Now in its eight incarnation, Wooyoungmi’s seasonal collaboration with the art world is going from strength to strength. Unlike the majority of brands who use models for their campaigns, Wooyoungmi commission an artist to reinterpret each catwalk collection. They’ve already collaborated with the likes of Guerra de la Paz and Christoph Schmidberger, and this season have turned to the Parisian artist, Mathias Kiss.
Madame Woo came from Seoul to their Paris store on Rue Saint-Claude in the 3ème for the presentation of the Frenchman’s creation for her menswear line. Kiss, who developed his skills as a gold leaf apprentice in his teens, working on grand projects at the Louvre, L’Assemblée Nationale and La Comédie-Française, has since moved away from the more regimented discipline of restoration and into the freer world of art. “It was very strict and classic,” he says. “It wasn’t open at all. I grew up doing that until about 30 and now gold leaf is my material, my palette, my colour. Before it was old-fashioned, so now I want to make it feel young and contemporary.”
Kiss’s work for Wooyoungmi includes a desk scene that mixes nostalgia for a grandfather’s study with the futuristic feel of a platinum-gold leaf coating. Madame Woo was drawn to Kiss’s work because she felt it synched with the lunar travel theme of the spring/summer 16 collection and said she was “so happy” with the results. “When I created this collection under the theme of moon trip, I had an idea and when I saw his interpretation, I could see we were on the same wavelength. When you collaborate, you have to be on the same wavelength. I didn’t see the moon trip as an exploration in space suits. I was thinking of it as a trip where you go to a really beautiful and romantic place on a very emotional trip. And he interpreted it the same way.”
Kiss called it “a mixture of old-fashioned and futuristic” and said that he was happy to be an artist working with the fashion world. “Art can be a bit closed. Fashion links us to time and can be very enriching. It also enriches other worlds, like music. When you mix things, the possibilities are infinite.”
‘Out of Time’ – the making of. from Wooyoungmi on Vimeo.
5, Rue Saint-Claude, Paris 75003