How did you experience the presentation of your Spring-Summer 2021 collection for your brand, at the beginning of October?
We simply showed pictures. Everything went very well and I had very good feedback. But in terms of experience, it’s still strange. Normally, there’s adrenaline and a lot of pressure from the event, the public, and the community that’s gathered. However, for this collection, I worked very hard for a moment that lasted only ten minutes. The stressful moments took place before the shooting. Everything was done by our small team in our Parisian studio. We wanted everything to be perfect, but this presentation was much calmer than a fashion show.
Was there less stress?
It was more that the stress couldn’t be released after a runway show. Normally, after a fashion show, you want to go for a drink to relieve the stress, but in this case, we just sent the pictures by email, and that was it. Even if we want it to be perfect and we want to create emotion, 2D doesn’t provide what the real thing can offer in terms of emotions. When you look at the photos of a real fashion show in front of an audience, you can imagine yourself in the place of the audience. It’s pretty dull and different when there is no audience.
Can you tell us how Mylène Farmer inspired you?
During the confinement in March, I plunged back into my adolescence and rediscovered the love I had for Mylène Farmer and her world. At the time, I wasn’t trying to analyze it, but rediscovering my memories allowed me to understand how much she contributed to forging the adult I have become.
Since you relaunched your brand, how has your approach evolved?
My style evolves all the time. Between the time I stopped creating my own collections in 2002 and my relaunch in 2016, there was a long interval. Creatively, it was a kind of a way to reposition myself, through a search for identity, a link with the past in parallel with a quest for contemporaneity. We were really like a start-up, and we were starting to move away from that mode of operation. But with the arrival of the health crisis, I feel like a start-up, now more than ever. Over the years, we have adopted a particular model that suits me well and which has allowed me to adapt quickly to any situation. I feel very free, as expressed by my collection. We did everything ourselves in the atelier with a lot of passion and humor. We refocused and concentrated on what we could do without moving. So we used deadstocks, i.e. stocks of materials left over from old productions.