the all-cotton, all-wool, all-whatever. But now, people are really starting the benefits of new fibers, which have been through tremendous improvement." Wearers can now glow in the dark, or stay cool in dark clothes under tropical sun thanks to Jakob Schlaepfer's "Cold Black" fabric. The Swiss textile designer usually specializes in sport brands, but has clients like Prada and Ralph Lauren.

The digital era, too, is marking fashion in more ways than one: increasingly today, textile design is  done online, allowing for a precision that would have never been possible by hand; also, 2.0 seeps into public consciousness, and it seems that by 2012, we will all be craving large 3D flowerprints, à la Avatar."The digital era allows a new complexity in pattern making which wans't possible before. Today, it's treated like a scientific experiment." Says Willhem.

And style-wise? "No more punk nonsense, we're going to stop rolling about in the mud" continues the head of fashion. There will be lots of silhouettes and shapes we don't have names for yet, she continues, "many deriving from harem pants and tulip skirts." Fashion is constantly shedding its skin, and reinventing so-called classics: "But if I have one wish for the future of fashion, I hope stop being nostalgic about every damn era."

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