Fashion Heroes

While preparing his contribution to the 2025 Culture Shift exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Stephane Sednaoui revisited Fashion Heroes, a series created for The Face in 1989. The project is now reimagined as a book.

Fashion Heroes marked the culmination of Sednaoui’s experiments with cut-outs and collage, a technique he had begun exploring two years earlier. Here, he transformed five designers—Jean-Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, Azzedine Alaïa, Thierry Mugler and Martine Sitbon—along with their muses into a joyful, cosmic odyssey of characters in outer space, fueled by the energy of pop and film culture.

The book draws on an original layout Sednaoui conceived for his participation in a 1993 group exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art in Miami. Enclosed in a solid slipcase and protective box, it unfolds into a sculptural object designed to be opened flat. Seven leporello sections extend horizontally and vertically, allowing the images to be viewed individually or as a panoramic composition measuring more than 2.7 meters wide by 1.1 meters deep.

On the reverse, solarized black-and-white photographs reveal moments from behind the scenes. Folding and unfolding the work continually conceals and reveals images, making the act of handling it part of the experience.

Part archive, part collage, part sculpture, Fashion Heroes transforms the 1989 photographic series into a physical encounter—an artwork in itself.