The Reinvention of Mugler
A Portrait of Nicola Formichetti’s Studio The new creative director at Mugler, fashion force par excellence Nicola Formichetti styled himself and his team for the first-ever portrayal of the Mugler studio. Varón spoke to the menswear quartet responsible for the reinvention of the old Parisian house.
By Anders Christian Madsen
Photographer Kacper Kasprzyk Fashion editor Nicola Formichetti All clothes Mugler autumn/winter 2011
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here are three sides to Nicola Formichetti. One is the private man, who doesn’t easily reveal details about his personal life. One is the creative director, who overlooks a small empire of positions including his govern at Mugler, which is the focus of this particular story. But I thought I’d start out with the third: the man best known to the world as creative director to Lady Gaga. Researching this story, I had to trail through countless celebrity and style blogs documenting Nicola’s history with the singer, her style evolution and the endless copycat accusations, which have clung to their collaboration. “Who’s not inspired by the legends?” Nicola says. “Janet Jackson and Madonna are incredible. Michael Jackson was amazing! If you don’t look at TV, magazines, and books, how can you create? I was brought up with certain artists, so it’s easy to say I was inspired by them. But they were inspired by people before them, who were inspired by people before them. They just happen to be the last people to do stuff before Gaga, so people compare us to them,” Nicola notes.
I’m nearing the end of a very long phone conversation with Nicola, during which I’ve come to learn that he’s unconditionally honest. It’s an utter delight for a writer – not because I’m waiting for a misstep, but because he’s not bullshitting me like most people in his position have been taught to do. In the weeks after my interview with Nicola, some quotes from a previous interview of his hit the blogs. He soon emailed me: “I get really sad when people judge me and think I’m snobby because of stuff they read on the internet, like stuff about old people or fat people that’s taken completely out of context. It gets blown out of proportion. It’s sad but I have to keep moving, and keep believing in what I’m doing.” A few weeks later, his communications director at Mugler, Alban Adam, chips in: “When Nicola talks to the press, he doesn’t change the way he talks. He just talks like he’d talk to his best friends. When he says something people think is provocative, it’s just him telling a story and being honest.” 70
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but they taught me in a very freestyle way, you know? They were like, ‘Believe in yourself and do whatever you feel like. We love you and we trust you.’ That’s what fashion was for me. And is.” If my peek into the worlds of Mugler and Formichetti over the past months has shown me anything, it’s that Nicola is a team player. Or rather, he truly cares about the people he works with, and he’s not in the business of taking all the credit either. “I want to shoot the menswear team in the autumn/winter collection,” he wrote to me in an email in the early stages of our project, which would profile the Mugler menswear team for the first time. Weeks later, on the phone, he’s laughing: “Basically, it was like, we wanted to do some pictures that we could use on Facebook.” I ask him why he didn’t shoot models. “I wanted to do something with the people I work with,” he says. Later, on another note, he tells me: “Mugler is a really chilled collaboration. I don’t decide everything. I’m a really good collaborator, and for me that’s when the magic happens. It would get boring and uptight if I did everything on my own. I love listening to everyone’s comments and developing things together. I really believe in that.”
Back on the subject of Gaga, Nicola concludes: “In short, no, we don’t have other people’s looks on the wall and we don’t try to copy anyone. That would be a stupid thing to do, no? Do people really think Gaga would go and look at a music video and say, ‘That’s a cool video, let’s redo that’? People only think that because that’s the only reference they have,” Nicola laughs. To those who know him from the mainstream media, his frankness precedes him. To those in fashion, his reputation is practically immaculate. It was a designer I was working with, who first mentioned Nicola Formichetti’s name to me. My answer: “Who’s she?” Needless to say, I was taunted for years on end for my fashion ignorance. When I arrived in London some eight years ago, Nicola’s allencompassing fashion reign was already going strong. He was a sort of Anna Wintour of young fashion and you were advised to bow low. Years later, when he’d become an international superstar and I thought I’d email him with a feature proposal on Mugler – the house of which he was now the creative director – I wouldn’t have dreamed how laid-back he’d be.
