Parallax

HEDI SLIMANE

parallax

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Though he’s too self-effacing to admit it, Hedi Slimane no doubt appreciates, if only internally, his standing as one of the most exalted menswear designers in the world, not to mention in his label-lashed homeland of France, where the streets may as well be paved with gold thread. From his Dior Homme collections to an array of extra-curricular projects, he’s proven he can do no wrong. Today, Slimane speaks softly but carries a big shtick, as he, uncharacteristically chatty, opens up to Parallax about everything from his club kid past to a future women’s line.

Ever-exacting, Slimane fastidiously adjusts our paper placemats at Café Gitane—a packed local hang-out in New York’s NoHo neighborhood where we catch breakfast—so that they remain exactly one inch apart, their scalloped edges never touching. On this, the morning after Bastille Day, he takes a blunt approach to answering my first blurry pre-coffee question—something about how he celebrated his country’s most important national holiday. “I forgot about it,” he deadpans. “I’m on American time.”

For Slimane, this is not a slight, just nonchalance. “I love Paris,” he qualifies, “but at the same time, I’m really bored in Paris. It’s too grown up. It’s not so much the energy I’m looking for.”

Nor does Berlin hold much interest anymore. For three years, Slimane’s name was synonymous with Berlin, the title subject of a book of his photographs and his home away from home where he owned a studio (now sold) at KunstWerke. With its suitably minimal atmosphere, the elite art space and its shabby-cool young students claimed inspiration for more than one Dior Homme collection, stirring a keen interest in the German capital among the international fashion set. “It’s not that I’m over Berlin,” he adds, “I like it a lot, but I’ve been traveling and experimenting so much, it feels like a different time for me now.”

Tall, pinstripe-thin and single, Slimane is a catch. He is wearing head-to-ankle Dior Homme and a pair of beat-up Converse sneakers. The epitome of smooth, he gives the waiter our breakfast order while my misbehaving tape recorder requires all of my fussy attention. Once fixed, he continues, “I could live here. I would get a place in New York, except, with what I’m doing, it’s really happening in Paris. Besides, I’m really bad with homes. I’m not interested in doing my home. But I could easily live in a hotel.”

And why not? Would it be so incomprehensible for Slimane to schlep his expansive record collection Stateside and set up occupancy at The Mercer, his New York hotel of choice going on ten years? Afterall, he routinely stretches out his visits to Manhattan as long as possible. And with reason.

Although Slimane is officially in town on business, for someone whose thumb never lifts from the rapid pulse of the young and painfully cool—despite that he’s perpetually in flight—that involves a substantial amount of off-duty observation. Alone, he’s known to roam the city’s streets and avenues, neighborhood by downtown neighborhood, watching and absorbing so intently that the notion of going incognito never appears to cross his mind.

“I love to just walk around and hang out. I’m a major hangout type of person. I don’t care about being recognized,” he laughs off as patrons subtly gawk even in this shoebox of a cafe. “Fashion designers think they are famous. In fact, they are not, not even Calvin Klein. There’s only one famous fashion designer and that’s Karl.”

Karl Lagerfeld, the celebrated designer of Chanel, Fendi and his own label, Lagerfeld Gallery, created an indelible fashion moment several years back when he shed forty pounds so he could, he famously remarked, return to the svelte physique of his athletic youth and squeeze into the crisp, tailored cuts of his friend’s creations. The lean, mean fitting machine has been ensconced in a black Dior Homme suit ever since.

“Hedi’s attitude is right and what he does and designs is about attitude,” Lagerfeld explains. “From his generation, he expresses modernity better than any other menswear 01

designer. But he is much more than a designer. He has an eye for total modernity. Photography and design are part of that. His vision is totally now in the three different, but not so different, areas. And few designers have more than a double vision of what is going on and know how to translate it into designs and images.”

“I’m very happy not only because we are close friends,” Lagerfeld continues, “but also because I am his publisher at 7L. His books represent his vision so perfectly. He works on every level of what makes a book special: the layout, the lettering, the printing, the size and the photos. He has a great talent for books. He gives his stamp to everything.”

This is, perhaps, what most sets Slimane apart from other designers. With punk-ish models clipping down the runway in dark fitted suits or trailing, intentionally, pieces of raiment behind their rail-thin chassis—spawning punny headlines such as “Black Is Slimane”—the heart-skipping theatricality of a Dior Homme collection can’t mask a multifarious créateur who’s equally, if not more, comfortable traversing the worlds of music, art and interior design.

With ample sky-blue peepers conveying equal parts intensity and bonhomie, Slimane is most animated when he speaks about his “projects,” some of which fall under the aegis of Dior Homme, others functioning as outgrowths from it, and still others entirely distinct. Yet they all share that inimitable Slimane burnish, a quality borne out of a sincere delight in the creative process. Not only does each Dior Homme boutique, which he micro-orchestrates, feature dressing rooms designed by renowned artists such as Ugo Rondinone, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Pierre Huyghe, but he’s constantly adding to the Dior Homme merchandising oeuvre, having just put out a trio of colognes and, coming this fall, a men’s watch priced into the next galaxy.

