Benn98
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Fashion director Ylias Nacer doesn’t hail from conventional sartorial stock. ‘I was born in Paris but grew up in Djibouti, east Africa. I come from a family of diplomats, so not exactly what you would call artists,’ he jokes. For Nacer, early fashion inspiration was found close to home. ‘My grandfather was a respected philanthropist who had a precise protocol when it came to style,’ he remembers. ‘He was always impeccably dressed and very rigorous in his choices, wearing mostly white in Africa and hound’s tooth Arnys suits when in Europe. I guess that, in a way, we are the products of those images engraved in us from childhood,’ he muses. The young Nacer moved back to Paris in his teens to study industrial design, then build on the sartorial heritage drawn from his grandfather to join Vogue Hommes International – under the guiding hand of Olivier Lalanne – where he honed his skills for six years.
Appointed as GQ France’s fashion director last summer, Nacer’s signature style borrows from the world of photojournalism, creating fashion spreads that stand somewhere between editorials and documentaries, often featuring locals cast on location. Six months in, the results speak for themselves: an intergenerational shoot in Naples, a romp through the streets of Dublin with a group of local kids or a mystic retreat in Japan in the company of ‘real ascetic Yamabushi monks’. A quick Google search reveals that these Buddhist hermit monks meditate and train in nature in order to attain a form of mystical elevation, if not supernatural powers. Realism then, but the kind that doesn’t forget to make you dream. Nacer says about his job: ‘Being a fashion editor consists of making decisions constantly, so I can get to the heart of things’.
Words by Florent Gilles.
Matches of Fashion
