As a teenager, I have always looked at historical pictures with great fascination. Capturing the energy of youTH at its rawest under a recollection of story-telling memories always touched me. Growing up with mixed origins and being trilingual gave me a feeling of deep isolation as I could never really fit or belong anywhere. I thus spent a lot of time alone, trying to construct myself an identity throughout books and old photographs, transposing such ideas in the world I was living in, and fetching for the feeling of belonging somewhere.
The off-beat underworlds of alternative youth cultures, also known as subcultures, became my first sources of nourishment. I have always been fond of the idea of a subculture, of breaking the approach of buying a garment because of its hype, price, or rarity and using it rather as a form of statement and as a way of telling what you belong to. Mods, punks, goths, ravers; all had specific ideologies still relevant especially towards the consumerism, sexual freedom, sense of community, or gender issues we still encounter today.
Each character, members of the same tribe, are a projection of their desires as individuals and of what they wish to relate to in order to construct their identity. To achieve such feeling, they construct a world of fantasies with the help of their own experiences and favorite references as well as past (sub)cultures, as the contemporary occidental society does not feed their feeling of belonging. Outside their habitat, they wear their references under various forms of specific shapes, prints, logo, and cuts as constant reminders of their own inner private world in order to survive.
I have therefore transposed precise archetypes and recognisable garments from punk, gothic, mods, and rave culture as part of a personal story by creating characters with strong identities, fetching for the feeling of belonging somewhere or to something when growing up in small-town societies: a reflection of my own youth that I wanted to transpose under a recollection of personal memories.
