Behind the scene of the Black Swan filming

This Sunday 8th of April, we did the filming of our Black Swan couture collection in Paris. Elsa Godard, former first artist ballerina of the Royal Ballet, is the muse of the campaign. She performed the variation of Swan Lake on her pointes in front of the camera, along with the famous "Pas de Deux" with Allister Madin, ballet dancer from Opéra de Paris. For this fourth Couture collection, I put together my two passions : fashion and classical ballet. So I took the grace from the ballet to make fashion more dramatic.

The skirts are inspired by the codes of ballet : they are light and flowing. It is all about the transparency and the playful volume of a tutu. It unveils the grace of the legs, and the sensuality of the moves. The collection is celebrating the beauty of a ballerina, but with a dark twist. The story of Swan Lake is very powerful. It is the story of a love that is impossible, a broken heart wandering by a lake and strong woman who is the victim of a curse and sees her body transformed into a Swan.

We wanted to recreate the mysterious atmosphere of Swan Lake, so we had two different locations for the filming : a ballet school where Elsa started her variation as a ballerina, and then the lake of Bois de Boulogne where she starts wandering until she can find her lover.

The mise en scène is very dramatic. The journey on the lake is the image of her transformation. She is passing from one state to another and we wanted to capture this constant move that is never stopping. She is longing for love as her only consolation. The technical equipment that we used for the filming of my campaign also contributes to bringing fluidity to the story telling. The steadicam is mostly used for the cinema industry, as a camera stabilizer that can film a very smooth shot. It is turning all around the ballerina in order to follow all her gestures and capture the most specific details of the body. It gives the impression of a continuous motion that is never stopping.

Black Swan is about the complexity of identity, between the light and the dark, between force and fragility, and all women can identify with the main character. What I love about ballet is that the body is the only means of expression. Through the choreography, you can feel so many emotions all intertwining together, without even using the language.

We were 11 people on the set of Black Swan, and it actually takes a village to organise this type of project ! I was the artistic director of the filming, and I had Zulma Rouge as the film maker, Manuel Laurent as the cameraman, Mokhtar Beyrouth as the photographer, and a team of 5 technical assistants. Yên Losset was the second photographer capturing all the behind-the-scene pictures. The filming day was quite tiring and challenging to say the least, with many outfit looks and changes of locations (and some dramas!), but we also had a lot of fun through it all, thanks to our team complicity !

The apex of the mise en scène was the final shot where Elsa Godard and Allister Madin were dancing with great passion in the lake, body to body, for the final love scene. You can feel the intense music of Tchaïkovsky playing in your head just by looking at the picture ! We had to face a dozen of onlookers gazing at the couple and taking videos on the set, and we gathered a whole crowd of fans for the 15 minutes of the filming, until both of them got out of the water, wet to the core ! You can discover the fashion campaign at the end of May 2018, and I can't wait to share it with you all ! Scroll down and enjoy the behind-the-scene pictures !

Credit photo : Yên Losset