Art Fashion: Artist Watch: Creative Director of Chanel

Saturday 10 July 2010

Artist Watch: Creative Director of Chanel - Peter Philips

The closest most of us get to owning a piece of Chanel, one of the world's most successful and fiercely guarded luxury brands, is its lipstick, nail polish or a bottle of its bestselling No5 perfume. So the person who creates those desirable items is, in artistic terms at least, in charge of the greater part of its business.

Peter Philips is exactly this person, the current global creative director for Chanel Makeup, belgian born he studied Graphic Design at Antwerp's prestigious Royal Academy of Arts. Philips abandoned fashion design to take up a career in make-up after working as a "dresser" backstage at the prêt-à-porter shows in Paris. After graduating in 1993, Philips built up his book doing test shoots with aspiring photographers and stylists, among them Willy Vanderperre, who recently lensed the Jil Sander campaigns.

He first became famous as a makeup artist for his use of unusual materials, at times he incorporated feathers, pearls and fabrics into his looks, which today seems to be the norm, but back then certainly wasn't. After a decade at the top of the industry, he had gained a reputation as one of fashion's best avant-garde talents – albeit one associated with menswear shoots and the edgier style magazines. Forget cover girls with pretty-pretty pink cheeks and smoky eyeshadow; the pivotal moment in Philips' career came at a Raf Simons shoot, when he drew a Mickey Mouse face onto a model. "It was spontaneous," he recalls of that session. "But when we showed the picture to other people, their jaws just dropped."

Philips told Vogue in August 2008, shortly after becoming Chanel's Global Creative Director, " I would like to shake up the brand a bit but not break it, and offer a nice palette, nice tools for women to use". Any visible changes to the brand will be "very subtle – unlike the other beauty brands, Chanel doesn't have to reinvent itself every five years, because it's so classic".

Highly regarded he is said to have been able to infuse high fashion with surprising influences and new ideas all with cutting edge sophistication.

It comes as no surprise that Philips is the creative mind behind Chanel's beautiful temporary tattoos, when you see the below images from pre-Chanel fashion shoots he masterminded. His graphic design studies come in handy at times.