The Eye

by Nathan Williams

  Today, no matter where he is, he likes to wake up at 5 a.m. to read the news and research (when at home on the outskirts of Berlin, from late spring to early autumn, he also swims in a nearby lake). Travel remains a pivotal part of his life, and he’s learned to appreciate every journey. “Rem Koolhaas taught me to hang around at airports in press shops,” he says. “Browsing through these materials, you get a good feel for where the world is going.” But, “first and foremost, I travel in my head and in my kitchen. Cooking is a true travel experience, and so is collecting textiles from all over the world,” he says. “Weaving—the weft and warp—is about connecting things.”

  Berlin’s legendary Volks­bühne theatre opened on December 30, 1914, with the goal of promoting naturalist plays at prices accessible to the common worker. The building was heavily damaged after World War II and rebuilt from 1950 to 1954 according to the design of architect Hans Richter.

  This notion of connecting disparate ideas and disciplines is precisely what motivated him during his short and somewhat spiky reign as the artistic director of Europe’s radical Volksbühne theatre.† “We wanted to achieve a living fabric, which can be stepped on, enjoyed by many different audiences in many different spatial and temporal environments, a kind of ‘total theater’ like the one [architect] Walter Gropius designed for [director] Erwin Piscator, and a new form of assembly, in order to find out how we could build or rebuild the idea of community.”

  Though he stepped down from the position in April 2018, he relished being able to work with living dancers and actors again, instead of “hanging dead objects on the walls” of a gallery—which, he admits, are two very different propositions. “Humans are both fragile and strong, strong-willed. In that sense, it is easier to run a museum than a theater, but as much as I like art and art objects, I love to work with people. And I am especially interested in things I do not yet know,” he says. “My slogan could be: I always find that for which I am not looking. So, I’m learning every day.”*

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  Matsoukas was born in 1981 and grew up in the Bronx before moving to Hackensack, New Jersey, when she was eight years old.

  MELINA Matsoukas

  Insecure

  Beyoncé: Formation

  Rihanna: We Found Love

  Master of None

  Director Melina Matsoukas often handles precious emotional cargo in her music videos and television work: a druggy, chaotic relationship in Rihanna’s “We Found Love”; police brutality and black power in Beyoncé’s groundbreaking “Formation”; the true story of a young woman coming out in an episode of Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. “That was the first time we’d seen a black lesbian come out on-screen—period,” she says of the episode, which featured one of the show’s writers, Lena Waithe, playing herself confronting her mother, played by Angela Bassett, about her sexuality. “It definitely feels like pressure, especially when you’re creating something that hasn’t been seen before,” Matsoukas says. “I’m always asking: Does this feel true to you? Does this feel authentic? But as long as it’s rooted in reality, you’ve done your work, you’ve created something special. I don’t want it to feel like my story—I’m always working on someone else’s story.”

  Indeed, some of the most powerful and risk-taking women in entertainment—like Beyoncé, Rihanna and Waithe, as well as Solange and Issa Rae, whose HBO show, Insecure, is executive produced by Matsoukas—have trusted the director with their journeys. “I get to the heart of the story the more I can allow someone to open up and let themselves be vulnerable to me. It’s my job,” she says. “But I also think a lot of these women see me in themselves, and I see them in myself. There are not a lot of other women of color directing, and so I think you naturally go to who you think is part of your tribe and will understand your background and treat it with a delicacy it deserves.” In perhaps the best compliment, many of these women come back repeatedly to Matsoukas, and the bond goes beyond professional—she has, for instance, been working with Beyoncé for over 10 years. “I wasn’t friends with any of these women before I started working with them,” Matsoukas says. “It has come out of our work, and I think that’s because the work has pulled us together in this really intimate way.”

