Bleak Fabulous

The photographs and spreads from the notebooks published in Ffasiwn Magazine Spring/Summer 24 were produced within the context of a Summer School programme created by Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James in August 2023. The programme involved a series of creative workshops centring on costume design, set design, photography and illustration. The finished costumes and set were then photographed in Merthyr Tydfil by Schneidermann, with James working on the creative direction. Responding to the theme of a ‘grey prom’, participants had the opportunity to work alongside industry professionals who delivered workshops at Georgetow Boys and Girls Club to support them in realizing their visions. Costume workshops were led by Welsh costume designer Thomas-Huw Hopkins. The youth centre was transformed into an atelier with mannequins, fabrics and sewing machines, where the participants became the costume designers for the outfits that they wear in the photographs. They then imagined the set that they would wear the costumes in, and workshops led by Welsh set designer Lowri Heckler enabled them to bring the set to life. 

Grey as colour is key to these photographs. Linking up with the greyness of the houses, the costumes and décor in these pictures use grey as colour and symbol. Grey can suggest the bland and monotonous, a dull documentary sobriety, but here grey is keyed into the energy and inventive play of these young people. Grey might also beautifully come to stand for the indeterminacy of their lives, caught between adulthood and childhood, their identities still in a state of flux. 

Since 2015 Schneidermann and James have collaborated on a socially engaged artistic project with the participation of youth clubs in the South Wales Valleys.It has introduced the creative arts to young people from deprived areas and opened up new representations of communities through photography within a post-industrial context.