8 ROMY
COCKX – KAAT DEBO
10 ALEXANDER
FURY
14 BLACK
ROOMS
100 JEFFERSON HACK
107 WHITE ROOMS
250 CATHY HORYN
256 LUIGI VITALI
261 CAPTIONS
Forever I am a Part of You and Me
Alexander Fury
I came to know Willy Vanderperre’s work through fashion. As an obsessed teenager, somewhat isolated in the British countryside, I experienced a world – not my world, but the world I wanted to be mine – through magazines. And the first cover I remember, etched into my memory, was by Vanderperre, for an issue of i-D The images were styled by Olivier Rizzo, the magazine guest-edited by Raf Simons. That issue was dedicated to heroes, and I had discovered a bunch of my own.
The cover of that magazine still resonates: the models Robbie Snelders and Chloé Winkel locked in an embrace, wearing archival pieces from Raf Simons’ 1996 and 1997 collections, could have been shot yesterday. It is simultaneously an encapsulation of a specific moment, and a timeless image. It comes from an editorial story titled ‘Forever I am a Part of You and Me’ – fittingly, it contains many of the signatures that we now readily associate with Vanderperre’s work: youth, beauty, fashion not as an outside force, imposed upon a body, but as reflection of an inner character, an expression of self. The image itself occupies a space between composure and spontaneity, its ambiguity arresting on multiple levels. The matching platinumblond models could pretend to be lovers, or brother and sister, or anything in between. Their embrace could be a fleeting instant captured, or one carefully choreographed in its allusions to classical art. It is an archetypal Willy Vanderperre image on many levels: the coolness of its palette, the stillness of its pose, and more than anything else in the fact that it pulls in a viewer, intrigues, begs further examination.
Would you call Willy Vanderperre a fashion photographer? Perhaps. His work occupies a fine-art sphere, through both its considerations and often its subject matter, and does not accept the limitations seemingly inherent in the narrow confines of fashion. Yet Vanderperre’s images are undeniably fashioned, carefully considered and constructed. They elucidate his own background within fashion, a knowledge of the world that gives his images resonance and meaning. Vanderperre is no passive observer, or accidental participant. Indeed, his connection to fashion is deep and meaningful. It was fashion that he first studied, for a year at Antwerp’s Royal Academy, drawn to its innate speed, its expression of society and the time in which it was created. Fashion is a living, breathing part of everyday life – something that touches everyone, often literally through the clothes on their back. Fashion for many is a means of achieving the apparently impossible: the Constructivists, for instance, focused pragmatically on fashion to assert their revolutionary edicts, the creation of a garment easier than that of a building.
In a similar manner, clothing is the medium used by many to invent their own identities during adolescence – a period of life that continues to fascinate Vanderperre, and that finds reflection within his own relationship with fashion. Fashion for him was a way to escape, ideologically, from a remote village in West Flanders, a window to another place and a means of communication of innermost thoughts and emotions. Both are ideas reiterated again and again throughout his work, in imagery that has an emotional reverberance – vulnerability and strength, power and fragility, innocence and experience.
There is also exceptional intimacy. Perhaps this is because, for Vanderperre, fashion is something close to home – his relationship with his husband, Olivier Rizzo, has been framed by fashion. So too has his deep friendship with the designer Raf Simons; both are fundamental to
COLOPHON
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Willy Vanderperre
Jelle Jespers
AUTHORS
Romy Cockx, curator MoMu
Kaat Debo, director MoMu
Alexander Fury, fashion features director, AnOther & men’s critic, Financial Times
Jefferson Hack, CEO & co-founder Dazed Media
Cathy Horyn, journalist
Luigi Vitali, editor-in-chief, Dust Magazine
EDITING
Romy Cockx
Willy Vanderperre
PROOFREADING
Lea Teuscher
PUBLISHED BY Lannoo Publishers
First Edition
© Lannoo Publishers, Belgium, 2024 D/2024/45/242 - NUR 652/452
ISBN: 978-94-014-1369-5 www.lannoo.com
If you have any questions or comments about the material in this book, please do not hesitate to contact our editorial team: art@lannoo.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher