As it turns out, those movies are crucial for all sorts of reasons for the Portuguese Freitas, 45, who joined Mugler at the end of March, his stellar resume including work at Dior (with both John Galliano and Raf Simons), Dries Van Noten, Alber Elbaz’s Lanvin and, most recently, the behind-the-scenes creative directorship of Sportmax (which he says, allowed him to take on a lead role without the attendant pressures of being thrust into the spotlight—a perfect trial run for his new job). The DVDs are destined to be part of the invitations for his debut show.
“Which one would you like?” I am asked. “Oh, surprise me,” I say, though secretly I am hoping for the 1961 Jacques Demy Lola, as I’ve never seen it. (“One of my favorites,” Freitas tells me a bit later. “Have you watched Demy’s Bay of Angels? It’s lovely.”) There’s a more crucial reason for having all those movies at hand, though: Freitas says he shares Mugler’s love of classic Hollywood, which proved an immediate way to find common ground with him. (Freitas’s all-time top three, incidentally, are Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, and Some Like It Hot.) Movies are also both specific inspiration for his debut collection, entitled Aphrodite Stardust, and integral to his working practices more generally.
“I like to have keywords on my moodboard,” explains Freitas. “They evoke the mood of the collection [as much as the images]—they’re very sensorial to me.” On the moodboard at the moment, much inspired by his cineaste interests: Kitsch Glamour, Stardust, Poetic Camp, Nocturnal, and Purist Maximalism, to give you just a few, all of them pinned up alongside images of classic Mugler, such as a Helmut Newton photo of a star-spangled, bodysuit-clad Eva Herzigova looking like a showgirl—showgirls across the decades are a big part of his thinking for the collection—as well as the likes of hip-jutting Jacques Fath cocktailania, Judy Garland, spooky Hans Bellmer artwork, the corsetière Mr. Pearl, Nineties Martin Margiela (bet you weren’t expecting that), Jayne Mansfield (he loved the recent Mariska Hargitay documentary, and he’s obsessed with Mansfield’s former home, the now demolished Pink Palace), and Guinevere Van Seenus in a scarlet-draped and crushed mimi-crinoline John Galliano dress shot by David Sims in 1996 (bet you weren’t expecting that either).
“This collection will have a very unique expression in the sense that it will be part of a trilogy—a trilogy of glorified cliches,” says Freitas, who’s engagingly smart and warm. He and I have barely been speaking for ten minutes, and already I realize that he is eager to face the legacy of Mugler head-on—even reveling in the challenge. “It’s embracing the idea of a cliché, as Mugler is very much connected to that,” he says. “These universal obsessions have been recurring throughout the years: the power dressing, the glamour, the femme fatale, and retro futurism. At the beginning of this journey [with Mugler], I wanted to be almost archeological—this discovery of the codes of the house by digging into the archives.”
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