by American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe would have been delighted to be silenced at Paris Fashion Week when an exhibition of his work opened at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery on Saturday.
“A world that fascinated him,” Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Ward Stout told WWD.
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But despite connections like a close relationship with Carolina Herrera, the late photographer’s projects in the industry remained scarce.
That may now change. “It has already reached the level of fine art in every major museum in the world,” said Ward Stout. “Now he’s getting this big attention he’s always wanted and someone like Edward Enninful helps bring him there.”
More than thirty years after his death, Mapplethorpe’s images “have something to say to us today,” gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac told WWD at the opening.
To bring this to light, the gallery asked Enninful to keep the exhibition running until 6 April.
Arranged as a flat plan throughout the gallery, the photographs create a dialog as their shapes and silhouettes find unexpected echoes in the companion image they are accompanied by.
Enninful said his career as an editor got him used to finding compromises or creating tension in double-page spreads. “Everything has to be about the storytelling,” he said.
But instead of creating a story ahead of time, the tidy editor said he would let instinct guide his hand through an extensive archive that includes still lifes, portraiture, fashion photography but also nudes and even more racy work.
“I didn’t go with necessary pictures,” he continued. “His work is so broad and has everything I love – society, fashion.”
From a portrait of British artist David Hockney receding and yawning and a flashy photograph of Princess Margaret in a bathing suit to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s toned muscles or the tender embrace of a black and white man, the curatorial explores how Mapplethorpe approached the aesthetic . traditional standards and definitions of beauty.
It is this disturbing side that resonated with Inseach Fuil.
“All mine [aim] the idea of bringing something beautiful into fashion without preconceived notions of age, shape or race and he did that by bringing all these incredible people to the studio, who weren’t necessarily famous,” said he with WWD. “And I’m obsessed with lighting.”
This gave a fresh perspective even to someone who had a lasting and deep connection to the photographer’s work: Ward Stout, who was a lawyer and friend of the late photographer.
“Mapplethorpe created a lot even though he died young and [Enninful] I was able to recognize images that I almost didn’t remember,” he said. “And then his way of pairing things, watching [the exhibition] as a magazine, laying out the pages, works very well.”
Ward Stout felt that the photographer would be delighted with this development and the connection with fashion. “Although he was very successful in the last years of his life, Robert wanted to be more involved in fashion,” he recalled.
But the foundation, which Mapplethorpe set up before his death in 1987 from complications related to AIDS, is not ready to sign off on many of the projects.
“After his death, we were very conservative,” Ward Stout said. “We were nervous about doing something the artist wouldn’t do.” Over the past few years, this has meant favoring paper products such as postcards and calendars.
“But then we started to loosen up,” continued the original executive. “The criteria are what it will be used for [and] how good is the quality of the licensed products [is].”
So there are always very few such projects, despite the constant flow of solicitations the base is reduced.
There was jeweler Gaia Repossi, who unveiled a collection based on the jewelry Mapplethorpe wore and made for his friends in 2021 and before that, Raf Simons translated images into prints for his spring 2017 collection.
Recently, Paris-based designer Ludovic de Saint-Sernin was the first to rework the photographer’s work into motifs in his fall 2024 collection or bring some of the characters from his images to life on his runway in New York in February.
But don’t expect to find echoes of his work everywhere just yet. “I’m not sure that his obsession with form and beauty and formality is the relevance of fashion today,” said Ward Stout. “But maybe it’s coming back to that.”
The fashion contingent was certainly out in force in the cultural hot spot in the Marais, despite the late afternoon rain and the 8 pm Alexander McQueen show on the other side of town in a traffic jam.
Among those who accepted the diptychs were Balenciaga chief executive officer Cédric Charbit, Christian Louboutin and makeup guru Pat McGrath, who had only one word: “Beautiful.”
In the case of Juergen Teller, today’s audience is in awe because the work is “very personal and very strong,” said the German photographer. “It’s not like taking photos of clouds or this and that. There is something very big about him.”
That unmistakable signature pushed designer Julie de Libran to bring her son, who is considering a career in film and photography, with her. “He had to see this to understand what he’s going to be,” she said.
Considering the black-and-white images, Haider Ackermann said that Mapplethorpe’s work felt “never dated, never dated.”
Furthermore, the photographer’s ability to provoke a very personal reaction by making controversial images is “what was so controversial back in the day when he became famous in this high bourgeoisie,” the designer continued. . “Somewhere, everyone could find or relate to it [them] — that’s why they all bought them.”
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