WORLD IN PROGRESS

FILM

WORLD IN PROGRESS is a campaign film created for Maitrepierre Spring/Summer 2021, at the beginning of a defining period in the house’s visual and material language.

Shot in studio, the film unfolds as a series of highly graphic monochrome tableaux, where bodies, garments and colour are brought into the same sculptural field. Strong pink and green lights saturate the space, flattening perspective and transforming each scene into a living image — at once pop, ritualistic and abstract.

At the centre of the film, three dancers assemble, separate and recombine. Their bodies form temporary architectures: human sculptures, moving knots, organic structures in constant transformation. Rather than presenting the collection through conventional fashion poses, WORLD IN PROGRESS stages the garments as part of a collective physical language, where clothing, movement and colour become inseparable.

The film is carried by the powerful sound of contemporary Mongolian overtone singing, mixed with an electronic and ritual energy. The voice does not simply accompany the images; it gives them the feeling of an invocation, as if the bodies were being summoned into form.

Created for a collection built from reclaimed textiles and materials sourced from recycling streams, the film reflects an essential idea in Maitrepierre’s early universe: fashion as transformation. Discarded matter becomes colour, surface, rhythm and silhouette. Waste becomes image. The unfinished world becomes a space of invention.

Between contemporary dance, fashion film and ritual tableau, WORLD IN PROGRESS presents Maitrepierre as a house already engaged in the construction of a new visual ecology — playful, graphic, conscious and radically alive.

PROCESS

For WORLD IN PROGRESS, the film was conceived as a studio-based visual composition, using colour, bodies and movement as the primary materials of mise-en-scène.

The lighting design plays a central role. Intense pink and green light fields create a nearly monochromatic environment, turning the studio into a graphic space where the dancers and garments appear as figures inside a painted surface. The result is closer to a moving image-tableau than to a traditional campaign film.

The choreography is built around the idea of combination. Three bodies come together, support one another, fold, rise, collapse and reorganise themselves into sculptural forms. This physical construction echoes the spirit of the collection itself: fragments, reclaimed fabrics and vivid printed surfaces reassembled into new silhouettes.

Rather than relying on narrative, the film works through rhythm, repetition and transformation. Each movement creates a temporary image before dissolving into the next. The camera observes the dancers as living structures, allowing the collection to emerge through gesture rather than through direct presentation.

The soundtrack — shaped by contemporary Mongolian overtone singing and electronic ritual energy — reinforces the sense of ceremony. It gives the film a primitive yet futuristic quality, connecting the collection’s recycled materials to a broader idea of renewal, mutation and collective presence.

As one of the early Maitrepierre campaign films, WORLD IN PROGRESS helped define a language that would continue to evolve throughout the house’s visual identity: a cinema of colour, bodies and transformation, where fashion becomes the starting point for a world in motion.