New wave by Jo Ann Furniss of The Independent
Sep 20, 2003
(Menswear insiders talking about their favorites, you can read the full article
here and
here.)
Image 1. V Magazine `0' issue 1999
Willy Vanderperre
The first thing that I think about as a photographer is that I am handling a human being. You have to have a feeling for the person in front of you, it's their aesthetic that interests you. It's not like I want to transform that person into somebody else. It's a search for a certain kind of purity, almost an intensification of who they are. If you talk about Robbie, you tend to use superlatives, everything becomes bigger. As a person he's beautiful, he would sum up the word beauty for me. If I'm going to clarify what makes me interested in a person it's a sense of their belonging to something. That's where the romance is I think. It could be past, present or future, there's no time zone around it, they don't even belong to a certain kind of group, they are just significant in some way. That's what I consider beautiful and Robbie has that, he almost vibrates it.
Olivier Rizzo
This image and the others that went with it were taken the same afternoon in our flat in January 1999. Raf [Simons] did that amazing collection with the big, black capes. We shot it about a week after the show. We asked Robbie to model. It was very relaxed really, we were just hanging around, not really planning a concept, not like a regular shoot, we just wanted to see where it would go. I felt it was quite nice to have pieces of the collection with Robbie's own clothing. Then at a certain point I thought about Mickey Mouse, I don't know why I thought about it. Personally, I'm very much into old Mickey Mouse images from the Forties and Fifties and have quite a collection of them on T-shirts. At a certain point it was getting very doomy but still very romantic, I thought about putting one of my mouse T-shirts with one of Raf's pieces. Then Peter Philips said he wanted us to wait around while he tried something. Twenty minutes later he came back with Robbie and that amazing make-up was on his face. At that point he was just wearing some vintage black jeans - my favourite staple that I still use in a lot of shoots - and one of Raf's dinner-jackets. That look just stands for what I really like in men's fashion; a young, handsome man who is quite sure of his presence, a simple stance, a beautiful daylight picture, an amazing tailored dinner-jacket with his own vintage sweatshirt and tight jeans. And the weird thing is, the whole lot blends together with the strange, children's cartoon on his face. f Peter Philips
During that shoot, Olivier combined Raf's clothes with vintage, so in a sense, that's what I did as well. It was becoming dark and gothic, almost depressing - and that day I wasn't in a depressing mood. I got inspired by the styling, this Mickey Mouse on one of the T-shirts. I didn't tell Olivier and Willy what I was going to do, because I knew if I said, "Oh I'm just going to paint Mickey Mouse on Robbie's face," they would definitely say "no" because, well, it sounds stupid. So I said, "Just give me 30 minutes while Robbie and I go off into the make-up area" - that's their kitchen by the way. I draw a lot so I knew how to play with the perspective; I wanted to keep it to three quarters of Robbie's face, I knew where to put the mouth and the eyes, so that Robbie's eyes became Mickey's eyes. A lot of people don't really see the mouse on first sight, they just see some sort of bizarre, Kiss-style make-up. Then suddenly you can see it and this naive, very American image becomes something quite twisted and insane which completely fits with the story. We all felt it was quite special; it could only have been done on that day with that boy.
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