House of card

Thomas Demand, who originally trained as a sculptor, is known in particular for his photographs of life-size models in colored paper and cardboard. In this book published on the occasion of a large solo exhibition of his work at the M Leuven museum in Belgium in October 2020, we can see the photographs that he took of the patterns used by Azzedine Alaïa, the French couturier of Tunisian origin, to prepare the cut of his designs. These images are thus based on material objects, but Demand’s lens transforms them into something abstract, becoming impossible to recognize.

Alaïa was often considered as an engineer or an architect of fabric, sometimes spending five years on the pattern of a single jacket. Thomas Demand shows them as being ‘ready-mades’ or found objects resulting from an artist’s practice, as if frozen in their process of formation.