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f course, who needs to shoot models when your team has the looks of Romain Kremer (menswear designer), Alban Adam (communications director), and Matthieu Bredon-Huger (Nicola’s assistant)? Since Nicola handpicked them all in November 2010, the rather handsomely staffed, reinvented Mugler atelier has worked much like the small studio of a young designer. “The space we’re in is really beautiful. We look straight over at the Opera,” Alban tells me when I speak to the team in July. “But I think people might expect that we’re like—I mean, we don’t have an LVMH budget at all. We’re not 200 people. We’re like twelve or fourteen people who do everything. We’ve all known each other for over six months now so it’s kind of a little family, and we all help each other. Everyone does everything. One minute I’m setting up an appointment with Cathy Horyn and the next, I’m boxing up clothes to send out for a shoot. We’re all here to make it work,” he says.
When I got him on the phone a few weeks into our collaboration, it was a lot like talking to a friend. Of course at this point, I’d already heard rumours of Nicola’s rare approach to fashion behaviour. “I hear you’re nice. Nice in fashion,” I say wryly. “Oh really? That should be the title: I’m A Nice Person,” Nicola laughs. “I know there’s all that stuff in fashion but I don’t believe in it. Why do you have to be bitchy? I think it’s when you’re not happy or satisfied with yourself, you take it out on other people. I try not to think about all the bitchiness that’s going on, though. I’m just doing my thing with my friends and if people like it, great, and if they don’t, I don’t really care,” he says. Perhaps that’s what’s made Nicola one of fashion’s few superstars in the mainstream world: he genuinely doesn’t care about all the industry nonsense. “When we started work on Mugler, Nicola was the first to say, ‘Fuck it. Let’s do it our way and people will adapt or not’,” Alban notes.
“Matthieu, I found on Facebook. Alban, I cast a long time ago for a McQ campaign. Romain, I used to work with on his collections. I didn’t even have to think about it,” Nicola says of his team. (Sebastien Peigné, a former Balenciaga designer, was brought on as womenswear director.) Nicola was appointed creative director at Mugler just four months before the men’s shows in Paris. It would be a lie to say it didn’t come as a surprise, but to those in fashion who had followed his tireless endeavour to educate mainstream youth on the existence of the Thierry Mugler universe – by dressing Gaga in multiple archive Mugler pieces – it made total sense. Fashion, of course, is easily thrilled. Much harder is it to please the sceptical minds of its opinion-makers. And so, fashion took a seat and waited for Nicola’s triumph or fall. “We had to build everything from zero. The men’s show was, like, four months away so everything went so fast. I was worried about the schedule, but it was more exciting than stressful,” Romain tells me.
Nicola is in New York and I’m in London, and it’s hours before he’s set to accompany Gaga – as you call her – to the CFDA Awards. They’re both wearing head-to-toe Mugler, and Nicola and his team are prepping the outfits as I’m talking to him. With increasing intervals throughout our two-hour conversation, assistants interrupt us with urgentsounding questions. True to reputation, he addresses them in a polite manner, but with the same straightforwardness, which characterises
“Do people really think Gaga would go and look at a music video and say, ‘That’s a cool video, let’s redo that’?”
While the fashion studio part of the Mugler universe had to be recreated from scratch, the universe was very much there already. What Nicola and his team took over wasn’t some fusty old dinosaur collecting dust in the corner of the libraries of fashion’s ghost of seasons past. While Thierry Mugler may not have been on the radars of the suburban teenager population of the world, his existence and legacy certainly hadn’t been forgotten by the generation, who grew up with his vision and fell in love with fashion through him. Such as Nicola and his peers. On the phone to Nicola, I move towards the topic of Mugler himself. “I don’t know. I don’t really want to…” Nicola takes a deep breath. “For me he’s like God, you know? So I don’t really wanna… I don’t really want to know what he thinks. Of course I’d like for him to love it, but I don’t really want to…” It’s the only point during our conversation he truly weighs his words. This isn’t just a designer following in another designer’s footsteps. It’s a designer taking over the house of his biggest fashion idol.