“I love so much to do projects,” Slimane reiterates, in charming word reversal. “I have no intention to ever stop doing fashion. I really love it. But to always be concentrated on one thing? I’m not sure I want that. I love so much to create different things.”

Even big-ticket items get the Slimane once-over. After breaking his contract eight months ago with Cappellini, claiming the high-end Italian furniture-maker was “too procedural and slow,” he was called up by none other than Rei Kawakubo. Comme des Garçons’s always-three-stepsahead designer wanted Slimane to apply his singular vision to a new line of furniture sold exclusively in London at her soon-to-open Dover Street Market, the highly-anticipated, multi-vendor experiment in mass collaboration. The extremely limited-edition endeavor (seven designs, ten pieces each) embodies the Slimane aesthetic by utilizing only hand-crafted ebony and stainless steel. “In the tradition of arts décoratifs,” Slimane describes, “the furniture transposes French social conventions of the 17th and 18th centuries into a minimal vocabulary for today.”

And then there are the books. Slimane’s third and latest, Stage, is a collection of black-and-white photographs he snapped while touring, as costume designer, with bands ranging from the Rolling Stones and David Bowie to Air and Franz Ferdinand. Critically-acclaimed, the tome is an adroit synthesis of Slimane’s dual graphic and humanistic sensibilities, and his new-found affection for rock ‘n’ roll, a departure from the beeps and whirrs of electronic music he once espoused. (Select photos from Stage can soon be seen as a video installation at the Almine Rech gallery in Paris.)

Though he has no plans yet for a fourth book, he’s still

documenting bands and, when asked, says a sequel is not out of the question.

For the iPod-wielding Slimane—who designed a black leather case for the little gizmos long before the onslaught of imitators—dressing musicians holds a keen fascination that others reserve for Hollywood’s well-trod red carpet.

Always diplomatic, he says he’s honored to have dressed big-screen royalty, including Brad Pitt (for his wedding) and Catherine Deneuve, as well as personal faves Ewan McGregor and Orlando Bloom. But, for Slimane, it’s about music. “Mostly, I love to dress Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand), the Libertines, Kim (Gordon) and Thurston (Moore) from Sonic Youth and Beck. Everything Beck wears looks so casual and natural,” he gushes, before another check of the placemats. “I especially like the transformation just before going onstage. That’s the moment when they become rock stars.”

Slimane’s own transformation into a star began early. Although he was enrolled at the prestigious Ecole du Louvre, majoring in art history, he claims he was restless and looking for a diversion from the “ladies in pearls” mentality he encountered there. Enter nightclubs. Slimane, “a major club kid” (though not of the circus-act variety), says he went out every night for years, finding inspiration in fashion, particularly in the men’s collections of Yohji Yamamoto in the 80s. He elucidates, “(Yamamoto) had strong concepts for men’s fashion, but in the end it was not just about the concept, but about a balance. He had a very focused philosophy, but the clothes were still wearable. That’s very important to me still.”

From there, Slimane’s early and sudden rise is fairly welldocumented, but, for the uninitiated, it goes something like this. Through a series of fortuitous introductions (beginning with the fashion consultant Jean-Jacques Picart, largely responsible for the success of Christian Lacroix, and Christophe Girard, now the cultural minister of Paris), Slimane met living icon Yves Saint Laurent and YSL chief Pierre Bergé. But, in what could have become one of fashion’s most regrettable missed opportunities, Slimane says those first few steps were a hard sell. “Picart kept pushing me into design, but I really didn’t want to do it. I never wanted to go into design,” he discloses. “Then one day he asked if I would just like to meet Pierre Bergé. I did, and he hired me.

But it’s not like they really needed a designer. Why would I have been chosen to go into something like that? I think it was because of the way I was thinking at the time.”

Slimane took baby steps at first. “The second season they asked me to do a little presentation. It was only two models in twenty looks set in an 18th century French salon. It was shown to only about five people, including Suzy Menkes, Carine Roitfeld, Hamish Bowles, Jim Moore from GQ, and Le Figaro editors. It was really nice, really couture. It was very prudent that I didn’t start right away with a big show.

I needed time to develop it. I had to first make it known where I was going. For example, I was not into buff bodies, like big 80’s bodies.”

He’s referring to of one his calling cards: his choice of male models. Rarely plucked from the circuit of professional mannequins ubiquitously appearing on runways stretching from New York to Milan, Slimane’s models—whom he used to nab exclusively from the streets of Berlin—possess, “something chemical, an energy. I’m more interested in magnetism than flesh. I’m not into the traditional idea that a man has to be manly.”

