The Other Side of The Picture Olivier Theyskens

What is being understood, then, in Claessens’s photographs of Theykens’s work? The pictures give us a shadowy, supenseful, near-cinématic world that seems a million miles away from the backstage we are used to. There is nothing here of the chaotic, goofy, neurotic glamour that fashion narratives usually trade in. instead, the viewer is drawn into an unfamiliar, unexplained scenario where solitary figures inhabit private dramas and reveries, very often in an atmosphere of longing and tranquility. How could do many people working so hard and so fast, in such close priximity, be so lost in thought?

The first retrospective of Olivier Theyskens’s magical collections since Summer 1999 photographed back stage by his friends Julien Claessens. Published by Assouline with an introduction by Sally Singer

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