Taking backstage images at catwalk shows usually reveals more about a specific collection or designer than the more traditional images of models walking down the runway.
What happens in the backstage is indeed a chaotic spectacle within – or rather behind – another spectacle in which the models become secondary characters, surrounded as they are by a new set of neurotic protagonists that includes the designer, make up artists, hairstylists, representatives of the international fashion media, PR officers and so on.
I do not always like backstage photographs, especially when they don’t reveal any of the emotions that the moments preceding a catwalk show can trigger – from tension to fear – but only show models playing around and making cheeky faces at the camera, as I find them rather superficial portraits of an extremely complicated world and often do not reveal anything about the art and craft behind the actual designs.
This is mainly why I was rather skeptical about the recently published volume about Belgian designer Olivier Theyskens featuring images by Julien Claessens mainly taken in the backstage of catwalk shows from different seasons.
Yet The Other Side of the Picture (Assouline) – launched at the end of May at London's Liberty department store and presented in New York a few months ago – pleasantly surprised me since the images collected in it can be seen as little tales forming a wider fashion narrative.
The volume opens with a few images showing Theyskens working on patterns on the floor, pinning fabric on a dummy and shaping his designs.
The images regarding the various shows start with two collections by Theyskens, the 1999 and 2001 Spring/Summer seasons.
The former features images of models with their faces erased by veils wrapped around their heads, trapped inside hooded body suits or framed by suffocating masses of roses, while the latter includes images of some of Theyskens’s designs from a memorable collection that featured incredibly well-constructed pieces (such as coats that turned into skirts).
In quite a few images there is an emphasis on details: the camera seems to focus on the elements of the dresses or on body parts, such as hands relentlessly moving around the models.
Some shots are particularly evocative: veiled model Michaela Kocianova photographed during a Rochas catwalk show could easily be mistaken for a character out of Pasolini’s Medea.
Other images could instead inspire little stories: one of the photographs from the A/W 2006-07 Rochas collection shows Theyskens putting the final touches on a dress that arrived late for the show.
As Sally Singer highlights in the introduction, tension in the image is not produced by the faces of the designer or of the people around him, but by the way they are all gathered around the design and working on it.
Claessens in Theyskens’s words doesn’t run after the best-cut dress but “after the moment” and this image perfectly proves it.
“Claessens is not your usual backstage
snapper,” Singer states in her introductory essay. “His inclinations normally lead him to such
subjects as architecture and portraits of individuals encountered on
building sites, in bars and on the streets.”
Singer recounts in her essay how Claessens met Theyskens on the streets of Brussels while looking for the La Cambre Art Academy and how the two young men became friends through a shared passion for dark and gloomy atmospheres, sensitive moods and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula.
The journalist and fashion critic also highlights something very important: Claessens’s photographs seem to chronicle a transformation in styles and moods: the models featured in the book gradually transform turning from ethereal women to characters that seemed to have stepped out of a book about the Victorian era and finally to mutant aliens walking on gravity defying shoes.
It may take some time to see again Theyskens's own collections on a runway, though he recently announced a new collaboration with American label Theory, set to launch in Spring/Summer 2011.
Yet you can bet that, as soon as his own collections reappear on the runways, his brave, dreamy and
indomitable heroines will be back to charm, scare and frighten us, and they will possibly do so through Claessens's photographs.
Olivier Theyskens – The Other Side of the Picture is out now.
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