his answers to my questions. “Put that with that. No. Yes. No. Thank you.” For as he tells me: “I never assisted anyone. So I never had that kind of hierarchy thing. Katy England and Alister Mackie both took me under their wing at Dazed & Confused, and let me do my thing. From day one, I had this freedom to express myself. I didn’t know anything 72
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“The men’s collection was going to be my first thing for Mugler,” Nicola says. I haven’t actually asked him the question yet – whatever the question is – but his approach to interviews, I quickly gather, is just to talk a lot. He doesn’t overwhelm you, though, and either way, his charismatic East London Americano accent with a twist of Japanese makes it hard to interrupt him. So I don’t. “I didn’t wanna do something really big. I wanted to concentrate on the clothes. We were making a great collection, but I felt it needed that final touch,” he says. The final touch was Rico – aka Rick Genest aka Zombie Boy – the Canadian tattoo enthusiast, who travels with a modern-day sideshow. If there had been any doubt as to Nicola’s competence – or vision for Mugler – the pre-show pictures of Rico, shot by Mariano Vivanco (in Montreal, due to the fact that Nicola’s human work of art discovery, at the time, didn’t even have a passport), quashed them like only a man tattooed to look like a skinned corpse could.
“For me he’s someone so high, but I’m not here to please him. If he doesn’t like it, it would make me sad but he’s not why I decided to take the job. The reason I changed the name to Mugler instead of Thierry Mugler was to make it less personal and more of a brand as opposed to a French couturier. I want it to become a global brand,” Nicola tells me. Thierry Mugler was born in Strasbourg in 1948. A dancer from an early age – a pursuit notably shared by Romain Kremer – his interest in stage costumes took him to Paris where he started working for a number of fashion houses. During the 1970s he designed several eponymous collections before opening his first shop in 1978. Throughout the 1980s, Mugler established a truly original signature, focusing on the sculpting of the female body, working with contrasts and highly sexual connotations. The 1990s saw his years of glory, not least with the introduction of an haute couture line and several fragrances.
Months after Rico had walked the Mugler runway and looked brilliantly blasé in a Gaga video, he and I were walking out of an airport together, trying to avoid the glaring eyes the crowds, to whom he was now a celebrity. “That’s the Nicola effect,” I thought to myself. “Before the clothes, we had to define the man. To me, Rico summed up everything. I knew what people were expecting me to do with Mugler: something a little bit Tron, like really techno and lights and computer games. But I wasn’t feeling that. Rico stood for beauty and the extreme. Gaga and him represent the same thing even though they’re from completely different backgrounds. They were meant to be like this,” Nicola says, echoing Gaga’s Born This Way mantra. “It’s like there’s a power within them forcing them to be the way they are. Working with these people on the launch of my first brand was very, very special. It’s fashion but it’s so much more than fashion. I wanted people to have that feeling of excitement that I used to have when I was younger and I was watching Michael Jackson’s videos. Entertainment,” he says.
Thierry Mugler’s shows were legendary, so much so that a new generation is often seen posting YouTube videos of them on Facebook. The man himself, an archetypal reserved artist, left the industry in 2003 amidst rumours he’d had enough of fashion. While Mugler still consults on fragrances for his old house, he doesn’t hold an official position as such in the company. I ask Alban, the PR who now holds the Mugler image in his hands, what he would do if Thierry called him up one day. “I would love to talk to him!” he exclaims in his Frenchly animated way. “I would love for him to come to the show. We invited him, but he couldn’t make it because he was in New York. Last season, I know he watched a streaming of the women’s show. One of the ladies who works with us has been here for over thirty years and has his number. So before the show, she called him up and said, ‘Gaga wants to talk to you!’ So Nicola and Gaga had him on the phone just before the show,” he says.
