To mark their 95th anniversary, French fashion magazine L’Officiel appointed Ill-Studio as creative director to take over and rethink the magazine’s identity as whole. The new identity was thought and conceived as a combination between the magazine’s long history, a creative look on fashion and contemporary visual codes.
Through this new court, Ill-Studio and Stephane Ashpool explore the representation of sport as a dominant idea within the beauty of an era from Classicism to Futurism.
The design establishes visual parallels between the Past, Present and Future of modernity, from Roman Antiquity to an interpretation of the future aesthetics of basketball and sport in general.
Photography : Sebastien Michelini
Photography : Luc Borho
Geodesic Dome is a sculptural work by Ill-Studio exhibited in
Paris in 2008. Ill-Studio imagined a fictional encounter between designer Rei Kawakubo and architect Richard Buckminster Fuller.
At the occasion of 2010 soccer World Cup in South Africa, Ill-Studio was appointed by Nike to transform its Parisian gallery into a temple celebrating the game of soccer.
«Ill-Studio? I first considered them as “contemporary aesthetes”. This could look like an oxymoron, a contradiction : the aesthete, in its old and dandy-est sense, is all about disdain for democratic productions, industrial civilization artifacts and popular surfaces, and for this crowd he snubs with his aristocratic taste.
You can find this in Ill-Studio’s work since 2007: whatever they’re asked to work on, they showcase the evidence of a cult of beauty, managing to combine minimalism with that kind of preciousness that may lead to esotericism.
The style is their style, before displaying any technical know-how or graphico-conceptual protocol. Except that this true “hyperesthesia disease” (illness?) does not only apply to quality items, but to some indifferently high or low forms of contemporary culture. This is the artistic direction that will be showcased during their exhibition Fetishistic Scopophilia : highlighting visual obsessions, to exhibit references, to taste raw materials.»
Text by Jean-Max Colard