Il Etait Une Fois, Le Nord-Pinus by Maryam Eisler

Maryam Eisler – the photographer behind many of LUX’s artist covers, including our most recent KAWS cover- continues her fascination with the Sublime Feminine in her latest series of works, If Only These Walls Could Talk

In 1973, Helmut Newton travelled to Arles and photographed Charlotte Rampling for her iconic Vogue shoot. 48 years later Maryam Eisler returns to this precise location, Suite 10 at the Hôtel Nord-Pinus to continue her exploration of the ‘Sublime Feminine’, the focus on sensuality​, and the female gaze ​within the context of this culturally historic space.

Huitres, Coquillages et Crustacés by Maryam Eisler

For this series, black and white photography takes precedence, allowing Eisler to distil figures to create ‘body architecture’ through abstract and emotive shapes. Embracing the beauty of women and their forms, in her photographs, the message of strength yet uncompromising femininity is clear.

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La Lionne by Maryam Eisler

​Maryam additionally looks to Suite 10 ​and it’s context as a place famously known ​for its association with successful bullfighters, such as Luis Miguel Dominguín, who waved at their fans from the balcony. Not only does this series pay tribute to the sport itself but also the artists, poets and writers who have also appreciated bullfighting in their works too.

Read more: A Belle Epoque revival in Paris

​In Maryam’s artworks, the bull is replaced by the strength and beauty of a female protagonist, ​at once the captor and the captivated, holding the power through their red capes.

Autant En Emporte Le Vent by Maryam Eisler

Maryam Eisler’s exhibition of ‘If Only These Walls Could Talk’ will be showing at Alon Zakaim Fine Art from Wednesday 2nd – Thursday 24th November 2022

The accompanying publication ‘If Only These Walls Could Talk,’, which includes a foreword by Brandei Estes, Sotheby’s Director, Head of Photographs, EMEA, will be available to coincide with the exhibition

Edeline Lee embraces femininity and female empowerment through her clothes. Photo by Nick Thompson.

As Fashion Weeks comes to a close, we’re celebrating designers who are paving the way for a more sustainable and ethical fashion industry. Here, Edeline Lee tells us why sustainability makes such a difference to the quality of her brand,

LUX: You’ve mentioned before that you design with the “Future Lady” in mind. What does that mean exactly?
Edeline Lee: The Future Lady is an idea that I made up to encompass the woman that I am designing for.  Female identity is in flux in our generation.  Modern women live hectic, collaged lives.  We can’t automatically subscribe to the identities that have been laid out for us historically.  Women now are more beautiful, more powerful, more free, stronger, more aware, more capable than any other time in history.  Yet, we still have a way to go before we fulfil our true potential.  How does the Future Lady dress?  What is it to dress with true power, grace, beauty and dignity in today’s world?

My overarching concept has always been a conversation about this journey as a woman with the women who wear my clothes.  It’s easy to be fooled into thinking that fashion is all about more and more: younger, thinner, cheaper, taller, louder, sexier.

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I’ve spent a lot of time dressing with women in changing rooms.  My experience is that women are well aware; they are not blind fools.  They can feel the difference when something is made with quality and meaning, fits well, and is designed with a soul, to lift the best out of you.  Once they experience what it feels like to put it on, they don’t need to be convinced to buy.

LUX: How did your time at Central Saint Martins impact your approach to design?
Edeline Lee: My time at Central Saint Martins taught me that you can design a collection from anything. At the beginning of every season, I try to connect back to the source.  What do I find interesting, meaningful and beautiful around me?  What makes me smile or makes me curious?  It’s important that the source is pure, because then others will respond to it too.

Edeline Lee. Photo by Mars Washington

LUX: Was there a particular turning point when you felt you’d discovered your distinct design language?
Edeline Lee: Femininity is a huge part of my design language. The problem I’m always trying to solve is: how does a woman dress with power and authority, whilst still being feminine? The two should not be mutually exclusive.

