5 posts tagged "M/M Paris"
M to M, A to Z
Yesterday at MoMa PS1′s Sunday Sessions panel, Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak—the grown-up enfants terribles behind the graphic-design partnership M/M Paris—discussed M to M of M/M (Paris), their first retrospective book. Glenn O’Brien—an M/M collaborator—moderated the conversation. “So who’s Mert and who’s Marcus?” was his opening inquiry. (A “fashion joke,” as the writer put it.) The pair laughed it off good-naturedly.
“We were approached ten years ago,” Amzalag told Style.com. “The physical work on the book took three years, but then there were two of going through the archives, and five of finding the right route.” The decade of due diligence paid off. M to M marks the pair’s twentieth anniversary in business, and it’s a fitting testament to their erudite style. The 528-page monograph is chock-full of Amzalag and Augustyniak’s greatest hits—from hand-drawn overlays on Balenciaga and Stella McCartney campaigns of yesteryear, to their groundbreaking catalog work for Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, to iProduct apps for Björk. The tome proudly reflects M/M’s keystone role in the forever-hybridizing fields of design, fashion, art, and music. And though they didn’t design it themselves (“We inverted the process—someone came to us with the solution—that was a beautiful moment,” said Augustyniak), the book’s juggled alphabetizing and pagination—it starts on page 311, at the letter M, naturally—pays homage to the pair’s distinct, irreverent intellect.
The Image Makers: Inez And Vinoodh
In a new series, Style.com sits down with the best in the field of contemporary fashion photography to talk about both the process and the product. First up: the husband-and-wife Dutch shooters Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.
At exactly 34 characters long, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin easily have the longest photo credit in the business. Admittedly, the count includes A-N-D, but that little linking word is crucial. Van Lamsweerde and Matadin are partners in every sense—creatively, romantically, as parents of their 9-year-old son Charles Star Matadin, and seemingly everything in between. The Dutch natives have been together for 26 years, and to sit with the two of them for an interview is to witness genuine sentence-finishing synergy.
There’s yet more neat duality in their work, which straddles art and fashion, gives you high glamour with a touch of the surreal or grotesque, ranges from classical black-and-white portraiture to near camp, and inevitably includes some degree of gender-bending. It also extends to their hefty new monograph, called Pretty Much Everything ($700, www.taschen.com), which comes out this month and encompasses their work for magazines like Paris Vogue and V, campaigns for houses like Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, and their art projects. In the two volumes, van Lamsweerde and Matadin scrapped chronology, and instead painstakingly went through the 666 photographs to create very specific pairings, each with their own visual logic. “It takes time away so it becomes one body of work,” explains Matadin. “You see a picture from 1985 next to one from 2011, and they’re still holding up.” Van Lamsweerde and Matadin talked to Style.com about their unique relationship, the wonders of Lady Gaga, and why you shouldn’t peer into the inner workings of a fashion shoot.
You have this book now but you had the retrospective exhibit last year in Amsterdam. Had you always planned to do that at 25 years?
Vinoodh Matadin: This actually started nine years ago when Inez was pregnant. Karl Lagerfeld said, “Oh, you’re pregnant. You should do a book.”
Inez van Lamsweerde: He said, “Oh, you have to have a project while you’re pregnant.” Which is very cute.
And very Karl.
IVL: Yeah, it was sweet. So we started working on it and kept shooting and kept adding pictures and the book grew and grew. When it was done, it was kind of 25 years of us together. And by now, it’s again a year later so it’s 26 years of work together. But the show was based on the book.
VM: Basically we started the book putting everything in order.
IVL: Chronological order.
VM: But then we thought, it’s too soon. We’re not there yet. So we decided to redo the book.
IVL: The exciting thing for us was the editing and putting it together. Once we decided no chronological, which for us was not interesting, it became really about the combination of the pictures.
The pairings have a nice rhythm.
IVL: It’s really about how all those images that we’ve made in the past 26 years live inside our heads, especially this idea of art, fashion, and portraiture being all the same, from the same source. It really depends on the context or the venue in which you see the image.
VM: It also became one body of work because it takes time away. You see a picture from 1985 next to a picture of 2011 and they’re still holding up. You don’t know when this picture is from. It could be yesterday or 26 years ago. Continue Reading “The Image Makers: Inez And Vinoodh” »
Spaceman About Town
The Man About Town is about to be Man About Galaxy. The new edition of Philip Utz’s menswear biannual Man About Town is The Space Issue, dedicated to the high life in all of its iterations—from the burgeoning space tourism market to French pastry master Pierre Hermé’s recipe for space cake. (Include cannabis at your discretion.)
For the new issue, Utz and creative directors Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag of M/M (Paris) pitted the homemade against the futuristic, starting with the hand-crafted font M/M (Paris) worked up for use throughout the issue, one that was hand-formed in salt dough, then photographed. “The space theme was chosen because I wanted to break with the retro aesthetic that Man About Town had been championing prior to the Hedi Slimane issue, but also because I felt that it would take the writers, photographers, and stylists out of their comfort zone to produce something less self-referential and more thought-provoking than what most other men’s books have to offer,” Utz says. “It was certainly very rewarding to see everything come together, with such unlikely bedfellows as astrobiologists and stylists, computer programmers and fashion photographers.” The full list of contributors includes fashion world heavies such as Alasdair McLellan, Joe McKenna, Olivier Rizzo, David Sims, and Willy Vanderperre, but also Google vice president Vint Cerf, astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, and Virgin Galactic head of astronaut relations Dave Clark. (“Our approach to Man About Town was very free-spirited,” Augustyniak and Amzalag say of the roster. “We wanted to have fun and placed calls for everyone to join the party.”)
The issue hit stands this past Friday. It comes with a packet of six postcards featuring art from the pages of the magazine, like the David Sims shot, styled by McKenna, at left. “Postcards from the edge,” Utz calls them. Space: Wish you were here!
Kanye West X George Condo X M/M Paris Hits The Web
Rapper/producer/style savant/Tory Burch menswear test case Kanye West made fashion headlines (again) when he reached out to M/M Paris’ Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag to create a limited range of scarves based on the George Condo paintings that he commissioned for his latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. (Condo’s image of an angel in flagrante made the cover—where, that is, it wasn’t censored.) News on the scarves has been circulating, but the scarves themselves have yet to go on sale. That changes Monday, when they go hit MMParis.com and Colette, in editions of 100. The five designs include a take on the album’s cover (“Phoenix,” below); a crowned, perhaps Kanye-esque head stuck with a sword (“Power,” bottom); two screaming faces (“Face” and “Priest”); and our favorite, “Ballerina” (above). The French-made, silk twill scarves all feature Condo’s paintings, with hand-lettered borders by M/M Paris. €250 and one’s yours. Continue Reading “Kanye West X George Condo X M/M Paris Hits The Web” »
Balenciaga’s Belle Returns
Gisele’s surprise appearance on the Balenciaga runway this September—closing Nicolas Ghesquière’s houndstooth-heavy show—was the talk of Paris. And apparently, her reign at Balenciaga isn’t over yet. Bündchen will front the new Balenciaga campaign, which hits February glossies next month. According to WWD, Steven Meisel shot the ads, which star the Brazilian supe alongside naked-and-face-painted male model Yuri Pleksun (a campaign veteran of Marc Jacobs). Marie-Amelie Sauvé styled and M/M Paris designed the mixed black-and-white and color shots, which make a strong case for what the kids used to scream at rock shows: Punk’s not dead.