Mark Leckey Conjures a New Fashion Mythology

“I wanted long necks, big eyes, a good profile,” says the artist Mark Leckey, talking about the models in this story, his first fashion project for a magazine. He was searching for the kinds of faces that might have fit into paintings from one of his favorite historical periods, “just before the Renaissance,” when Italian artists such as Giotto were, he says, “moving from Byzantine icons to sort of early realism.” Giotto lived in Florence in the late Middle Ages, and Leckey is excited to note that one of the models is Florentine too. “He looks like a kind of angel,” he says. “I always had this expectation that models were not going to be that luminous in real life, but they are. It’s like, the closer you get to them, the more impossible looking they become.”

Working in mediums including film, installation, and performance (he once inhaled refrigerator coolant in order to get into the mindset of a Samsung fridge), Leckey has carved out a unique niche in the art world. Many of his works draw on youth cultures; his most famous film, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, from 1999, is a euphoric but eerie montage of frenzied British clubbers in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. In 2019, at Tate Britain, in London, he re-created the overpass where he used to hang out at night as a teenager in Liverpool; he is about to make a similarly site-specific intervention at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Leckey is also a DJ—he says that the night before our meeting, he cleared the dance floor at the London nightclub Fold by playing “horrible gabber,” the super-fast, super-hard Dutch techno subgenre. One of the chief inspirations for this shoot is the year 1971, sometimes acclaimed as the best year ever for rock music, with landmark albums including Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and Carole King’s Tapestry. “I was only a little kid in 1971,” says Leckey, who is 61, “but it calls to me in some way. There was a notion that you could create a culture from the detritus and waste of contemporary capitalism. I guess I still believe in that.”

The artist, who is wearing a rumpled gray suit and a single piratical pearl drop earring on the day of the shoot, says that, like the rest of his work, the images seen here are a way to try and bring together disparate cultural elements to evoke some kind of mythology. He also incorporated one of his obsessions since the pandemic: the Middle Ages. He’s noticed how club kids have been wearing what he describes as “medieval athleisure”—picture a Joan of Arc haircut, chains, and a tracksuit. “Covid felt very medieval, in the sense of a plague,” he notes. “But I also think that the more ubiquitous technology becomes, the more it paradoxically throws us back into a kind of animistic past.” With the online and offline, Leckey notes, “you’re experiencing the world as both material and immaterial at the same time. And I guess that’s what felt to me akin to kind of a medieval mindset.”

Leckey also wanted to convey something else he often returns to in his work: states of bliss. “I’ve always been fascinated by the ecstatic, whether it’s through music, drugs, or religion,” he says. “I once had a moment of rapture. It was the end of lockdown. I was with my little kid in the pram, walking in the park, freer than I’d been for the whole year. I was listening to Judee Sill’s ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker.’ The sun came out through the trees, and I was just overwhelmed.” Leckey says that the images and music he makes are an attempt to recapture that transcendent moment. Then he adds: “Because I can’t do yoga.”

Hair by Claire Grech for Oribe at Streeters Agency; makeup by Daniel Sällstrom at MA World Group; manicure by Chisato Yamamoto for Essie at Caren Agency. Models: Edna Karibwami at IMG; Matilde Lucidi at Society; Athiec Geng at Fusion Models NYC; George Anderson at Viva Paris; Amedeo Mancini at the Claw Agency; David Gant at Models1. Casting by Ashley Brokaw Casting.

Production: Farago Projects; executive producer: Sylvia Farago; producers: Kate Duncan, Sarah Aranda Garzon; photo assistants: David Manion, Abena Appiah, Max Lancaster; digital technician: Patricia Benitez; projection technician: Dawid; fashion assistants: Jordan Kelsey, Atalanta Thornton, Maria Vredko, Lily Ramsay; production coordinators: Keri Hannah-Pettigrew; Mia Vinaccia; hair assistants: Kirsten Bassett, Gordon Chapples, Krisztian Szalay; makeup assistants: Martina DeRosa, Martha Inoue, Naomi Gugler; manicure assistant: Tomoko Komiya; tailor: Inna Romanovych at Galedi Agency.