Frédéric Sanchez
Sound artist / catwalk DJ / collaborator
Text by Peter Lyle
Portrait by Carole Peyrot
To many regulars on the fashion show circuit, Frédéric Sanchez is, basically, the guy who has all the best tunes. And that's no mean feat: when you're on the relentless tour of fashion show duty in Paris or Milan, a catwalk soundtrack that puts a spring in your step and a song in your heart means an awful lot. Sanchez's influential selections have a way of bringing little-known bands - such as CocoRosie, whose music he wove into a Prada show in the autumn of 2005 - to the attention of a cliquey but hugely influential coterie of taste-makers.
But being asked to turn up, play some records to fit some runway looks and then leave is, Sanchez says, the last thing he gets excited about. The Parisian was 22 when he first started making sounds for fashion designers in 1988, and Martin Margiela, no less, was his first collaboration. Hermès, Valentino, Givenchy, Versace, Jean Paul Gaultier, Jil Sander, Calvin Klein… he's since worked for most of the key houses, and turned down plenty of others. His objection to the DJ-for-hire tag is that he finds ongoing relationships rewarding in a way that one-night stands aren't. Alexander Wang is one of the few new designers to have enticed Sanchez to work on his shows in recent years; the way he tells it, that was simply because he felt a meaningful connection.
"Alexander Wang called me," he recalls. "He was very nice, he had worked for Marc Jacobs [as, naturally, had Sanchez]. We had a conversation and from that we understood we could have a longer collaboration." And they went on to work together over successive seasons. In Sanchez's fashion work, he says, "getting to know the house" rather than merely "DJing for a show" makes all the difference. Either way, his superstar DJ status among fashion folk rather obscures the fact that his catwalk show work is but a sideshow to his more involved adventures in sound. His latest solo show, Une Utile Illusion, ended earlier this month at the Serge Le Borgne gallery in Paris. Sanchez has worked with the gallery since the summer of 2007, when his Castles in the Air show opened there, and says, "It's a new thing for me - living with the particular space." The earlier show took visitors through a sonic environment in which speakers were hidden behind temporary walls in a bright, white corridor, in an attempt to "carve" a space in the gallery with his sounds; Une Utile Illusion, by contrast, puts the sound sources on prominent display. "It's a little bit the negative of Castles in the Air, seeing the speakers," he says.
Sanchez also has an extended relationship with the Louvre, including a 2004 installation in its Middle Ages gallery as part of the Counterpoints show, which riffed on 16th-century French history and the myth of King Midas, and a track record of collaboration with French cultural icons of all sorts - from the art of Louise Bourgeois, via the music of Serge Gainsbourg, to composing the music for a play starring Anouk Aimée. Whatever the environment, he says he sees all his personal work as being "about the sound creating images, a different sense of what the visitor sees in their mind. I'm really pushing that. I want the visitor to be the actor of the piece." He evidently believes in pushing himself whenever possible too. After the recent show, he's now devoting his time to pondering a new invitation: to create a video for a piece of existing classical music, which will be exhibited in Paris in May. Going behind the camera like this will be a first for Sanchez, "A little bit like the opposite of what you normally do…" And that's just the way he likes it.