Much like a moving editorial, the autumn/winter 2011 show was a concentrate of the Formichetti/Kremer combo: rubber, transparency, fitted suits, creepers, studs, ripped jeans and whichever other dark elements a goth/punk/raver heart could wish for. Some looks were nearly purely styling, while others had a distinct Kremer-ish vibe to them. “It’s all about paradoxes and contrasts. Cheap and expensive. Light and dark. Old and new. Future and past,” Romain, whose eponymous line is currently on hiatus due to his work at Mugler, says of his signature. “I like to take something from somewhere and put it somewhere else. I like taking non-fashion things and putting them in a fashion context. It’s all about making people think about what they’re looking at, and making them think about what fashion is,” he notes. Since he first met Nicola in 2005, their universes have intertwined and complemented one another in a reciprocal air of luxury, trash and sex.
“It would get boring if I did everything on my own. I love listening to everyone’s comments and developing things together. I really believe in that.”
“When Nicola is in Paris, we spend a lot of time together getting inspired and talking about what we’re gonna do. It sounds stupid, but we’re really connected. I always get him and he always gets me,” Romain tells me. Due to Nicola’s schedule – next to Mugler, he’s still the fashion director at Vogue Hommes Japan, the creative consultant at Uniqlo, oh and there’s this singer he styles – he’s only at the studio a week each month. “I don’t need to be there every day. Of course I need to be there for fittings and choosing fabrics and all those things, but most things can be done online,” Nicola says, noting that both he and Romain draw the Mugler sketches. “Nicola and Romain are very spontaneous. If they come up with something, they’ll be like, ‘Let’s do it for tomorrow! We can make it!’” Alban laughs, reaffirming the optimistic spirit of the Mugler studio. “We’re all like this because of Nicola,” Matthieu, Nicola’s assistant, comments. “He puts a certain dynamic in the studio. He’s never mad. He’s never stressed out. So we have to be the same way. That’s the way it is,” he says.
Since Thierry Mugler’s departure from the house he created, his endeavours and whereabouts have been shrouded in the kind of mystery fashion thrives on. First he changed his name to Manfred. Then some morbid gossip was followed by genius rumours he was directing porn, before reports finally surfaced he was creating costumes for Beyoncé on her last tour. Today, Alban tells me, Thierry Mugler is working with the New York-based transsexual performance artist Joey Arias. As for the new Mugler: “I mean, it must be difficult for him to see his name being put in such a different context. Not that’s it’s that different. There are so many matching points between him and Nicola and him and Romain and him and Sebastien. But remember, Thierry didn’t get fired and his house didn’t close down. Of course it must be weird for him to see the change, but I think he’s quite progressive,” Alban comments. 76
I ask Matthieu what Nicola is like as a boss. “You’re kidding?” he says in a French and adorable way. “It’s a real question? He’s amazing! Working with him never feels like work,” he exclaims. And I don’t even think he’s just trying to flatter his boss – that’s the most amazing part. 77
“For me Thierry is like God, you know? So I don’t really wanna... I don’t really want to know what he thinks.” Like Nicola has already established, his – in fashion – rare disposition can be accredited to the fact that he never assisted anyone. But as Alban points out: “He also comes from a Japanese background, which means he’s very polite”. Nicola Formichetti was born in Tokyo in 1977 to a Japanese mother and an Italian father. After travelling back and forth between Japan and Italy for most of his childhood, he moved to London at the age of eighteen. Today, he lives in New York. When I ask him what nationality he is, he says he can’t answer the question. “I’m neither of my nationalities. It was a problem when I was little because I never felt like I fit in anywhere. I always felt like an outsider,” he tells me.
stuff. Maybe that’s a New York thing. They all do that over here,” he says, referring to his new base. Since he tore up the firmly established roots of his London reign and basically built a new one in New York – Gaga styling gig in tow – Nicola has undergone an almost madefor-biography-writing morph from fashion stylist to household name. “I never really cared about fame and stuff. It’s a strange feeling. All of a sudden I have all these followers. Sometimes people want to take pictures with me in the street,” he says, baffled-sounding. “It’s all happened because of Gaga and Mugler, and I’ve had to go with it. But if I can inspire those young people, why not? They give me ideas—you know, they’ll be like, ‘What about putting Gaga in this kind of shoe?’ It’s great! People in fashion are so secretive. With these people, everything is so open and collaborative,” Nicola says.
