Curiosity about the creative process—along with a saturation of media focused on the catwalk—has compelled more and more television cameras to dive behind the scenes of fashion shows in New York, Milan and Paris. Yet few have captured as much histrionics and hilarity, as well as rare moments of humanity, as Loïc Prigent, a slight, bespectacled Frenchman in a rumpled shirt, whose dry wit, sly charm and irreverent yet intelligent approach always get results.
While perhaps best known for his fast-paced collaborations with wacky Parisian fashion commentator Mademoiselle Agnès—who likens the moribund economy to the “worst crisis in fashion since the return of the color mustard”—Prigent, 36, is also the director behind more in-depth fare: the 2007 fly-on-the-wall portrait Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton, and Signé Chanel, a five-part series documenting Karl Lagerfeld and the fabled house throughout the creation of its fall 2004 couture collection.
Prigent and crew backstage at Gaultier.
For his latest series, The Day Before, made by his production company, Deralf, and airing in September on the Sundance Channel, Prigent tracks four diverse designers in the 36 hours before their clothes appear on the runway, his cameras swallowing delicious footage of a forever fidgeting and philosophizing Sonia Rykiel; the antics of Jojo, a yappy, jumping Prague Ratter pooch belonging to Lazaro Hernandez, one half of Proenza Schouler; the traditional, stress-busting annual employee fashion show at Fendi, this time featuring a man in high heels; and the grumpy, exhausted seamstresses in the run-up to Jean Paul Gaultier’s couture show. (Produced in English, the series is subtitled when its various subjects lapse into their native tongue.)
“Messy” and “bloody” are among the words Prigent throws out to describe the backstage world. Yet he’s interested more in the characters than the clothes, from hysterical PR minions and overworked interns to the tempestuous designers themselves. The Proenza episode explores the dynamics of duo Hernandez and Jack McCollough; Rykiel’s, the delicate dance between the designer and daughter Nathalie; Fendi’s, the inner workings of the Roman fashion house, with Lagerfeld pulling the design strings; and Gaultier’s, the designer’s continuing status as an “enfant terrible” at age 57.
“I want to understand what the process is about,” Prigent explains as he nibbles a croissant in an editing suite at Story Box Press, a production company at the edge of Paris, where more than 40 hours of footage for each designer is being whittled down to 51-minute episodes. “It’s a circus, but it’s an interesting circus.”
For fashion newbies, it will no doubt come as a shock that dresses are being sewn and altered right up to the very last minute. At Gaultier, “two hours before the show, only four or five dresses were done,” Prigent says. “It’s very tense.”
