Clever, sophisticated boys – not men – emerged on the Dior Homme runway for FW14. It was a changed game from Kris Van Assche, the designer departing from the monochrome code of seasons past in favour of a confident, if ever so slightly colourful new approach to menswear.

That the collection was inspired by young creatives studying at the likes of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (where Van Assche cut his teeth) formed a strong foundation for M/M Paris in their interpretation of the Fall 2014 collection, materialising as an installation launched alongside the range at Dior Homme Soho, NYC.

The design duo has become a creative culture mainstay, and though their work is varied (Kanye West, Björk, Inez & Vinoodh and a bevy of luxury fashion houses feature on an extensive list of past collaborators) Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag’s vision is as intelligently multifaceted as it is crisp. Here, it’s a pageant of light effects and a unique alphabet, used to enhance Van Assche’s future vision…

Tempe Nakiska: This is your second collaboration with Dior Homme? How does it build from the first?

M/M Paris: This represents a second phase in constructing and defining an alternative Dior Homme space, alongside the one that currently exists. A display area designed for the Dior Homme between-season collections, those that do not appear in runway fashion shows, the ‘pre-season collections’. It’s a space designed to be mobile and modular so that it fits stylishly into Dior Homme boutiques around the world.

During our first collaboration, we endeavoured to design and build a space with coloured geometric metal modules that had removable paper walls covered with pictorial motifs; by contrast, this season we decided to create a series of 26 lights based on an original alphabet designed for this project. Designing an original alphabet was a natural choice for us because we wanted to convey how, in this new Dior Homme collection, Kris Van Assche wanted to pay homage to his years spent attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.

Dior Homme Catalogue Autumn 2014, by Karim Sadli © Jason Schmidt

TN: How was the visual idea of the catalogue born?
M/M Paris: To us, the catalogue is a publication we see as an event on the scale of a magazine published twice a year to present the collection to the public the way a runway show can do. For this ‘issue’ of our magazine, we envisioned an imaginary art school where students and researchers are working on a luminescent alphabet mechanism in their school. Karim Sadli’s photographs show those various groups of students amidst their installation, dressed in Dior Homme.

We also asked the photographer to take more sentimental portraits of each of these imaginary students. These portraits are reproduced as ‘crude’ prints to evoke the images produced by activist artists of the 1960s. All these images are assembled and laid out in a publication in the same format as the two previous ones along with scattered reproductions of the original drawing of the alphabet that we designed for the occasion.

TN: How does this fit in with the presentation in Soho?
M/M Paris: The presentation in the Soho boutique expands upon the world described in the catalogue. So in Soho, on the day of the opening, ‘the luminescent alphabet’ is installed in its entirety. The lights are grouped into small islands around which pieces from the new collection, the one that is photographed in the catalogue, are presented. The installation as a whole creates a path of lights and thus demarcates a space for the presentation and sale presenting and selling the new Fall collection within the Dior Homme boutique.

The day after the temporary staging in the Soho boutique, the boutique will revert back to its normal configuration, and only some of the lights arranged in small islands will remain to remind people of the previous day’s event.

TN: How do the catalogues and the installation form an integrated whole?
M/M Paris: It does form a whole, a single place that combines two contradictory spaces, an imaginary space, which is the catalogue, where memories, dreams and reality are unfurled, and the reality of the area demarcated by ‘the luminescent alphabet’.

The M/M Paris installation will show until late May at Dior Homme Soho, 133 Greene St, New York, NY 10012, United States