Charaf Tajer: It’s a shirt made of knitwear—from Damascus.

The next collection is inspired by a group of people who, during the war in Syria, were partying, taking LSD, having plastic surgery, and dressing really colorfully with crazy hair styles. Those people survived the war in part because of the partying. They were rebels in a pacifist way. I met this group of people—who are still doing these completely illegal techno raves and disco parties—and that is why I was in Damascus. And the show in January will reflect on my trip.

No they haven’t. It’s an underground movement that forms illegally. I found the story just mad. I met them when some of them came to Paris as political refugees. As I was already in the Middle East, I thought it was a good time to go to one of their parties—a techno party in Damascus.

We invented codes because there is limited documentation of these parties. It was my first time there. I’ve been working on this collection since last July.

Yes, I always start work [on my next collection] just after a show.

Yes, I do a lot of research in the first two months. Then, I start designing and sampling. The general idea for this collection is really about love; it’s against war and against the very idea of fighting. It’s about being liberated through partying, and about self-expression.

Frankly, this morning I was still in a state of shock. I met people from all social backgrounds: kids who have to go into the army; people who are artists and who are more bourgeois; politically-active people. And the spirit is generally so positive—compared to Paris where people love complaining about nothing. The guys there have nothing; they’re like in the shit, but they still have such a positive mindset and that is really touching. I’ve always been close to the youth, and I spent quite a lot of time with young people over there. Frankly, it breaks my heart seeing how they don’t have the same opportunities as we do, and how complicated their existence is. At night there’s no electricity, their currency is worthless, they have no prospects in life, most schools have been closed. It’s very difficult. So, you come away thinking: how come I got lucky to be who I am—and not be in their shoes? You really come face to face with that reality. It’s amazing to experience that, but at the same time this morning I was really down. I’m processing everything I saw there. The young people in uniform really touched me, too. They have to go to war even though they don’t want to. There are portraits of Bashar al-Assad everywhere. It’s crazy.

On the way there it was quite violent.

Because there was a traffic jam and people started shouting. There are armed guards everywhere, so there was a lot of tension. Also, it’s obvious I’m not from there, so they asked me lots of questions like, What am I doing there? They’ve met French people, and so they would get confused because—even though I’m French—I look Arab. So they would be like, What’s that about? There were bribes coming from people who wanted to get through the frontier quickly. You can imagine: getting into an unstable country from a country that’s also completely unstable. Then there’s this no-man’s-land that lasts for about 20 minutes between Lebanon and Syria. When you get to Damascus, it’s really beautiful, but at the same time really protected. There’s been no bombardments in the center of Damascus, but as soon as you get to the suburbs there’s so much destruction. You can see the traces of combat everywhere. I’ve never seen that before.

I met Maya Chantout, who was part of this movement and who told me of its existence. She’d left the country, having been lucky enough to get out. She got to France, went to fashion school, and then started working at Hermès, and then at Celine. Now she’s a freelancer. When we met she had this really Parisian aspect to her, and then when she told me her story it really touched me. We’re always talking about looking for the beauty in the world, and I think what’s happening in Damascus is also beautiful. We talk about the bombardments, but people are still partying. It was a really touching story, and so I thought creating this collection is a way to show that beauty—the pacifist resistance of these people—from a different angle.

Yeah.

There’s reappropriated propaganda, an architecture theme—it’s still Casa, just applied to Damascus. It’s joyful, but there is one shirt where I draw a contrast between the people dancing and the fighter planes just above them. There’s a Casa money print, which was hard to do. I’ve always been fascinated by and really studied the detailing on bank notes. It’s just wild how they’re made: the scanning, the mini monograms, the writing. I really enjoyed doing that.

It’s the craziest iconography made of intricate details and holograms that make it impossible for them to be copied. I found this graphic designer—I didn’t work with him—who has a site, specializing in copying bank notes. On his website you can see all these bank notes he’s worked on from around the world. The bank note codes are completely mad.

