Celine’s creative director goes back to his first love — photography — in a collaboration for the rock documentary ‘Meet Me In The Bathroom’.
If fashion designers represented genres of music, there is no doubt that Hedi Slimane’s would-be rock n’ roll. It is not only the intrinsic way his designs slant toward the romantic and rebellious; his career itself is very intimately intertwined with how rock was revived in the early aughts, and he is integral to how that era was recorded via a medium no less evocative of rock’s intense emotions — a photo diary.
Photography was a part of him before fashion came into the picture, so this collaboration could not be more natural. The designer and creative director of Celine — who launched the photographic blog Hedi Slimane Diary in 2006 — partnered with the documentary ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ to produce a limited-edition concert poster, using photographs from Slimane’s archive.
Collaged haphazardly, the poster evokes the mood of what’s now being called the Indie Sleaze era, a time when photography did not differentiate between reality and “realities”; Slimane describes photography as his way of “keeping a record of everything that happens to (him)”, and said that this nostalgic style contains “a sort of melancholy that comes in relation to his pre-adolescence” — probably why his capturing of the “micro scenes” effortlessly carries the sombre undertone spirit of rock.
This is to celebrate the release of the movie in New York City and Los Angeles, which was directed by British filmmaking duo Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, and based on music journalist Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of the same name.
While this film chronicles the revival of New York rock in the mid-2000s — a movement helmed by bands like The Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and LCD Soundsystem — this period also overlaps with a significant time for Slimane.
As creative director of Dior Homme then, he had already been outfitting many of the era’s European groups and attending many of their concerts — a staple voice of the fashion and underground rock conversation since then.
It’s thus no surprise that his fashion workplaces have such a heavy emphasis on music, Slimane taking the opportunity to feature artists like Jack White, Gracie Adams, The Drums, and most recently Gustaf for their Spring Summer 2023 show. But we can’t help but feel the essence of rock from the very warehouses where icons and their iconic performances were birthed; rock is forever, and so is Slimane’s cemented footprint in its legacy.
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