  In fact, it was Beyoncé who helped Matsoukas break out, commissioning four videos from the director when she was still in her mid-20s and without a long résumé.† “She was looking for new voices. She recognizes young people and likes to give them opportunities,” Matsoukas says. Even then, the director’s work was remarkably self-assured for anyone so new to the game: controlled, intimate, with just the right amount of messy humanity to keep things raw. Matsoukas’ style is diverse, ranging from grainy DIY fuzz to floodlit bold flash, but there is always a sense of something very real—even tense—no matter how glamorous her subject. In one of those first videos, for Beyoncé’s “Green Light,” she reinvented the 1980s glitz of a Robert Palmer video but with a feminist edge. She filled the screen with a funk band made solely of women and two brassy backup dancers in black latex, who didn’t have the toned Olympian bodies that had come to be expected in that era of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. “It’s political in that you haven’t maybe seen two women who look like that be honored for their beauty,” she remembers. “It was changing the idea of what we saw as beautiful at the time.”

  “I treat each video like a thesis project,” she told The New Yorker in 2017. The concept for Beyoncé’s “Formation” video started with Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and Octavia Butler, a seminal bunch rooted in American letters.

  Politics is absolutely central to Matsoukas’ idea of art. She grew up in and around New York City, the daughter of two socialist- leaning parents from a mixed heritage of Jamaicans, Afro-Cubans, Greeks and Polish Jews. “I was always political,” she says, noting that in the 1970s her parents were part of a progressive party with communist leanings. “I was brought up to fight for people’s freedoms,” she says, eventually turning more radical in college. “It’s always been my intention to use film to create what I call ‘protest art,’” she says. “To have something to say while entertaining.” Matsoukas became obsessed with photography in high school but switched to film at NYU and received a graduate degree from the American Film Institute, all while reading as much as she could from black and Latinx writers and thinkers: “bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Paula Giddings, James Baldwin, Malcolm X as told through Alex Haley,” she says. “My mom works in education, and I grew up with books.”

  She is also a self-described “control freak,” noting that directors must have a vision for everything. “I go deep in my research and divide it into sections,” she explains. “I’ll have an arts section for what I want my interiors to feel like. I’ll have a wardrobe section. I’ll have a lighting section,” she says. “I care how a pillow is folded. I hate when things don’t feel real. I go through a set and throw shit around. People don’t live in this pristine thing where there is no dirt in the corner and no cord coming down the wall.”

  Matsoukas is ambitious, too: Her latest project is a television series based on Marlon James’ Man Booker Prize–winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, an intricate story about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976, told in varying shades of thick Jamaican patois and set across the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. “I love a challenge,” she says simply. As with much of what she does, the urgency of getting it right is personal. As a woman with Jamaican heritage, she feels a responsibility—and passion—to do the country justice. “I love getting into different histories, especially when they are also my own. It’s a way of really knowing who you are,” she says. “America is so ignorant, and that’s where all this hate comes from. The more we have an understanding of each other, the more kindness that promotes. Maybe someone who was seen as a monster becomes your friend.”

  So how does one woman juggle the perfectionism, the politics, the pressure? A Buddhist practice, which Matsoukas
picked up from an aunt as a child and has tried to maintain, helps, although a busy schedule makes it harder. “I have an altar and a Gohonzon. Now, sadly, I chant once or twice a month, but when I had smaller projects, I would chant every day before going to set, because the amount of stress on the director is massive,” she says. But no healthy routine can fully relieve the weight she puts on herself, one that comes from making sure she’s worthy of telling other people’s stories right. “I’m so hard on myself, I probably hate 90 percent of what I create,” she says frankly. “Some stuff I’m really proud of, but most things I never want to see again. I’m looking at every flaw.” She continues, relenting at the thought: “Yes, I’m confident in certain things I do, but I just think we can always be better.” The director says that all her hard work doesn’t always equal satisfaction. “I don’t know how to guarantee that I’ll love something,” she says. “I haven’t figured that out yet. I never feel like, oh, if I’m involved, it’s going to be great.” That’s one thing Matsoukas is actually wrong about.*

  Yes, I’m confident in certain things I do, but I just think we can always be better.