“If I was in Japan, I looked different – and my name is different to Japanese people, so in school I was immediately labelled ‘the foreigner’ – and in Italy it was the same, because I looked Japanese. I always tried to blend in. I remember I used to hate if we were in Italy and my mum would talk to me in Japanese in front of other people. Then, when I moved to London, I met all these international people and realised there were other people like me. And I started believing in myself more,” Nicola says. While his mother may not have understood the insecurities of her bi-nationality son, it was thanks to her that an understanding of fashion was instilled in Nicola at an early age. “She loves Versace,” he notes excitedly. “My mum is very stylish. She’s Japanese but she dresses like an Italian lady. So for me she was always an inspirational person. She introduced me to all the magazines and brands. She was very important to my career. I never went to fashion school or anything like that. I learned fashion from people like her,” he says.
“In a way we’re all on the same level now, with all the blogging and everything that’s going on. No one is more important or less important than anybody else anymore. I love how young people are taking over now, and attending fashion shows and so on. I know a lot of people in fashion don’t like it and wanna stop it, because ‘these people haven’t done their duty’ and they haven’t yet become some boring editor. I don’t believe in that,” Nicola tells me. It’s quite clear we’ve hit a nerve. Nicola’s work, his inspirations; his universe all have one common denominator: youth. “Young people inspire me a lot. Their energy. For me, the most important thing with Mugler was to get a younger and broader audience to know that Mugler existed. I was talking to young people and they didn’t even know what Thierry Mugler did. They didn’t even know the name and those who did, knew it from a perfume. We put the name out there. Gaga made it global. You know, Mugler was the number one trend topic on Twitter,” he says.
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ask him one of my favourite questions when speaking to creative directors: “What do your parents think about what you do?” Nicola: “They’re really supportive of me.” He pauses. Then goes: “I mean, they don’t really know what I do but…” He laughs. “I mean, they never really understood. I tried to explain a long time ago… but it’s difficult. You know, I’ll be like, ‘I’m opening a pop-up store next month.’ And they’ll be like, ‘Why?’” he says, mimicking the voice of an unconvinced parent. Of course when young Nicola packed his bags for London, his parents were under the impression he was heading off to architecture school. Little did they know their son would quickly become a nightly regular on London’s party scene, supporting a lifestyle of going out with shop jobs rather than university lectures. In 1998, at 21, Nicola landed a consultancy job at the fashion store The Pineal Eye. Soon he was doing visual merchandising for the Japanese-owned shop – a move, which attracted the eye of London’s key fashion players.
“I think what we’re doing is an updated, digital era Mugler,” Alban notes when we discuss Nicola and his team’s reinvention of the house. Digital is a key word in the understanding of Nicola’s success. In his channelling of all things youth-related and his work with one of the biggest pop stars of the modern ages – and her PR machine, not least – the appreciation of digital promotion and social networking practically runs through his veins. “Because of Twitter and Facebook, I get to meet all these people online, who become like your friends. If I do something that’s shit, they’ll be like, ‘That was shit.’ You know? I respect them because they already believe in what I do, so if they tell me something is horrible, I listen. We couldn’t do that when I was fifteen. If you wanted to talk to, like, Michael Jackson your only option was to send him a letter. Now, it’s different. Gaga actually talks to her fans. Obviously I don’t have the same following as her… I have about 80,000 followers on Twitter,” he says, almost self-effacingly.
In 2000, Katy England – the then-fashion director at Dazed & Confused – became so impressed with Nicola’s work for the shop that she invited him on board her magazine to curate a monthly visual column. It was a move that would lead to the creation of the world’s perhaps biggest stylist. “I’m what?” Nicola shouts. “Really? Am I? No, not me. There are so many amazing ones,” he says. “It’s between you, Katie Grand, Arianne Phillips…” I offer. “Rachel Zoe is the most famous one, no?” Nicola says deadpan, and continues: “So anyway, I think Katie is incredible. She’s always the first person to text me about stuff— she’s always been so supportive. Arianne is a fucking genius. I respect Melanie Ward, Joe McKenna, and Grace Coddington so much, and of course my styling teachers Katy England and Alister Mackie. But come on, they’re like legends! I’m just starting.” Nicola worked for Dazed & Confused for nearly a decade – alongside many other titles – and was made creative director of the magazine in 2008. That same year, he met Lady Gaga.
