PHILIPPE KATERINE / ZOUZOU TOUR

Costumes / Design & production / Client : Philippe Katerine

When Philippe Katerine asked me to design the outfits for his new Zouzou tour, I imagined a visual response to his universe: an island of the mind, an intimate space of gathering, a suspended moment where everything could begin again.

I pictured a world both radiant and unsettling, somewhere between existential escape and joyful ritual. As if a free spirit were making an absurd declaration, banana in hand, a tear in their eye after a shipwreck. Everything turns into collage, subversion, play. Functions shift, absurdity becomes a language. It’s an aesthetic of spontaneity, of beautiful misalignment.

I wanted to invent new signs, carried by silhouettes in motion. Costumes like flags from countries that don’t exist, marching in a utopian parade. Tropicalo-melancholic with a Dadaist edge.

I was inspired by Lucy + Jorge Orta and their exploration of imagined identities, and by Yinka Shonibare, whose textiles disrupt familiar narratives. I was also thinking of singers like Antoine and Demis Roussos, icons of liberated, pacifist elegance, moving freely beyond institutional codes.

Each look became an assemblage: a patchwork of silk crepe, mixing archival prints with bold hand-dyed color fields. A squared garment form appeared, chosen for its fluidity, its democratic cut, its symbolic openness.