Yeah, I think that’s the step before. The ultimate step is definitely bank notes. I was looking into forgers, and even printers. For example, there are these printers that are illegal to own. I saw a documentary about gangster graphic designers who do forgeries.
I also didn’t want to do any Arabic type prints or Arabic ornamentation—I avoided all orientalism as I didn’t want to go down that path. That’s how I came to the money prints, I was looking for a parallel range of ideas instead.

Because I find it too tribalist, and a bit too easy. I wanted to create other iconography for the jacquards and prints. I didn’t want to fall into the Arab for Arab’s sake. But you’ll see in January.

We’re 60 people now.

We’ve employed a lot of people in the past four years and then there’s the freelancers, too. We’re at least 60 people at Casablanca.

No. We had a small investment in the beginning, but now we need to raise in order to evolve. I want to open shops, and production is super complicated.

Yeah, if you sell for $25 million this season, you have to have $12.5 million in your bank to push the production forward. You don’t always have that as a young label. We’re not there yet and we’re totally autonomous, so we have to borrow money and pay it back quickly. It feels like gymnastics.

We’ve got a 20-person strong atelier made up of the pattern-makers, machinists, people specialized in tailoring and evening dresses. All the samples for the show, apart from a few things that are done elsewhere, we do ourselves. We have a versatile, well-trained team. They all come from Burberry or other big houses, and they’re all really passionate about what they do.

We had this right from the beginning. As soon as I had my own office in London four years ago, I had a little room with a machine—a mini atelier. I’ve always wanted to do this. I didn’t want to feel frustrated, waiting for three weeks to get your stuff back from Italy after sending it off. I wanted to create something more similar to a house. To be like a house, you need an atelier. The atelier grew really quickly, and that really makes a difference.

Really?

I think those trousers are one of the categories we need to work on. But it depends on the collection. The last collection was vaqueros-inspired, so we found these slightly weird shapes for the cut in Mexico. And yes, we did accentuate the crotch length. We made trousers that are a bit above the ankles and a bit flared. As we’re still in the process of defining the Casa style, we sometimes do things that stand out—but I don’t really have a specific style of trousers.

Yes, tailoring is very important for us even with sportswear. We apply lots of tailoring proportions to sportswear to make it a bit more chic. Sports is something noble especially when thinking about the first guys who played tennis—they were super chic. I want to go back to that but in a modern way. So yes, even when making our tracksuits, we use tailored volumes and details for a sporty elegance.

Yes, even the fabric is really well-developed. We’ve developed all our own jerseys. They’re not at all a second category—they’re just as important. I think there are two sides to the brand: there’s the side which is very tailored and then there’s the sporty aspect. That’s what makes the spirit of the brand.

Yes. In fact, with System, I wanted to talk about psychedelics with a professional.

Did you like it?

They’re top.

What have I learnt? So many things, starting with the fact that it’s great therapy. Through psychedelics I learnt how to let go of my ego.

Yes, they’re the best. Psychedelics taught me a lot of compassion, how to see the world differently. They also taught me how to put things into perspective, not stress anymore, and how to focus on the important things in life. I’m still learning how to not be scared, how to get over certain fears that I’ve cultivated—they really help with that. Psychedelics are really important to me, especially mushrooms.

It depends where you are. But generally speaking, they’re all good—especially in Mexico and in Hawaii. I think psychedelics are a bit like wine: it’s best to drink locally. For instance, when you’re in Italy, you drink Italian wine and eat Italian parmesan. Mushrooms are like Mexico’s parmesan.
They truly are interior experiences; so personal. They help you analyze yourself and discover the world through a different point of view. A shaman once said to me that shamanism is the art of going far in a place that we don’t know, but that the whole art of shamanism is about bringing something back with you. The difficulty lies in the fact that you trip, and then you forget that trip. So it’s important to keep something from the experience by bringing it back into your life.

That’s what you want.

Yes, I’ve seen that kind of thing, too. Here are the pictures.

Yes, it’s arches within arches.

Futuro Optimisto. It’s the vaqueros collection we’ve done.

