We present fashion insider, filmmaker, Loïc Prigent.
“I could watch documentaries about Carine Roitfeld for days,” confesses 36-year-old French director and filmmaker, Loïc Prigent. “But still, a lot of what is filmed is never about fashion or the skills of the fashion professionals, but just about bling and fake first row opportunistic VIPs.”
That’s an accusation that can never be leveled against Prigent who from capturing the petit mains of the Chanel atelier at work in the 2004 documentary Signé Chanel to showing four craftsmen taking three days to create the infamous Cubist bag for the Louis Vuitton S/S07 show (in Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton), manages to detail the creative process and the backstage chaos in the lead-up to the fashion shows with an unerring honesty, leavened with an irreverent sense of wit.
Besides his regular gig alongside the fearless fashion journalist, Agnès Boulard for the French TV show, Habillées Pour, Prigent recently directed a series of documentaries for the Sundance Channel, The Day Before focusing on the 36 hours leading up to the shows for Karl Lagerfeld at Fendi, Sonia Rykiel, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Proenza Schouler. The common thread between these disparate designers? “Le sens de la curiosité. That they all live for the next thing, that they are never bored, that they enjoy it.”
From showing a new model break down in happiness when Lagerfeld requests her to walk for Chanel to an exhausted Marc Jacobs seeking refuge in London after his NY show, the almost unparalleled access Prigent is granted leads to rare moments of intimacy with his subjects. “When I contact a designer, I tell them I will be spying, that they won't forget me but that at best they will consider me as an intern being there for a few days…”
And while debate rages on about the traditional hierarchy of the front row being disrupted by upstart bloggers, behind the scenes Prigent was struck by how these social barriers were broken down. “The collective aspect of it is really strange to film, how this fashion show becomes the goal of very different people of very different horizons. At some point it feels above class, like they are all united for this thing to become real. I love how suddenly the unknown worker is as important as the designer who is feeding the machine with his imagination but can’t do it without the great hands in the atelier.”
He may affectionately poke fun at Lagerfeld’s “Battalions of Beauty” (the model Babtiste Giabiconi and his bodyguard, Sebastien Jondeau) but having previously worked with Lagerfeld on Signé Chanel, Prigent has nothing but admiration for the iconic designer. “He could meet my mother who is the shyest person in France and lives in the countryside and I know he would make her comfortable. He would talk about apples with her and he would be nice in a very genuine way. I love that he is generous and so hysterical.”
Despite having made fashion his beat for over a decade now, Prigent still values the capacity to be surprised. Like the scene in The Day Before Sonia Rykiel where her daughter, Nathalie surprises her mother at the 40th Anniversary celebrations with a surprise second show featuring tributes to the famous redhead designer from her fellow designers. “I got goosebumps for like 15 minutes during that. It was the never ending goosebump. The music, the never ending line of girls, the huge room full of applause, the face of Sonia Rykiel who didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know a goosebump could last that long.”
It would seem his love for fashion knows no bounds. When pressed as to which design studio he’d like to film next, Prigent can only declare, “My thirst for fashion is unquenchable!”
The Day Before is available on DVD
Kin Woo writes for Dazed & Confused, Ponystep and Androgyny magazine and is a contributing editor for Dazed Digital. He has produced films for international artists Phoenix, Patrick Wolf and Lissie Trullie
