Passion is always Purple! This sentence could fit me when you know me well but it’s more a call to Purple Fashion Magazine, the baby of Olivier Zahm and Elein Fleiss.
Olivier Zahm is a night owl, passionate about fashion and beautiful things. He likes people with style but beyond fashion, what interests him is above all the character, character that we find in his photos in black and white mode.
In 1995, the fashion world was shaken by the creation of Purple Fashion Magazine, a resolutely different, more realistic opus of the fashion world with photo series by great photographers such as Terry Richardson, Marrio Sorrenti or Jurgen Teller. In 2009, Olivier Zahm, who is also a photographer, created the corresponding blog, Purple Diary, which he illustrates with photos he takes during fleeting moments between Paris and New York.
Olivier Zahm likes to take pictures of everything he loves, from his crazy parties with celebrities to his friend Terry Richardson’s shootings, and even more personal pictures. On Purple Diary, he gives us his raw photos with very few texts and shares with us his daily life made of intimate moments, fashion, fashion shows, music, sex, love and especially encounters. From the Baron au Montana in Paris to the trendy restaurants of New York or the trendy clubs of London, walks with his daughter, moments of fashion shows, Olivier Zahm features the life of a hip night owl with his buddies from Terry Richardson’s La Clique.
The strength of Purple Diary is precisely its photos, slices of life that are sufficient in themselves. They don’t need explanatory notes, they are just true. He shows us how Purple Fashion Magazine is built but his obsessions: these omnipresent female bodies, these still lifes, the architecture of the cities, the Parisian nights between jet-set and ordinary people, his daughter…
From March 1st to April 3rd 2010, it is of course at Colette, one of the most trendy places in Paris, that we can discover a selection of Olivier Zahm’s most emblematic prints since 2005, taken at first for WOW Magazine and then for Purple Fashion Magazine. The choice must not have been easy among the 10,000 pictures that have been taken during a year of crazy nights and 100-hour days, but it is a successful choice. Like the testament of a life burned at both ends….
Olivier Zahm from March 01 to April 03, 2010.
Colette
213 Rue Saint-Honoré
75001 Paris
www.colette.fr
www.purple-diary.com
Marie-Odile RADOM
