Paranoid Android
If you had walked into designer Michel Berandi’s loft over the past few days, a high-ceilinged workroom just west of downtown, you would have been confronted with a menagerie of antelope and rams' heads mounted on the white walls. And then, below them, you’d notice the shoes, perched upon a 300-pound wood block. They're painted black, they have impossibly high heels resembling gazelle horns and they would support no woman weighing over 45 pounds.
Or so you would think. In Paris earlier this month, Alexander McQueen’s high, hoof-like shoes elicited admiring murmurs and gasps, and are stylistically in line with the fantasy pair that forms the base of Berandi’s “etLUXOR” art installation, a combination of futurism and brute nature that premieres tonight at an invitation-only event at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA for Downtown L.A. Fashion Week.
Berandi was originally approached to do a runway show for fashion week—perhaps similar to the midnight splendor he assembled a year ago at BOXeight Studios, with male models glowering in crinkled, washed leather jackets and creepy scarves tasseled with long, silvery manes (clearly he had presaged the goth/vamp resurgance).
But the designer, who recently lost a backer on his niche collection, didn’t have the money for runway (who does, it seems), and opted for a smart visual presentation this year that has little to do with commerce.
“Of course you can make beautiful clothes. But nobody’s buying them right now,” Berandi says in almost a whisper. “We have to decide do we want to do fashion, do we want to make art? We know we’re not making fast food. We’ve tried to make clothes for people we don’t know. And it’s never worked.”
He’s not being wistful, despite his sullen appearance—paired this afternoon with exquisitely bleached handmade jeans and a slouchy T-shirt. With his high price point -- necessary in a line anchored by fox Russian hats, intricately-pleated blazers that require inordinate yards of imported wool and bombers fringed with goat hair cut by professional hair stylists -- rock stars with an uncompromising aesthetic whose finances weren’t capsized in a failed hedge fund comprise his core clientele. If that’s you, his pieces are available at Church, H. Lorenzo and Traffic. If not, Berendi's clothes are as stunning as visual art, at the very least. Hence, the MOCA event.
Berandi’s girlfriend, Simonida, collaborates on the line. “I like to do the preparation, the research, to come up with a lot of possibilities,” she says. “Michel’s good at picking the right idea, the right direction and putting all those ideas into the final piece. But it’s important for both of us to keep a unique vision.”
Though the collection inhabits a dark vein similar to the work of California native and expatriate Rick Owens, the design duo's influences are capped at two: McQueen is one, and Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga is the other.
“That’s it,” Berandi says. “Balenciaga is very into future—technology, fabrics,” Simonida adds. “And McQueen is so poetic, so romantic.”
Berandi’s installation—which during a recent visit was still a work in progress—is a distillation of both. The feet are rooted in natural elements, the torso clothed in leather-centric, feminine garb, and the head absorbed in a sleek, avant-garde Schuberth motorcycle helmet, not available on the U.S. market, but procured for the exhibit thanks to an unnamed, high-profile music producer in town.
The finishing touches came courtesy of stylist Noogie Thai, who applied a corona of tangled curls that descend to traverse the entire piece.
“Where is this person coming from?” Berandi asks. “It’s coming from earth, from the soil and the dirt. But where is it going? It’s going upwards, into the future, the stratosphere. It has these human and feminine elements, yet it’s deformed, kind of scary. It's all about the imbalance."