In the lead-up to his spring/summer 2012 men’s show for Mugler, based in part on Greek Gods, Nicola released a short film to the anticipative masses, which have become perhaps the most vital part of his impressive fan base. (He also released a version on XTube.com for another part of his fan base, but that’s a story for a different feature.) A stunning preview of what was to come in the show most of them could only attend via an online stream, it signified his willingness for absolute inclusiveness. “I don’t believe in that whole elitist thing. I wanna share with people and collaborate with people. It’s not about me, it’s about the whole world,” he asserts. As for the new generation of stylists, Nicola tells me he finds one of them particularly promising. “Robbie Spencer. Everyone says he’s a little me,” Nicola says. “I always tell him, ‘Everyone says you’re the next me so you better do some fucking amazing stuff.” +
“You’re looking very thin these days?” I ask Nicola in my best editor-ofa-women’s-page voice. “Yeah, because I started being really healthy. I started going to acupuncture a lot. I’m really into Chinese herbs and 78
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Romain Kremer Menswear Designer
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efore Romain Kremer was a designer, he was a dancer. “I did a bit of everything. I still love dancing. Whether it’s in a club or in a theatre,” the menswear designer at Mugler says, noting he’s not one for the Paris clubbing scene. (“You know what I really enjoy? A good cyber-goth party.”) Born near Toulouse in 1982, Romain’s youth was characterised by his parents’ liberal upbringing. At fifteen, he chose art over dance and enrolled at Duperré. After graduating, Romain set up his eponymous label and was honoured with an award at the Hyères International Fashion Festival in 2005. He soon received a call from Nicola Formichetti, who would go on to style his shows. “He’s like an extension of my hand. Our tastes are so similar. I’m not very good at making things so he does it for me,” Nicola comments. Next to Mugler, Romain still oversees his own label, which is on pause while Mugler establishes a solid footing. “I don’t really care if it’s for Mugler or for me. As long as I get to make things, I’m happy,” Romain says.
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Alban Adam Communications Director
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former model, Alban Adam and Nicola Formichetti met when Nicola cast him in a McQ campaign in 2006. “He lived on Kingsland Road and I was on Hoxton Square, and one day he said, ‘Come over, we’re doing a casting for this thing’. He’s always very vague about these things,” Alban notes. Born close to Strasbourg in 1980, at 18, Alban started doing PR for Charles Anastase before moving to Cristofoli, where he spent three years. Bored of the Paris scene, he relocated to London and spent some time partying before settling at Arena Homme Plus. “They told me a friend of theirs upstairs needed an assistant. And so, I ended up assisting Katie Grand on POP,” he recalls. He went back to Paris and re-entered PR, and one day Nicola rang. “He was like, ‘Do you wanna deal with this communication thing at Mugler?’ I was like, ‘Okay’. And he was like, ‘Okay.’ And that was it,” Alban says. “He’s my brain. Everything I think about the brand, he articulates into reality. And he’s not a boring PR person, which is nice,” Nicola comments.
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Matthieu Bredon-Huger Assistant to Nicola Formichetti
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e’s my little brother. The stylish little French brother I never had,” Nicola Formichetti says of his 21-year-old assistant. Raised in the town of Vendôme close to Paris, Matthieu Bredon-Huger moved to the city to study photography in 2008. “We met on Facebook, actually. I’d seen some of Nicola’s work from Dazed & Confused, and I really liked the styling so I wrote to him on Facebook and we talked for a while,” Matthieu recalls. Bored of his studies, he jumped at the chance of assisting Nicola in the weeks leading up to the first men’s show in January 2011. It was a move that would land him a position as Nicola’s chief aide at Mugler. Since, he has played the part of clubbing friend, fitting model and casting director (he’s a fan of Yuri Pleskun), as well as key researcher for Mugler’s erotic short film for spring/summer 2012. “I was always torn between fashion and pornography. So I decided to merge the two,” Matthieu notes.
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