Tokyo, Japan 2008

With this and other subversive tactics, it took only six months for the then 27-year-old Slimane to go from assistant to head designer at Saint Laurent Homme, hitherto a less-than-gatecrashed slot on the show schedule. But as speedily as Slimane forged ahead in rebuilding the men’s division of the august label into a must-steal ticket, he ran into a roadblock. “I found such a complex situation with licensing at Saint Laurent. When I started, the house was like a sleeping beauty. There was no personality. There was no way for the house to really show what it could be. It was really horrible.”

Three years later, in 1999, when Tom Ford rode in from Italy on the back of Gucci Group and annexed Saint Laurent ready-to-wear, Slimane decided to call it quits. “I was

really sad because I loved very much to be around the original house,” he says. “They were really wonderful people.

Difficult, but so amazing, so true. But it was my choice to leave. I could have stayed, but I felt the new house would just become a branding opportunity. I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. They (Gucci Group) were trying to tell me, but I couldn’t feel for what they had in mind. As a result, I thought ‘Let’s get out of here.’”

And get out, he did. Although Ford offered him his own line under the auspices of Gucci, and Prada offered him its Jil Sander line, it was LVMH chief Bernard Arnault’s offer of Dior Homme that made the cut. “Although Dior has a wonderful history of couture, it has never been applied

to menswear. There wasn’t a men’s vocabulary already in place. That was the deciding factor for me.”

Slimane’s debut outing at Dior Homme was nothing short of a tectonic shift, a hit of seismic proportions that had even Yves Saint Laurent himself applauding, in a rare public appearance, leaving Ford without his support. Sleeveless shirts, architecturally strict blazers, black leather straps and military overtones made their first of many subsequent appearances. Vaguely gothic but faithfully Edwardian in cut, the collection was an entirely fresh proposition for men.

“I am not at all into traditional technique,” proclaims Slimane, who also does not rely on stylists, directors or even 02

Tokyo, Japan 2008

a line-up backstage. “Dior Homme is not a construction of the mind, but a gut feeling—almost non-design. For me, it’s so much about the way people wear clothes, the way they behave, not so much about the clothes themselves. In France, it’s called le porté. It’s a very old-school way of dressing based on how the clothes fall on the body. I work on this natural level of understanding clothes. It comes from getting so into my own world and chasing my own moods. I pay attention to movement, the way the clothes translate on the body, even the way they translate to a girl.

Tokyo, Japan 2008

“Actually, I’ve been thinking about a women’s line of my own,” he divulges. “I have to find the right way to do it, though, and I’m not in a hurry to do anything. I’ve gone through a lot of studies, business plans and investment plans, and I have lots of offers, but I’m very protective with the idea, especially if I decide it should be under my name.

At that point, the issue of privacy comes into play.”

The painfully shy Slimane, who he says, as a kid, “was completely quiet, almost autistic, and still am sometimes,” carries a lot of stock in privacy. Not that it’s stopped the press from taking ill-informed jabs. Though he gets off better than most, the nothing-but-benevolent designer has been dogged by persistent rumors of a fashion feud with John Galliano, his women’s counterpart at Christian Dior, a notion at which he scoffs, but remains dignified. “What does not bother me is how people see a collection, because it’s subjective. From the set to the music, which is composed, and even to the casting, which takes place over six

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months, I have to accept the consequences if it sucks. But the press does get to me when it comes to integrity, and that includes my relationships with other people.

“My integrity is most important to me,” he continues, wrapping up the subject. “I don’t talk about this much, but I was an intern at Martin Margiela when I was a kid, at almost the beginning of the house. And for me he was the original one. For me, he invented integrity.”

Ironically, it was the field of journalism, with a political emphasis, that held Slimane’s interest before those fateful, pearl-menacing art history courses at L’Ecole du Louvre.

It’s still his favorite part of the day, he says, “to wake up in my Left Bank apartment at 7:30 am (not that he likes it, but he lives in a place that’s very light), go to the local cafe and read the morning papers. I love newspapers and magazines. I like to feel in touch.” In case you’re wondering, he has no intention of entering politics one day. In fact, the question drew the biggest guffaw of the morning.

very important to try to understand the time you are living in, to be a part of the present. I always just try to know the spirit of the time.” How would he like people to remember his work? “I don’t know, it would be very presumptuous of me to think about it. It’s only when you look back years and years later that you can see somebody’s work clearly.”

Suddenly, a spark. “There’s one thing I’m really militant about. And that’s trying to get more people interested in men’s fashion, and studying and teaching men’s fashion.

I’m really happy to see more menswear lines coming out from other designers. More people creating men’s lines will make the whole industry better. Paris will benefit.”

If not, there’s always New York.

For the record, Vanity Fair ranks as his favorite glossy, not least of which because “they’re very courageous for what they do (exposing Bush). The French hate the idea that Bush has created such a misunderstanding with the American people, creating an abyss between our two countries.

And we hate when we hear that your government has to tell Americans to be careful. It’s really horrible.”

“But with anything you do,” he waxes philosophical, “it’s 04