I design to help women express their higher purpose, but I also make clothes that resist wrinkling so that women can actually function at a high level in the clothes.  The tricky thing is to strike the perfect balance between something that is flattering and appropriate, but just special enough to draw out what is individual and special in the woman wearing it. Thinking women deserve clothes that think.

LUX: Are there any designers or perhaps, design movements that have influenced your practice?
Edeline Lee: I’ve been very much influenced by the practice of the Weiner Werkstatte with their philosophy of the Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art”.  I love the idea that every element in an environment can be harmonised and unified whether it be art, decorative arts or design.  They believed that it was better to work 10 days on one product than to manufacture 10 products in one day.

Edeline Lee Autumn Winter 2022. Photo by Nick Thompson.

LUX: How do you think the brand has evolved since its inception?
Edeline Lee: The label really became a “brand” when I learned how to define and project my purpose out into the world. If you know what your purpose is, the rest becomes so much easier.

LUX: Edeline Lee has been celebrated for its sustainable approach to luxury fashion. What’s your personal approach to sustainability? And do you think attitudes are changing in the fashion industry?
Edeline Lee: It startled and worried me when we were named in the top 4 sustainable brands at London Fashion Week by Good On You. It takes a lot of research and commitment to try to source and work sustainably and ethically, and we’ve been doing our best. Yet, I know that we still have such a long way to go.

My personal approach is that we must all take responsibility for our actions. Just as we producers need to take responsibility for the choices that we make, it’s important for customers to be empowered by their choices, and realise their power to purchase sustainably as well.

LUX: There has been much discussion around the unsustainability of fashion week. What are your thoughts?
Edeline Lee: I don’t think that it is necessary for everyone to relentlessly travel around the world, all the time. In that sense, the relentless churn of global fashion weeks isn’t sustainable. If anything, Covid 19 has taught us that we could all probably take a breather and be more selective in our choices.

Edeline Lee retail space at Harrods, opened in 2022

LUX: You’re also an advocate of community-made fashion. How does that work in practice? And why is it important?
Edeline Lee: We dye our fabrics in Yorkshire, and design, cut, sew and finish all of our pieces in London – not because good craftsman don’t exist elsewhere in the world, but because of quality control. It means that I’m always the final eye cast over each piece before it ships. It means that I know personally each hand that touches the clothes, I truly believe that the love and care that is put into the making of a garment lends it a soul.  It is visible to me when I look at a dress.

Read more: All-access rundown of Ozwald Boateng’s return to London Fashion Week

When your mother gives you a dress that she wore in her youth, aren’t you able to see or feel the soul in that garment?  It is something like that.  A dress is more beautiful when it is made with love, and that humanity in it becomes more powerful if every part of the dress is made within a community, by a team.

LUX: What are your goals for your company this year, and in the longer term?
Edeline Lee: We’ve just opened our first branded retail space inside of Harrods – so I am enjoying the process of developing and improving that. Please visit and take a look!

Find out more: edelinelee.com

Mickalene Thomas with her work Clarivel #6 (2019). Photograph by Maryam Eisler

New York-based Mickalene Thomas is an important and innovative voice in the art world. Her dazzling portraits of African American women use collage, enamel and her signature rhinestones to explore femininity and ideas of beauty. Maryam Eisler visits her in her Manhattan studio to photograph her and talk beauty, sexual politics, identity and racial stereotyping

LUX: Your work is almost exclusively about women – real women, everyday women, in different sizes, with different stories, textures, colours. Tell us a bit about this.
Mickalene Thomas: I love everything about women and more – confident women, smart women, the I-don’t-give-a-sh*t women, with all shades of blackness. When I think of all the women in my life, I think of those who have mentored me, about those I’ve read about in books and their stories. I think about all the women who have trail-blazed and sojourned that I aspire to be, about all the women who I haven’t met yet and who protect me. When I think of blackness, I think of my grandmothers. I remember seeing one of them at 95 years old in her apartment sitting in her favourite chair, and the wrinkling, deep indigo colour of her skin, that blackness, the ageless glow in her eyes, and thinking about all of the history that she’s endured and the things unspoken, all those secrets. I think of her vulnerability, her beauty, her fragility, her strength.

