The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Thursday December 11th — —

I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Thursday December 11th — —

“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Thursday December 11th — —

L’amateur

In ‘L’amateur’ Murielle Victorine Scherre, the visionary force behind lingerie brand La Fille d’O, illustrates a world that balances sexual self respect and an object of lust, naughtiness, fantasy and reality: her personal Wunderkammer of the senses. She captures an erotic world, where mind and body each find their own way. The book provokes questions about the contemporary beauty ideals and the universal appeal of the human body and of eroticism. The result is a visionary scrapbook in search of the true meaning of 9 hollow words like beauty, attraction, eroticism and pornography. Words which have been over-used in our modern day hyper-visual commercial world and Murielle finds herself confronted with in her everyday creative process and therefore wanted to visualize into her personal discourse. She draws from the immense image archive of La Fille d’O, which was built over the course of the last 11 years combined with contributions by like-minded amateurs (meaning enthusiast in French, not incompetent) like Jesse Draxler (USA), photobooth meister Marco Ferrari (IT / UK), Richard Kern (USA), S magazine (DK / USA) and Rita Lino (DUI). ‘L’amateur’ is like a very intimate diary; diligently and obsessive as life itself. In girum imus nocte et igni consumimur.

I’d like this book to be an adventure, in which you know when you begin but never when  you’ll finish. It’s not about going  through the chapters one after  another, but rather [it’s]  something you can open a hundred  times and still be surprised. I don’t want you to be able to take it all in at once but to savor it bit by bit, as though you were meeting someone really special.

After her studies in fashion and working in different ateliers, Murielle Victorine Scherre started designing lingerie under the label La Fille d’O, firstly for herself, because she refused to compromise between a perfect fit and aesthetics, which over the years grew into a brand that has been embraced worldwide, with prestigious retailers like Selfridges, Opening Ceremony and Baby Likes To Pony carrying her lingerie. Eleven years after that first design by Murielle, La Fille d’O has empowered a lot of other women around the world. Not only by providing avant garde lingerie and swimwear, but to make it in a way that it can be used everyday.

To me it was very important that the book not only covered my own work, because I also want to reveal what inspires me. I don’t like over-styled campaigns, flattering lighting and Photoshop corrections: give me real stories, real emotions.

The book is published by Belgian publisher Uitgeverij Lannoo.

See here for the world of La Fille d’O.

‘L’amateur’ is available online here.