  Insecure

  In 2013, Matsoukas started working on her first television show, an HBO series called Insecure based on comedy writer Issa Rae’s original web series Awkward Black Girl. Since its release in 2016, the series has won critical acclaim. Rae told The New Yorker she requested Matsoukas for the job but that they occasionally disagree on how to balance authenticity and glamour. “Her taste is more elevated than mine,” she told the magazine. Matsoukas also introduced Rae to Solange Knowles, Beyoncé’s sister, who served as music consultant.

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  Matsoukas became the first female director to win MTV’s Best Video with Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” The video also earned her a Grammy Award for Best Short Form Music Video.

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  “There’s not one ounce of nostalgia in me,” de Betak told CNN last year. “I’m only interested in the future and I want to help it come faster.”

  Alexandre de Betak

  Bureau Betak

  Alexandre de Betak is a showman, one of those masters of spectacle who pop up periodically to intuit what their fellow humans are craving—the type that speaks to the times and propels them forward. De Betak is more than a fashion show producer; he has refined the medium altogether over the course of his career, transforming the industry’s standard catwalk presentation into an extravagantly multisensory, multiplatform media event.

  “There is a global interest and audience for fashion shows today. Presumably, I helped make that happen by making those shows more memorable and mediagenic,” he muses. De Betak is seated in his Paris office, a snug box of a space plastered with bright white acoustic foam; behind him are piles of oversized hardcover books. He wears pale tinted glasses, and his hair is swept back. His beard is short and stubbly. “The fact that the catwalks were mediagenic made the media want to show them, and the fact that they were showing them made me want to make them more fantastic,” he says. And thus the contemporary fashion show became a pop culture phenomenon.

  To witness a de Betak show today is to observe fashion at its most communicative, its most interpretive, its most highly charged. When he first launched his studio in 1990, shows were simpler in-house productions run by staff or the PR team, and directed solely at media, buyers and industry bigwigs invited by the brand. A handful of the more theatrical designers in the late ’80s—Mugler, Gaultier, Alaïa—ramped up their live presentations, but the events otherwise continued as they had for the entire 20th century: as staid affairs for a prescribed room of insiders.

  Today de Betak has produced more than 1,000 of his high-impact, abstractly arresting shows—for houses including Givenchy, Céline, John Galliano, Michael Kors, Lanvin, Miu Miu and Rodarte. He sent a genuine tornado whirling down the catwalk at Hussein Chalayan, crafted a giant glowing sun overhead for Jacquemus and sent John Galliano’s models striding through a sci-fi tunnel of lasers filled with fake snow and iridescent haze. He created the first-ever webcast for Victoria’s Secret, and later mastered the art of “Instagram timing” so guests could prepare their phones for the climax. He constructed a spaceship-like dome and installed wooden Swiss chalets around it for Louis Vuitton, topping off the surreal event with a performance by Grace Jones.

  Though the installations are always fleeting, de Betak’s work is frequently like that of an architect, creating environments or changing the way a space is perceived. It’s perhaps most tangible in de Betak’s decade-plus partnership with Dior, where he’s executed his tropes of florals and mirrors on a grand scale—blanketing an entire tent in the courtyard of the Louvre with a mountain of blue delphinium flowers, re-creating the legendary hanging gardens and, later, building crystal ice caves from a mosaic of mirrors inside the Musée Rodin. For a Dior show in Moscow, de Betak installed a warehouse-sized mirrored box in Red Square with a surface camouflaged uncannily by reflection. De Betak’s art is one of interpretation and reimagination that begins with an almost scientific study of a brand’s DNA and clothing, but after all the research, it’s his eye for the fantastic, his gut feeling about the visuals that shapes the show. “What you make of this is artistic and intuitive,” he explains. “It’s completely free-form.”

