You can buy a copy of our latest issue here. Taken from the autumn issue of Dazed:
In fashion, where the shock of the new is expected but increasingly tricky to achieve, one of the most powerful things you can do as a designer is make the familiar unfamiliar. Take the signature red that runs through HUGO like an electric wire. When your AW17 collection looks to the works of David Lynch – the master of the uncanny – that flash of recurring crimson becomes something else entirely: another dimension, intriguing and enigmatic.
Inspired by Lynch’s oddball characters at large, designers Bart De Backer and Jenny Swank Krasteva – of HUGO menswear and womenswear, respectively – are taking the house’s tailoring somewhere unexpected by lacing it with a strangeness that sets a new agenda for the 90s-born label. Powerful but restrained, these are the kind of pieces that invite self-expression rather than ready-meal looks.
HUGO’s new faces embody this feeling, too: Paul Hameline, Hari Nef, Clara Deshayes, Olan Prenatt, Luka Sabbat and Gabriel-Kane Day-Lewis. All are individuals whose multidisciplinary, free-spirited approach is shaping and challenging the cultural landscape. They’re also symbolic of a generation that could be retreating somewhere safe and easy in the face of everything that’s going on right now, but instead chooses to be fearless and open, and do something.
The day before the brand’s SS18 show during Pitti Uomo, the HUGO squad came together in Florence for this shoot. Off-camera, they each provided a lesson in how to be a true individual in the face of the status quo; after all, when you’re shooting in the cradle of the Renaissance, it’s hard not to get carried away by the vibe and quote humanist frontrunner Petrarch: “Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.”
Photography Hill & Aubrey, styling Elizabeth Fraser-BellAll clothes and shoes HUGO AW17
PAUL HAMELINE: artist and model
“Beauty today is individuality. And sticking to your ideas”
Photography Hill & Aubrey, styling Elizabeth Fraser-BellAll clothes and shoes HUGO AW17, all jewellery Gabriel’s own
GABRIEL-KANE DAY-LEWIS: musician
“Sometimes I write music because I’m in a particular state of mind and I need to get something off my chest. Sometimes I write because it’s therapeutic. I usually get lost in what I’m writing”
Photography Hill & Aubrey, styling Elizabeth Fraser-BellAll clothes and shoes HUGO AW17
OLAN PRENATT: skater
“My philosophy on life is ‘start’. Whatever you wanna do, just start it. It’s often scary, ’cos you’re thinking about what other people think of you. But you gotta have that freedom to start”
Photography Hill & Aubrey, styling Elizabeth Fraser-BellAll clothes and shoes HUGO AW17
CLARA DESHAYES: DJ and musician
“I’m not a slave to tempo or rules with club music. It’s a genre where there are lots of unwritten rules, but I don’t really think like that so it’s kind of – you could say punk, in a way. I listen to music with my heart. What I’m really looking for is honesty”
Photography Hill & Aubrey, styling Elizabeth Fraser-BellAll clothes and shoes HUGO AW17, all jewellery Luka’s own
LUKA SABBAT: creative and model
“I’m just a creative. Back in the day you could only be one thing – ‘I’m a carpenter, I’m a farmer, I’m a knight.’ You had to pick. I feel like we came far enough for us to be like, ‘Ah fuck it, I’m gonna be all of the above’”
Photography Hill & Aubrey, styling Elizabeth Fraser-BellAll clothes and shoes HUGO AW17
HARI NEF: actress
“True freedom to me is independence. It’s being able to find everything you need within yourself. I don’t think freedom has to do so much with external circumstances as it does with internal circumstances”
Hair Jawara at Bryant Artists using Fudge Professional, make-up Ninni Nummela at Streeters using Chanel, photographic assistant Harry Burner, styling assistant Alessia Ansalone