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LUX: There are many stereotypes of black women set by white patriarchal societies. Is there an expectation for you to fit within a white canon of beauty? Not that you have ever conformed to that way of thinking, of course!
Mickalene Thomas: Yeah, especially when you think of the ideology of a beauty that was put forth, setting a paradigm and an agency for everyone to follow. I’ve always tried to figure out how that happened and how it remained at the centre of our world. Because there were so many other powerful empires that had their own notions of beauty and aesthetics.

The artist with her partner Racquel Chevremont, in front of October 1975 (2019). Photograph by Maryam Eisler 

LUX: How did you extricate yourself from this way of thinking about beauty?
Mickalene Thomas: As a woman of colour, I was fortunate to be raised by a very strong group of women. I never grew up wanting to be anything other than what I am, or wanting to question my own blackness. I never thought, “Am I light enough for you?” I’ve always had natural hair or locks. I’ve never straightened my hair. That’s never been an issue. So that white notion of beauty has never been imposed on me.

Installation view of ‘Mickalene Thomas: A Moment’s Pleasure’ at The Baltimore Museum of Art, 2019. © Mickalene Thomas. Photo Mitro Hood, BMA/The Baltimore Museum of Art.

LUX: Was this down to the influence of your mother and your grandmother?
Mickalene Thomas: Yes, they let me know that I was beautiful enough for myself and no one else, and that I’m of a new generation and can be a leader and that my blackness and difference is important. I questioned their ideas of beauty because they were vastly different from mine – but I also think that growing up with Black Power in the 70s made me think differently. Looking around the room and seeing women with hair in Afros was very empowering. It’s about freedom, really.

Read more: How Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah is establishing itself as a cultural hub

LUX: Yes. And owning it, right?
Mickalene Thomas: Yes, absolutely. However, you start questioning these ideas of beauty placed on you by the media because it’s the only representation that you see. You know that within your own community some things are considered beautiful, but then the media tells you otherwise.

Untitled (Maya #4) (2019) by Mickalene Thomas. © Mickalene Thomas.

LUX: Does that make you wonder if you’re creating your own bubble?
Mickalene Thomas: Yes. And you’re constantly up against creating your own agency. Where do you fit in exactly? How do you navigate this world and this image consciousness as it is? Forget double consciousness!

LUX: With the histories and background stories involved, it’s probably more like a tenfold consciousness?
Mickalene Thomas: Yes! I think that if we embrace the diaspora and look at ourselves as the melting pot that we are as a people, then we can start tolerating our differences and embrace the various forms of beauty that each of us harbour.

Read more: Why we love Hublot’s limited edition spring timepieces

LUX: Do you think we tend to forget about our humanity as the common ground?
Mickalene Thomas: Yes, that would be a much healthier way of looking at the world – to try and understand the way we are because we had to migrate and move around for a variety of reasons, such as adverse conditions, weather, food, nature and much more!

LUX: What does it mean to question such stories of migration within your own community on a daily basis, in this day and age and in the USA of all places, the country of migration par excellence?
Mickalene Thomas: The entire country is based on migration. And for me, to even have to think about it gives me an ulcer. To think that America is leading this atrocity of deportation, when it is built on people immigrating here for many different freedoms.

Studio shot of two works from Thomas’s 2019 series based on images from the Jet Magazine pin-up calendars from the 1970s. Image by Maryam Eisler

LUX: Where is this re-examination of colour, race, faith, culture coming from?
Mickalene Thomas: I think there are many people in the world who operate specifically out of hatred and fear. I was raised a Buddhist and I think that was one of the fortunate gifts my mother gave my brother and me, this sense of spirituality and the sense of philosophy of life. It’s not necessarily a religious practice, but more a philosophy of understanding, through knowing your causes and effects. The people who commit atrocities, such as mass shootings and bombings, are feeling displaced and threatened in society, and the causes are deeply rooted in their ancestors’ past. We want to live right now and right here, but there’s a lot we don’t look at in our pasts. I really believe that, as an artist, you have to look at history to move forward. We’re just moving forward without resolving our past histories. Times are tough. Our economy is about to take a huge shift, and I think it won’t just affect the poor or the middle classes – it’s going to affect many people in ways that they haven’t really seen before.

LUX: And there’s a lot of anger out there.
Mickalene Thomas: Yes. And people want something that they feel is owed to them, or that they are entitled to. And they think that immigrants and people of colour have been given some special privilege, not realising that most of us, if not all, have worked very hard to get to `where we are.

Installation view of the exhibition ‘Mickalene Thomas: Better Nights’, at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, 2019. Photo Jessica Klingelfuss, courtesy of Mickalene Thomas and Jessica Klingelfuss

LUX: Can we talk about ownership of one’s sexuality?
Mickalene Thomas: You’ve got to own it! You only have one life. Period. And it took me a long time to recognise my own power and strength.

LUX: And while it’s okay to flaunt it, it seems that women and men are judged differently when they do…
Mickalene Thomas: Men have much more access to self-expression as well as the freedom to navigate the world and go about doing whatever they want to do. I remember arguing with my brother and having to figure out how to deal with those complications and being very argumentative with my family about it: “So why is he able to do certain things and I can’t but that I do better?”

August 1977 (2019) by Mickalene Thomas. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020, photo Elisabeth Bernstein

LUX: Your work can be flamboyant, exuberant and cacophonous, with much layering and fragmentation. Is this a case of eye candy on the outside, but with deeper issues beneath?
Mickalene Thomas: These ways of telling stories, of thinking about how the women I depict collected their own histories, making sacrifices and compromises with little means and making the best of it. They went from one place to the other, transcending time and space.

Read more: Gaggenau presents new combi-steam ovens

LUX: So, it’s about stitching together a patchwork of life events?
Mickalene Thomas: A lot of the layering of material and patterning is about their own journeys, their own perseverance, their own struggles. The residue, the unearthing of time and space, is about their scars, and mostly it’s about the artifice of what you may think you see and the reality of it being another truth.

Installation view of ‘Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me’ at The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2018. Photo Luke Stettner, courtesy of Mickalene Thomas and The Wexner Center for the Arts.

LUX: The visual effect is powerful, and the nostalgia palpable.
Mickalene Thomas: There’s the power of the visuals, yes, and how we begin to believe our own truths or memories, whether or not there’s myth, and how they then become our reality. And so, as artists we create time capsules for histories. I find this very interesting, how people believe their own lies, their own truths, or their own memories or fantasies or dreams. These become reality to the point one might think: “Well, did that really happen?” When my mother passed in 2012, I came across photos that were almost a validation of my memory of childhood experiences. The photos encapsulated many moments for me – “Okay, now I have some evidence of what happened in my life. Now I have images from which to work. So now I have material to use for creative ideas and put the pieces of the puzzle together.”

LUX: So, above all, is your art a journey of research and self-discovery?
Mickalene Thomas: I think, as an artist, if you’re not doing self-discovery, then you’re really no longer making the art. It’s always a journey.

For more information visit: mickalenethomas.com

This article will also be published in the Summer 2020 Issue, hitting newsstands May 2020.

Pit Power Pendant

Parisian jewellery designer Anissa Kermiche takes inspiration from everyday objects and situations to create wearable pieces of art that are as bold and quirky as they are sensual and delicate. Since the launch of her first collection in 2016, Anissa continues to challenge the conventions and restrictions of traditional jewellery; her most recent collection in collaboration with Rejina Pyo draws on Alexander Calder‘s iconic mobiles with curved golden lines and hanging pearls. LUX asks Anissa 6 questions.