When you’re tripping on psychedelics, you have moments where you feel like you’re part of the architecture. This picture is a psychedelic visual that we reproduced with the camera, one where you become part of a universe; where you realize you are blending into the world you are a part of, which in turn makes it easier to accept. One way of getting over difficult challenges is to accept you are part of everything. We wanted to integrate the design into this spirit of fractured lighting.

Yes, there’s always a cosmic message. It’s really important for us to show this.
It’s like we’re the opposite of Balenciaga—the true opposite of Demna. They have a point of view that is honorable and valid, but it’s the polar opposite to us. I’m not talking about their polemic, but about the way they dress like skinheads listening to techno music with a totally dystopian view of the world. We have a totally different point of view. We want to show the beauty of the world with no limitations. We travel a lot and meet people who do things very differently, like the shamans I mentioned alongside other artists. For me, the importance lies in showing what I find beautiful in the world—not the end of the world, which is all ugly and horrible, and where we’re all depressed. I want to share this notion that we live in an exceptional world with an abundance of beauty.

Yes, I don’t know if it’s above the clouds, but I’m always taking time to acknowledge that it’s not all shitty. If we want to pass on any sense of hope to the next generation, to pass on a sensitivity to questions of culture and nature, we have to give them a taste of what is good. Referencing certain artistic movements and types of architecture, showing nature in a particular way, is a way of saying that this world belongs to us. And it’s beautiful, it’s not empty. We can draw inspiration from everywhere. That’s the message of the brand.

For sure. Maybe not a teacher, but definitely a platform on which people can say, Oh yeah that’s cool too. It gives people an excuse to talk about different subjects, like finding beauty in Formula 1 racing or by giving a glamorous, psychedelic edge to the vaqueros or through these hippies in the Arab world who are partying against a backdrop of war. That’s what interests me and that is what this brand/platform is based on. It’s about giving the keys to people who don’t necessarily know about these movements. Casa is a medium. I don’t know if teacher is the right word because it sounds a bit pretentious, but the brand creates a dialogue and a space for us to share ideas.

Thank-you for referencing Lesage. That’s an honor. I went to visit their atelier recently and I hope to work with them next year. What do you want to know about them?

I think around €30,000. It’s all hand embroidered, I don’t know how many hours of work it took.

If you take the right mushrooms, that’s the jacket you get to see.

Those are animals that are part of this psychedelic vibe. Have you ever been to Oaxaca in Mexico? At the beginning of the 20th century, an artist called Pedro Linares created this whole imaginary world of animals, and now it’s become something of a tradition, like a horoscope. Only we have the 12 astrological signs and they have 365. Everyone has two animals each, and people even adopt them. So, we developed these particular drawings with local artists there for the collection. They created four or five totally psychedelic animals like this that have found their way into the collection.

Yes, it’s what we’ve done since the beginning. I don’t know if we’ll continue, but I hope so. I was at a conference the other day where we were talking about fashion, and someone said to me: You travel to somewhere different all the time with each new collection—why don’t you talk about Morocco? And I was like: I do, but I can also talk about other things—I don’t see why just because I have Moroccan origins that I always have to talk about Morocco, and not explore the world? Morocco is an amazing place where people go on holiday and the culture is super cool, but as a Franco-Moroccan I want to explore the world.

Maybe. Maybe, that’s what it is.

Yes, audacity is very much part of it—audacity and panache. Those are both things that often get lost in the world today. Humor is another thing that’s often missing, not irony, but humor. I think it’s as cool to do a collection based on vaqueros as it is to do one on Air France, which is a subject that can be perceived as quite austere with the blue, gray, white and red colors, and the uniforms. But I see so much poetry in the world of French aviation, the belle epoque of the Concorde. It’s as interesting as the psychedelia of the vaqueros. I can explore both equally.

Yes, it’s a mixture of things. The Hermès silk scarf is a bit like the architecture of the brand. Inside it, we put what we want. We can talk about Lake Garda, about psychedelic animals from Mexico, about Tokyo or Monaco. We can talk about a thousand things.

