"It's All About Beauty": Interview with Maripol

Everyone is beautiful in every Polaroid in Spring/Summer 2015, a showcase exhibition by iconic artist, stylist and designer Maripol. Could it be her fondness for her subjects made visible? When posed this question, Maripol cuts through that kind of frou-frou mystical romanticism. “You have to realise I used a flash, it wipes out any pimples, lines. It would make your lips come out.”

S/S 2015 is just one of many recent acknowledgements of the significance of Maripol’s contribution to art and design – from collaborations with LVMH to the recent homage on the cover of Taylor Swift’s latest album. It’s true there was a time when Maripol was too often stuck in the same breath as the famous personalities she styled or who featured in her photographs. However, as the latter become less recognisable to new generations, her work conversely becomes more and more quoted and appreciated, within the space vacated by celebrity interest. “A lot of people have a tendency to make books on famous people because they know it will sell, but I’ve always wanted balance.” At heart, for Maripol, “It's about beauty.” Even surrounded by the likes of Grace Jones, the people in the photos that aren’t famous “are as important as everyone else, if not more so than anyone else. And some of them are still friends, some of them are still around and it makes them proud that they are in the book.”

Alongside Maripol’s famous Polaroids, the show features examples of the iconic objects of her career, displayed under transparent domes: rubber bracelets and earrings (including some from the Maripol/Marc Jacobs collection, 2010), and the Slinky bracelet – made from the toy of the same name. There’s a temptation to speak of these materials as 'disposable', but Maripol only agrees “in the sense you can take your shower with your rubber bracelet. If you lose it, it’s not a big deal.” Yet there’s a complication to this labelling now, as she adds, “Some of these were made in 1978, and they are holding through time,” suggesting an unexpected persistence to these otherwise transient consumer plastics and paperclips.

Aside from the benefits of making something conveniently waterproof and replaceable, the jewellery works in the exhibition also emerged from “a motivation of detourning the art object from its normal meaning, in some ways related to a kind of Duchamp appropriation.” While Duchamp inspirations were important, Maripol also describes a more straightforward realisation: “What was I going to do, make gold and diamonds? Who would wear that, Mick Jagger? Maybe. But that was not who I was.” So it was that inspiration came from the industrial hardwares on sale in Manhattan’s Canal Street, as well as during her first trip to Japan in 1978, when she would go further and further out of the central areas to the factories. After this, in Hong Kong, she began to make the distinctive plastic and almost readymade jewellery for which she would become famous.

Especially in the Polaroids, enmeshed with this Duchampian glamour, there is something authentically sexy. “We didn’t have any boundaries,” Maripol recalls as she describes a “show-my-tits-and-don’t-arrest-me” period of social history. This open, unembarrassed sensuality and sexuality within the work is arguably rare amongst an increasingly cerebral contemporary art scene. Maripol draws a sophisticated distinction when speaking of this aspect of contemporary art: “Sex is a provocation in a lot of work, but it’s not sexy. Sex is pornography now, and for me there is a limit between sexiness and pornography. There is that line where it’s subtle, and it’s more romantic and mysterious.” Giving an example, she jokes, “I’m not Terry Richardson.”

While this explains some of the context for what she made early in her career, Maripol’s position is now that of a recognised, significant and inspiring figure in fashion and art, and her recent output has taken the form of brand collaborations. Examples of these are displayed on a rail, on entering the exhibition.

"Now sex is a provocation in a lot of work, but it’s not sexy" - Maripol

Fabricated by Each x Other, the jumpsuit and t-shirts are part of the annual capsule collections they create together. In these lines, she utilises her own history to make garments and works – there is a reflexive self-sampling and reconfiguring. Curator Graham Domke was keen to include the present referencing of older work (some originating from Polaroids from more than 30 years ago) to exhibit the currency of Maripol’s practice, rather than allowing the show to relax into an easy nostalgia.

Speaking about her collaborators, Maripol is clear that “they’re not big and luxury brands.” For example, the Each x Other brand is “a very young company and Jenny Mannerheim who created the brand was [Maripol’s] gallerist in Paris.”  Maripol mentions one product of this collaboration in particular, a “white studded leather jacket, lined with fabric printed with the Polaroids. It won’t be produced; it’s the one piece, because it’s expensive – there’s another leather jacket in the exhibition that is one of a limited edition – so it does become an object of art. Especially displayed in the glass case, like in DCA.” As throughout Maripol’s work and career, she continues to leave undefined the distinction between art and design.

Cutting across the entirety of her work, there is a constant interest in current technology, with advanced textile printing developments making possible many of the garments on display. Even when she was first working with Polaroid,  “it was definitely high tech. I didn’t have to go to the lab, it was an instant and great tool.” Even now the photos in the exhibition make use of cutting edge technology, as they are the product of Maripol’s high resolution scans: “I worked for years and years to get to the right colour correction, to be close to the Polaroid. It’s almost not a Polaroid anymore, it’s an object.”

Concerning the reading of these Polaroids as a record of a generation that was about to be devastated by AIDS, Maripol speaks in simple terms. “Not everyone is gone, but a lot are gone. But you know, I’m so happy that I have pictures of them. Because you have a name, but as the time passes you can forget the face.” While these works are documents of lost figures like Basquiat, Klaus Nomi and Keith Haring, they appear bright and unsuspecting in the photos. In some ways the photos are equally-poignant counterparts to the sharp sombre of Maripol’s contemporary, Nan Goldin. “We had some of the same subjects. We might have shared the same lovers, and she’s a good friend. But her amazing photographs of the people who died of AIDS, and especially Cookie Mueller, are very different to mine.”

With this growing recognition, and the accompanying opportunities, what’s next? Now making her way towards the fifth decade of a prolific, and continually surprising and inventive career, Maripol answers this question with the same sharpness of wit that ensures her growing visibility – not to mention her active presence within a network of influence that spans 35 years, and across fashion, photography and film.“Maybe I’ll become a chef, how about that? I’ll have my own TV show. Because that’s where the trend is these days, the foodies.”

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