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NEW YORK - The scene backstage at a fashion show is far different than the one along the runway.
Yes, it's frantic; yes, it's frenzied. And, of course, there are the models there to do their job and clothes waiting for their debut.
But there is an intimacy behind the curtain that the audience never sees. Or, at least didn't see, until designer Olivier Theyskens and photographer Julien Claessens collaborated for the book "The Other Side of the Picture," recently published by Assouline.
"The book is really not about clothing, but about a universe: The feeling of the girls and the feeling of photography," Theyskens says.
The book chronicles Theyskens' Paris shows for both Rochas and Nina Ricci, from 1999 to 2009. Nina Ricci didn't renew his contract last year, but Theyskens, who won the Council of Fashion Designers of America award for international designer of the year in 2006, remains an industry darling.
"Even though this is a young designer who has experienced an unusual - though increasingly typical - number of professional upheavals and fresh beginnings in a relatively short career, his vision has remained extraordinarily intact," writes Sally Singer, Vogue's fashion news director, in the book's foreword. "Whether designing for Olivier Theyskens or Rochas or Nina Ricci, he has always wandered at the edges of beauty and refinement, resisting the distractions offered by irony or camp."
The photos are similarly elegant. In dark, shadowy tones, there are images of models looking like statues as they're primped, and you see them contorting their bodies to fit into a gown or strike the right stance.
All of Claessens' pictures, however, are candid shots with the model often unaware of the camera.
"The girls look alone or they are not paying attention or she is in her dreams - and that's not at all what backstage is like. The girls don't notice him," says Theyskens, a native of Belgium.
He adds, "Every time a girl notices him, she goes into a professional pose, but he's not interested in that. The last picture is of a girl posing for other photographers and it shows the picture he's trying not to take - and how not natural that picture is."
Theyskens says he not only prefers to see the models showing glimpses of their own personalities - the young women dashing into his show in their own clothes more than a few minutes late or drawing on a cigarette wearing one of his pricey gowns - but he likes that Claessens captures his clothing as the garments are being "worn."
"When I think of clothes, I think of the girls sitting and standing, moving - and that's what makes backstage one step closer to real life. On the runway, it's about one pose."