I think it’s interesting to give some depth to the conversation, too. It’s not just about where beauty comes from. It’s about the movements that aren’t supposed to be there, like these hippies in a country at war. We’re not talking about Syria itself, but about these people who want to escape fear through love. For me, there’s nothing more beautiful than that. They are an oppressed people, faced with things that no one is ever ready for. I met people who have been to Burning Man, who party, who live their lives normally, some of them were plumbers, others architects, artists, painters—they are just normal people. But no one wanted to talk about the fighting planes overhead.

Yeah when they were seven or eight years old, war had already begun. But what I want to say is that it could be you or me. Oftentimes we have this vision of a refugee as someone we know nothing about, and I want to draw attention to the fact that these people we talk about on the television have a boyfriend or girlfriend. They have their families, their work, their lives. They’re obliged to leave their home or stay in horrible conditions. I also met people who have left their lives in Canada to come back to Syria, who said: If we’re not here to represent the culture, then cultural society will just collapse.

Yes, you have to love your country and your people. But they’re not masochists. They just believe they have a role to play in, for instance, organizing weekly concerts. I met this guy who has rebuilt his family home, which was not destroyed by the war but from old age, to throw weekly concerts that are free to attend. He brings in amazing musicians all to continue the creative conversation of Damascus. He doesn’t earn any money doing this—he used to live in London, but he went back to cultivate the artistic fibers of the city. It was really touching to meet people like him because, in a world where people are really quite selfish, they’ve found this passion to give to others.

Yes, they really are a noble people.

No, it was a toad that we had on the shoot.

It must have a name. I can find it if you like. But once again, it’s a psychedelic allusion because there are methods where you lick the back of a toad.

Yes, but that’s not mushrooms, that’s more to do with ayahuasca.

Not yet. But I thought the animal was very beautiful, so we brought it along.

Yes, it was with its owner. There was one guy who complained about the horses in Casablanca’s last show. Like, what are you doing to those animals?

Yeah, it pisses me off a bit. They were horses who work in cinema, so they are treated super well. They do that all the time, and their trainer was with them. Everyone was very happy. Animals are magnificent—there are so many species and so much beauty—and frankly, as long as the animal is well looked-after with lots of love, I don’t see why we can’t show this beauty. We take care and work with people who truly love animals, with specialists.

It was the first time we had someone who makes hats on the team—this amazing guy, Noel, who I think you met when you came to the show.

He’s on the team.

Yes we have an actual hat guy. He works part time for us.

Yes, and he’s great.

Yes, and so does Hermès. The hat completes the look. It’s complicated to do as it can easily fall into the carnivalesque. We’re pretty close to having a hat like that—if you made that hat three or four centimeters taller, with a smaller brim, it would instantly be something else.

Yeah, it’s completely surreal. But, having someone who knows the tones and the proportions of hats really helped me. I didn’t want a shy hat, but I didn’t want a Halloween hat either.

Yes. I love that outfit.

Really? If you’re bringing Karl into the conversation—he defined the codes of fashion today. It was him that first started the notion of having a creative director in a house. There had been people who’d worked for big names. But he was the star creative director, who was almost more important than the brand itself.

Once, after a Chanel show, I was invited to lunch in the Grand Palais and we met there. I was with a friend who I’m really close to. So, I went and Karl was sitting opposite me.

Yes! We spent a few minutes with him and then he left, he was a bit tired—it was towards the end.

We didn’t talk much. We said hello, and then it was a conversation around the table. He was talking about music with Pharrell and asked what we thought about the music at the show. Then he said his goodbyes and left.
I’m really inspired by him. It might be because of him that we always have such strong themes in each collection. He really defined a way of being a creative director that didn’t exist before. He’s a part of pop culture, all the while being a really classical guy. I like those two aspects. I’d like to be a continuation of that style, a style that isn’t completely deconstructed but also isn’t old and dusty. I can see myself a lot in the way he thought, in the way he integrated architecture and design. He would often talk about drawing, about comic books, about caricatures. He had such an incredible repartee. You met him a lot didn’t you?

Yes, just one.

I can’t wait to do it, too. We’re going to have a pretty crazy set design. It’ll go so well with the story.