  Fashion Show Revolution, his aptly titled 2017 book, is a compendium of those playful experiments with light, reflection, performance and in-situ constructions that established his groundbreaking form—yet de Betak says it’s not meant to celebrate his art but “to mark the closing of a chapter for fashion shows.” The events as we’ve come to know them are dead, or at least dying, he says. The brutal fashion calendar, with its endless travel and enormous costs for magazines and brands, no longer makes sense when the real audience is not in the room. Coming next, according to de Betak, are fashion shows pro­duced as digital content, created expressly to be consumed by a digital public.

  But de Betak is not sounding the death knell for his métier. “You can’t replace the magic and emotion you get from live performance,” he asserts. “We’re all interested in live moments, but we’re getting more and more used to consuming them virtually.” The live aspect is palpable in the spontaneity of the images, he says. In the future, those images will be the most important part of a show.

  Change, for a showman, equals opportunity. “I’m ecstatic to be a part of a new era, and ecstatic to help revolutionize it faster,” he enthuses, leaning forward as he looks up. “Newness for me means new opportunities for creative freedom.” And the show goes on. *

  De Betak is responsible for many notable fashion moments, from a 59-foot mountain of blue delphiniums at the Louvre to a vast scaffolded structure on a pier in Monaco.

  Newness for me means new opportunities for creative freedom.

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  “It’s time for people to come out on the street in their pajamas,” Spade told Purple magazine shortly after founding his own sleepwear brand. “It just feels right. It’s in the air.”

  ANDY SPADE

  Partners & Spade

  Andy Spade is an industry unto himself. He is everything from copywriter to a gallerist, fashion influencer, activist, publisher, consultant, creative director and artist. He’s also an inspiration, with enterprises spanning many creative mediums. Simply, his artistic vision and prolific drive have the power to shape the world around him.

  Spade initially dove into the world of fashion with his wife, Kate. The duo first launched her namesake brand in 1993, followed by the men’s counterpart, Jack Spade, in 1999. A decade ago, however, when they decided to sell the global corporation, Andy took a step back to reevaluate—but only for a moment. He soon launched a multitude of passion projects, including short film productions, bookmaking and a sleepwear brand called Sleepy Jones. He took on advertising projects with clients including The Village Voice, lent his creative eye to brands like J.Crew, opened an art venue and starte
d his own consultancy, Partners & Spade. It’s evident, at least within the creative world, that Spade likes to master it all. He’s also a self-professed collector who finds creative innovation in his serendipitous discoveries. Collecting everything from skateboards to amateur photographs, fine art and vintage magazines, he finds that these personal treasures often become an integral part of his work. “Among some of my favorite things I’ve found are hundreds of pictures of identical twins wearing identical outfits, some original Dogtown Zephyr skateboards ridden and signed by Tony Alva and Jay Adams† and love letters between a World War II soldier and his wife,” he says. His list goes on, including items like handmade doorstops and vintage Thrasher magazines. For Spade, a new collection or creative project often begins with a forgotten person, product or object. “I stumble across these special items at a random flea market or vintage store,” he explains. He is inspired by everything from an old album cover to a street sign, and says an object can remind him of his childhood or a place from the past. “Whatever it is, I tend to have an emotional connection to the things I collect,” he says.

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  Partners & Spade approaches every project with its team of designers, writers, architects and marketers with the belief that a brand’s messaging and expression are inseparable.

  Spade’s personal history and creative journey certainly include plenty of opportunities to make such connections. “I grew up in the Arizona desert riding dirt bikes and skateboarding,” he says. “After high school, I moved to Aspen to ski and then to Hawaii to surf. I went to college, started writing, moved to NYC with only $1,000 and started working as a copywriter.” Spade says the city instantly felt like home. “Everything evolved from writing ads to designing clothes, to meeting Glenn O’Brien and Jim Walrod, discovering Rene Ricard and Agnes B. . . . Then to designing stores, making books, opening a gallery, shooting photography and making movies.” Then, as now, he says, he is constantly discovering and experimenting with new mediums.