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Michel Tcherevkoff designs, sculpts and photographs exquisitely delicate that are inspired by and made of a single vegetal variety. Fantastical fun underfoot.
It all started with the underside of a banana leaf. While working on a campaign for client Estée Lauder, advertising photographer Michel Tcherevkoff was captivated by this prop, and the way the leaf recalled the form of a shoe. He spent that evening alone, after the work in his studio had subsided, playing with plant's forms, reshaping, angling them, and applying various lighting scenarios for photographing the shoe as it emerged. This maiden creation was called "La Première". Thus was born a way of designing shoes without leather, laces or stitching but with a unique vegetal variety whether young, blooming or dried yet nevertheless styled to perfection.
The photographs from Shoe Fleur: A Footwear Fantasy were exhibited at New York's Museum of Arts and Design in 2007 and will show at Paris's Le Bon Marché in June through August in 2008. Large format images with stunning detail, in editions of twenty-five, are being bought by photography collectors, shoe obsessives, and simple lovers of a bright, imaginative and cheerful image.
A Russian aristocrat whose parents moved to Paris in the 1920s, Tcherevkoff has had a 35-year career as one of the most inventive and conceptually playful commercial photographers working in New York City. It is with this solo work, however, where he has arguably come into his own. Describing this project as one in which "creativity completely took over", Michel Tcherevkoff shares his sense of fun and fancy by means of an acute eye for perfection that plays with form and function, nature and artifice, in a mix of old and new world creativity that enchants the elegance of nature.
You've once described your work as "cognitive, visual metaphors that tell a story". What story does Shoe Fleur: A Footwear Fantasy tell?
It tells a story of fantasy, it tells a story of nature associated with people, what they wear. When I talked about visual metaphors, that is more referring to my advertising work. This book it is strictly for pleasure, for the senses. If you could smell them, they smell wonderful. They're fun. When someone looks at it, I want them to feel good, that's important. Realistically, it is strictly done for me. It's my pleasure, my vacation from my other work.
Are you thinking of going further with this work or going in a different direction?
I am more than halfway through the next book. The subject is also flowers and plant species but this time I am making lingerie. I'm using models and then I'm dressing them up with flowers, leaves ect. and I'm inventing lingerie. The shoes, although they are three-dimensional, I have done them all from a similar point of view, from the side. The lingerie is very different, it has a lot more curves, it has bends and it has to conform to the woman's body, how it folds. Technically and conceptually it is one step beyond, so it is an evolution. The first shoes were a little more simplistic than the ones that I started to do after, then I went back to simplicity, it is an evolution.
Have you learned more about plants or more about shoes during this project?
Proportionately, equally. I knew about flowers already but this was a little more in depth. I use flowers because of what they are; I don't want to become a horticulturist. I picked flowers like I would have picked feathers, or fabric or anything that fulfills my vision is just good enough for me, it doesn't matter what it is.
Of course going to the wholesale market on 6th Avenue and 28th Street is extraordinary, a wonderful way to wake up in the morning. I just go from wholesaler to wholesaler and I pick up the scent and I touch the flowers. Some stores know me and they think I am a little odd, and that's ok. I look at every part of the flower and start to think 'What am I going to do' and 'Where is it going to go', and 'How can I use that, the texture....'
An example is the Poppy. Poppy is absolutely glorious, absolutely beautiful. But when you look at it very close up the hair looks like spines. I realized that they looked very forbidding, very scary. That was also something very important, it had to be something that people would look at and think 'I could wear that, its not going to hurt me'. But you know some of them should hurt you, because its fun.
So when you started a new shoe, you saw the flower and then the form of the shoe came afterward?
The flower and the leaves totally made the shoe. It is a process of construction and deconstruction and reconstruction. And so its like sculpting a little bit or like painting. You kind of do it and don't like it and then you start it again and then you do it again and that part works, and suddenly what you originally planned is completely different and you get something else. Aesthetics is also a very big art of it. My particular aesthetics and sensibility has to be 100% fulfilled. If I didn't smile when I looked at my own work then the work had to be redone.
How did time function in the creative process. Was it sometimes a race against time to photograph them before they wilted?
It changes flower to flower. Some of the flowers that I use in their infancy, when they are young and not fully bloomed, they give a look and when they go full bloom it's a different look, that for a particular type of shoe might not work. Sometimes they become more interesting dried than alive, they curl and start to twist as they dry. If I take a live leaf and wrap it around a shape and if I let it dry for a few days or a week it would dry around the shape and take on the shape. Suddenly out of one flower I might get two different looks.
I also work with provoked accidents. I do that both live in the studio with the plants and I also do it on the computer. The drying of the plants was at first an accident so now I provoke it. I take a hair dryer to see what it looks like or I dry it in an oven to see how the petal reacts, and I keep notes.
Is there a shoe designer that you would like to be inspired by your work?
Why would a designer take another designer's designs? Is there a particular shoe I admire? Recently Nicolas Ghesquière for Balenciaga has made absolutely wonderful shoes, they look almost mechanical, they're great. I like some from Jimmy Choo, others from Christian Louboutin. One that I think that is extremely enduring and that has a sense of style and sensibility that I particularly appreciate among all of them is Ferragamo. Not just for the shoes qnd the colors, but for the ensemble. There is a wonderful feel.
What I think is so visionary about your work is that you are all at once a designer, a stylist, a creative director and a photographer.
On this particular project, this is a totally solo work. I went to the markets, I picked the flowers, I photographed them, I put them together, I manipulated them on the computer: It was not done by ego, every part of it was a treat. I wanted the result and I happened to get the result doing it myself and that's fine. I worked very late at night. After everyone in the studio in the commercial side had gone, I just played into the wee hours of the morning. It's quiet and there's no one, I don't even have any music. I could hear myself talk aloud, and I laugh, it's just a treat. It's fun and that's what I want my work to be, my life to be - fun. That's my only way to contribute to the world is to put a smile on someone's face.
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Michel Tcherevkoff's definition of luxury
.......difficult to describe but impossible to miss!
an object?.....my boat.
a place?........on the water, in my boat.
a person?.....my wife, on the water, in my boat.
a moment?....with my wife at sunset, on the water, in my boat.
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Bouquets de Souliers
Le Bon Marché - www.lebonmarche.fr
June 21-August 9, 2008
To order prints and book details:
http://www.shoefleur.com/
http://www.tcherevkoff.com/