辞表と勿れ DELUSION TO HEDI SLIMANE

DELUSION TO HEDI SLIMANE

Hedi Slimane, the revolutionary of fashion who was called a genius. I like everything he makes and shoots. As a designer in Asia, there are very few ways to find out about him, and the more I find out about him, the more he is wrapped in a mystery, and looking at the black clothes he makes and the monochrome photos he shoots gets me excited at how his bold activities, which are synonymous to rock, will expand in the future. Speaking of Rock, he takes photos of rock music live performances and has released a photo album of them called Rock Diary. They are mono- chrome and have very bold inks, and the photos still feel so alive that I can almost hear the breath of the performers in the moment. It is one of my personal favorites when it comes to Hedi’s photo albums.

One day, I was daydreaming about Hedi and imagined what if he were an Asian born on an island nation like me, a normal person that everyone can relate with, has a family, and maybe a daughter, who says to him “I want to make an album like yours, Papa,” I wonder what he would do? I don’t have a daughter, so what am I even thinking about? you might say, but I think so much about Hedi that such imaginations blossom.

There was no stopping my daydreaming. As his daughter is still young, they would not do photos, so it might just be an alphabet card of A~Z that she could comprehend. He would want to make it monochrome, but his daughter might say she wants it to be colorful instead. However, Hedi would probably be adamant about keeping a consistent format like Rock Diary instead of just following whatever she says. Although it’s an album, it would probably be more simple, like folded paper.

They would probably have some story for the A~Z motif, and the context of him laughing and enjoying the creative process with his child will likely also be inserted together with the motif. It will be simply written by hand and become a book that is so much more colorful than Hedi expected. As I imagined such a scene while continuing this work as my heart led, it resulted in something totally different from Rock Diary, as expected.

At that stage, I was just about to add the story for the A~Z motif in cursive writing, and decided to just write it all in Japanese, but I wanted it to take slightly longer to read for an Asian, like how it would take them longer to read cursive writing. I was almost at my wit’s end before I got the idea to “write the Japanese characters vertically, make them smaller horizontally, and then rotate that sideways, which would make it hard to comprehend immediately but can be read after some time is put into it”, which would make its readability speed be slightly similar (to cursive writing). Only after actually making them did I realize how similar the structure of the text looked to cursive writing. While the thin and well-spaced Japanese characters looked perfect for light reading, it’s slightly harder to read and looks a lot like cursive writing. While it has totally veered from the idea of Hedi Slimane and Rock Diary, I think being inspired by Hedi to not just copy but create something that is totally different and has no resemblance to his work is probably much closer to his philosophy of rock, and as I finished up my work, I realized how incredibly unique a person Hedi Slimane truly is. I would like to believe that this work of mine is also incredibly unique in that sense.

Hedi, forgive me for this amateur work.  Hedi Slimane will likely continue to shine brightly in my mind.

Atsushi Ishiguro