Punches, armlocks, tripping… “Tours de force”, a photographic series produced by the Belgian stylist Benoît Bethume and the British photographer Marc Hibbert, was designed in several sketches, each illustrating a self-defense situation. It has just appeared in the latest edition of Mémoire universelle, a funny publication launched by Benoît Bethume in 2012. Around 500 copies per issue, printed in Belgium in the format of a beautiful book, it only appears once every two years (except in 2020 due to the pandemic) and each time around a theme chosen by him alone: love, animality, imagination...
For the fifth issue, titled "Le grand large" and which focuses on audacity and freedom, the stylist has invented a series of fashions diverting the imagery of self-defense guides. “I had seen some like this lying around, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, where women were being attacked and fighting back. But I didn't want to imitate them to the first degree," recounts Benoît Bethume. While feminist self-defense courses have experienced a resurgence over the past five years, in the wake of the movement
"Benoît is as intelligent as he is enigmatic: he shared his idea with me in a few sentences that fit on the corner of the table," says Marc Hibbert. Parodying self-defense situations with fashion clothes would have seemed like a silly project to many, but I knew that with it we would have no trouble injecting elegance into it. As references, the stylist shows him some shots from vintage guidebooks, as well as 1895 images by Eadweard Muybridge capturing examples of "gentlemen's" self-defense holds.
In the fall of 2021, in a studio in Brussels, they finally stage their series after having prepared a dozen story-boarded situations, deliberately offbeat. "I wanted paranoid characters," says Benoit Bethume, edgy smarts who pull the pin out.
One claw: Lemaire
In the end, a man asking for directions is immediately grabbed by the leg, a mother who too timidly hands a 5 euro note to her daughter has her arm twisted, a man offering a woman a bouquet of flowers makes the wrist grind in the blink of an eye... "In order to understand the progress of the situations, we broke down the movements and choreographed everything," says Hibbert.
To dress the heterogeneous cast signed William Lhoest and which brings together actors, a dancer, a singer, a karate teacher, a taekwondo adept or a bodybuilder, Benoît Bethume chose a single label: Lemaire. The two acolytes know her well, since Bethume is a consultant there and has already signed campaigns for the brand with Hibbert.
For them, Lemaire agreed – a rarity – to open his archives wide, lending recent pieces and others whose creation sometimes goes back fifteen years. "The collections of Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran have slight references to the 1970s and martial arts, with oriental inspirations, marked collars and belt games. But they manage to always remain timeless. For this story, we couldn't have asked for more. Nor more convincing that one can be very comfortable in high-end clothes.
