SERGE LUTENS INTERROGATED IN THE DARK
To coincide with the launch of his latest product, Le Vaporisateur Tout Noir, Serge Lutens offers us this interview.
Serge Lutens, where does your taste for black come from?
Taste, disgust… they all have the same origin. Our first seven years incubate them. If they’re still undecided, they take shape, then take shape and, finally, become pigmented. It’s in adolescence that they make their mark. As for me, it’s between 15 and 16 that I emerge from the shadows to see only black, as others see red. In a way, the tone is set.
To explain myself, I take up Freud’s rule of three: according to him, we are, as children, the center and apex of a triangle, stabilized on its base by, on the right, a father and, at a distance, separated by the base line, a mother. But my choice destabilized the pyramid, leaving only one oblique line between my mother and me.
There’s a reason for this. It was 1942, and the war, the law and its obligations meant that from my earliest days, I was separated from my mother and entrusted to a family. Rather than taking me away from her – which I might have done – her absence made her very present. I invented her. It’s in the depths of this story that my color is announced, and it’s obvious. Black. I won’t lie: it’s also the color of mourning.
So what exactly was Serge Lutens’ grief?
Mine first, at last, the one provided for by society and its rules!
Nothing is involuntary. I don’t love my mother in the way you’d expect, but it’s undoubtedly this particular love that made me a priest in her continuity; in this way, too, I’m mourning the loss of my father, eliminating him from the trilogy. Nothing is more present than a ghost. About him, I stretch out a feeling that inextricably confuses hatred and love. It’s also the time when, consistent with my initial direction, sexuality plunged me for a time into shame, but the Girl who makes me Her decided. An irreversible impulse freed me from the mold of everything agreed upon. Everything was absurd, terrible, marvelous, just, a matter of living and dying. In short, a funeral with a happy ending.
Serge Lutens, we’ve just been talking about your mother, and some have suggested that her taste for black may have stemmed from a black dress she wore. Can you tell us about this?
That’s partly true, but let’s not maudlinize the word “mother”. She may deserve the honors of insult, but certainly not those of self-pity. She’d have hated that toc. Even though she was very intelligent, it’s possible that she could have benefited from it; Well, back to the anecdote.
I must be ten years old. It was during a big tidy-up that I discovered this dress, lying on the sky-blue background of the bedspread, shouldered on a hanger. It’s just an outfit, one that women wore during the Occupation. It’s black, made of crepe Georgette (my mother’s middle name) and looks familiar. It’s the one my mother wore for the first three years after I was born. The only one, I think. The photographs bear witness to this (all torn, I don’t like witnesses, they get in the way of the image). So it’s her past, and by extension, mine, that I’m looking at: simply cut,
Right, stopping below the knees and on the wrists, three tiny buttons covered in the same fabric close it around the neck. Parisian jet scatters to the ends of the square shoulders, randomly, without any precise pattern. I’m dazzled. This dress, worn down to the weft, is and remains fabulous. The woman who wore it is a stone’s throw from me, but this time, it’s no longer my mother, but a woman of complete judgment, who has renounced all forms of appearance, abdicated anything that might enhance her attractiveness. Certain images stick. They never let go. They’re engraved on our inner walls.
What I hold in my outstretched hands is no longer a dress, but the moult of a snake, hence my question: Why don’t you wear it anymore? She had what I call the elegance of silence. Perhaps it was at this point that I began to split into two, a word that implies a double: the main actor in the betrayal that would be the stuff of all that I don’t know and make her Great: criminal, high-flying thief, Queen in white mourning… In a word, I saw her. These abandonments, hers and mine, are my real luck. They beget the next ones.
You talk about doubling, and we know from your photographs that your signature white women seem to be the antithesis of this black evocation. How do you approach this?
There is no calculation. Beauty is cruel. It demands it: every self-respecting poet is in love with his Death. These chalky-skinned women, fixed figures dressed in purple, royal pomp and religious splendor, have no desire to please. They are fatal. They fulfill, in both senses of the word, what cannot be said. It’s not at all sad. I laugh at my life as others breathe it. Black is not a choice. It’s imposed. You could say that Chanel had this relationship, if only in reaction to his father’s absence. In other words, so did Saint Laurent. For me, it’s a destiny. For some, a fashion. Let’s just say that this color penetrates me and, from beneath, resonates…De profundis.
You speak of the depth of black, yet for some, it’s the embodiment of evil.
It’s evil! Who’s looking? Turn the binoculars around, the vision reverses! Look at Baudelaire, offering him his flowers. Others, the good guys, point at it (the axis of evil). Good and evil are intertwined in our natures, unless there is madness, and even then, it’s human. Man acts in the best interests of the moment, for the better, or so he hopes. I’m reminded of an interview with a Resistance fighter and concentration camp survivor who, when asked: “What is it you don’t forgive the Nazis for?” answers something like this: “For making me discover evil and saving my life. In a different way to her, we are all confronted with this. What impulse commands good, evil if not the one that allows us to better live hope.
Serge Lutens, black for you: luxury or misery?
It’s got both sides, as long as you recognize yourself in them. Nothing more is important. It’s not so much the black as what’s inside it. Make no mistake, it can be pink!
Bachelard says he or she is the refuge of all colors. We all feel the need to withdraw. We see best in the dark.
To conclude, Serge Lutens, it’s been said that you’re a black line, drawn without a rule. What do you think?
I don’t feel I’ve drawn a line under anything. The only thing I want to build up in essence, in every possible way, is to bring this blackness to light.
credits: Serge LUTENS
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