Anissa Kermiche

1. Who do you design for? Describe the Anissa Kermiche woman.

I wouldn’t say that my designs are just segmented to women, there are a lot of men that have worn my pieces before. Men love wearing the Precieux Pubis pendant! If I had one criteria though, it would have to be someone fun! In terms of my female customers, I am inspired by many women around me, women who are funny, successful and independent, it’s not just one. Lately, I have found that many of my customers feed me with inspiring thoughts too.

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2. You originally studied engineering and computer science – what led you to change career paths?

I got into the jewellery world quite late. After 5 years of working as an engineer for a big consultancy firm, I was about to be promoted, but I just couldn’t see myself becoming one of my managers and the lack of creativity made me sad. I then decided to ditch everything to move to London and study jewellery design at Central Saint Martins. I dreamt about creating my own label one day, but I didn’t know that it would be so soon after graduating.

3. As an independent designer, how do you compete with bigger jewellery brands?

Right from the start, I wanted to create jewellery that wasn’t seen anywhere else before. I felt like there was demand for cool, quirky and edgy pieces, but still in precious and fine materials. I have  been fortunate enough to work with some of the best known worldwide retailers including Net-a-Porter, MatchesFashion etc. who have provided me with a great platform for my brand.

Mobile Doré earring

4. What’s inspiring you at the moment?

Paris has always inspired me, because it is home. When I lived there, I took it for granted, but whenever I go back I get an inspired by everything and spend the journey home sketching. Paris is an open museum, everything has artistic value to me, from the rich architecture to the food to the luxurious boulevards.

5. Can you tell us more about the 3D printing process you use to create your jewellery?

CAD allows me to see the precision in my design, creating attention to detail. It helps me to under-stand the practicality: how to create not only  beautiful jewellery but also durable, functional pieces.

Read more: Geoffrey Kent on responsible and sustainable travel

For example, rings and earrings need to be durable and wearable, as they can easily get knocked. CAD allows you to see how heavy an earring will be in advance, so you will know that it will fit comfortable and look beautiful before you make them.

Manipulee Black Onyx Citrine earring

6. We’re very excited about your collaboration with Rejina Pyo. What was the creative process behind that particular collection and do you have any more collaborations in the pipeline?

Thank you! Working with such a talented designer like Rejina Pyo was such an honour. Myself and Rejina were both fond of each other’s work and working together came naturally.

We were both inspired by Alexander Calder’s mobiles and Bertoia, one of my favourite architects, and created pieces that can be worn as wearable art that coincide with both our design aesthetics.

anissakermiche.com

Guy Bourdin, Paris Vogue 1975, Chloé autumn-winter 1975 collection ©The Guy Bourdin Estate, 2017 / Courtesy A + C

Most people aren’t aware of Guy Bourdin’s close relationship with the fashion house Chloé, but between the late 50s and late 80s, the brand was interpreted through the lens of the French artist and photographer more than anyone else. The inaugural exhibition at the newly opened gallery space, Maison Chloé in Paris celebrates Bourdin’s wild and seductive world through a collection of emotionally charged images that challenge both stereotypes of femininity and fashion photography.

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Guy Bourdin, Paris Vogue 1970, Chloé spring-summer 1970 collection ©The Guy Bourdin Estate, 2017 / Courtesy A + C

In one image women lie draped languorously across a bed playing cards, whilst another depicts a hotel room cocktail party with a man in his underwear being chased out by a policeman in a background. Rather than pouting, staring with glassy indifference into the camera, the models are dramatically engaged in the scene creating an atmosphere that’s cinematic and completely captivating. Alongside the prints are the clothes and accessories Bourdin photographed as well as copies of the magazines the images originally appeared in, most often Vogue Paris, and a curation of Bourdin’s photographs for other fashion campaigns, including for French shoemaker Charles Jourdan. It’s an interesting insight into the development of Chloé’s dreamy, bohemian aesthetic, Bourdin’s creative vision and perspectives of mid-century women.

Millie Walton

“Femininities—Guy Bourdin” runs until 6th September 2017 at Maison Chloé, hotel particulier on 28 Rue de la Baume, Paris and re-opens during FIAC and Paris Photo from 18th October until 18th November 2017.