“Mapplethorpe has all the time been my hero,” de Saint Sernin instructed me final week through Zoom. “I learn [Smith’s memoir of her time with Mapplethorpe] Simply Children in my early twenties, and it modified my life. It touched me not solely due to who he was as an individual, however as an artist—discovering his identification, and what he needed to face for and symbolize as a homosexual man, as a queer man, on this planet.” Studying Smith’s rightly acclaimed remembrance of youth, love, friendship, and fame brought on de Saint Sernin, who’s now 33, to reevaluate the whole lot—and to pivot. “I used to be a younger designer working within the studio of a vogue home and chasing the dream of in the future changing into a artistic director,” he stated. “However I spotted that Robert Mapplethorpe solely had his personal voice, and he was such a novel voice; he was one in all one. I had been feeling there was one thing lacking within the business—there wasn’t a model I might completely relate to. I needed to precise myself and see if what I did would resonate with my neighborhood. So I give up my job.”

That job was with Olivier Rousteing at Balmain. “It was heartbreaking to go away Olivier,” stated de Saint Sernin, “as a result of he was the primary to provide me an opportunity. However there was this little voice in me that needed to do one thing for myself.” His first assortment in 2017 set the blueprint for who he’s as a designer: the leather-based, the eyelet lacing, the tailoring scissored near the physique—an oscillation between masculinity and femininity that concurrently questions the validity of these binary phrases within the first place.

That assortment additionally included the primary of many references to Mapplethorpe, although ultimately solely he and some others clapped eyes on it. “We had a secret look that I didn’t dare present throughout the presentation,” he recalled, of a leather-based jock strap impressed by a Mapplethorpe picture of a person carrying one related, set off by the little star tattooed on his thigh. “It was a bit a lot for a Sunday afternoon, what with my household coming and the business discovering me for the primary time. Since then, although,” he went on to say, “I’ve referenced him a number of instances: In Mirage, the summer season 2023 assortment, as an example: The primary look was a boy in a white shirt, black leather-based pants, and boots, and with an anthurium flower at his waist.” (A picture redolent of the photographer himself in his early ’70s punkish Arthur Rimbaud section.)