Right now, we’re dancing. But we’re only dancing, in the joy of clichés and the overjoy of not giving a damn. We’re on the edge.
For Paris Fashion Week Online SS22, GAMUT unveils D’une heure bleue à une autre (nous n’avons rien fait de grave), a video developed and created in collaboration with Arnaud Idelon and Carlos Franklin, with the support of DICRéAM (CNC), FHCM and DEFI. With this second video project — after Kerosene Party (PFW Online SS21) — the Parisian collective reaffirms its position as a cultural and militant laboratory at the crossroads of fashion and the arts.
The lockdowns stripped fashion of one of its very reasons for existing: wearing a look for a specific event, in order to stand out and make a personal statement that we can’t express every day. Likewise, the health crisis has pushed GAMUT to question the way that it presents itself to the world. After considering several technical solutions, the collective agreed on one: 360° video, a favourite tool of director and artist Carlos Franklin. A process that reproduces reality by imitating the subjective point of view and that dusts off the fashion show experience by giving it new depth.
D’une heure bleue à une autre (nous n’avons rien fait de grave) is based on the tale Le Contre-Jour by Arnaud Idelon, itself inspired by the festive approach dreamt up by GAMUT to shoot its SS20 campaign. The text describes an after-party organised in the furnace of the Garage MU Fest. The event is seen through the eyes of a myriad of characters, an array of scopophilic gazes on the festive chaos, imbued with the choice of vision, focus, rhythms and attention. This approach is reflected in the experience of the viewer, who is also immersed in the party thanks to the 360° video.
The first phase of the project, the video recording, took place in the northern plot of La Station — Gare des Mines. Submerged in a party pulsing to original music by JAZZBOY and F/cken Chipotle, 14 muses dance in full sunlight in the middle of a huge empty lot. An inclusive and lovingly chosen cast representing an entire panel of the underground night scene. Performers, DJs, artists, dancers, models… These muses played a role in the creation of the collection itself, as well as the redirections of the story and staging: each outfit was tailor-made, following interviews between the muses, the author and GAMUT during the weeks before the shoot. A dialectic, individualised and horizontal approach to fashion creation, centred on the person wearing the garments.
The collection that sprang from these micro-collaborations interprets the GAMUT universe through the external vision of these 14 people. The pieces, often hybrid (leather accessory jacket, corset dress, dungaree suit, etc.), highlight the artisanal work, from hand-knitting and recurrent embroidery to tailored stitches, bordering on fine art. One example is a harness decorated with ceramic horns by Hélène Mourrier, worn by the artist herself in the video. Faithful to its obsessions, GAMUT created the majority of the collection from leftover fabric and second-hand pieces, echoing the drops of one-of-a-kind pieces launched this year for its community.
Several universes and artistic disciplines collided to give shape to D’une heure bleue à une autre (nous n’avons rien fait de grave), which invites the viewer to enter an immersive transmedia experience that melds fashion, literature, music, performance and digital arts – and the imagery of festive nights, put on hold since March 2020.
Arnaud Idelon is an author, art critic and radio host. This night owl probes the power of the party to bring it to life in fragments, sound poetry, radio creations and performances. He has written two novels (Nuits d’Achille, 2019 and Tolède, 2020), an essay (Politiques du Dancefloor, 2018) and the tale Le Contre-Jour, which he wants to exist in a form that transcends the book-object: in magazines, on social networks and — a just reward — in the form of a party itself. He works with the 16AM collective, which he founded in 2020 to use as an autonomous artistic medium: a fiction shared by the community of a single night.
Carlos Franklin is an artist and filmmaker trained at the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia and then at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in France. His work revolves around wandering, not only human, but also between disciplines, between the possibilities of thought, creation, memory, images, writing and worlds in order to analyse contexts, languages and historic legitimisations of reality, as well as their encounters and intrinsic power games.