For his first ever fashion shoot, the Parisian photographer cast the models, styled them, and did their hair and makeup. They were his cousin and his younger sister, and Sadli was just 10 years old. “I did the whole shebang,” he recalls. “But I never thought it would become my actual job.”
Now the 32-year-old Sadli is being asked to produce pictures of elegant restraint for the pages of French Vogue and Fantastic Man. “I associate Karim’s work with his personality—serene,” says Franck Durand, the French art director who’s tapped Sadli for ad campaigns for Isabel Marant and Céline. “I can have all the props in the world, but I always end up putting them away,” Sadli says. He suspects his childhood DIY experiments were formative: “The composition was not so different from what I’m doing now.”
