The World of Kuntzel + Deygas | Hypebeast

Its interesting to hear you speak about creating characters to tell stories. How did the creation of Caperino & Peperone come to fruition?

Florence: We recently realized that our character creations were often pairs and duets. Probably because we are ourselves are a sort of a “pair”. But also possibly because this is typically a French attitude of “thesis vs antithesis”. It’s part of our French curiosity and love for “conversations” and dialogue. When one part of the pair says something, the other brings another vision of the same topic, not to fight, but to open the door to unexpected ideas and to help further develop the idea.

Caperino & Peperone were born to fit this need of conversation. They are a graphic pretext to make dialogues. Sometimes dialogues with words, sometimes abstract dialogues with “silent stories”, and expressing feelings only with the help of visuals. We consider them as “characters” in the typographic mean, like letter “a” and letter “b” always read “a” or “b” in whatever font is dressing them up (using Gothic font or Helvetica gives a twist to the reading, but the reading stays the same). The same with Cap&Pep, we can distort them to abstract shapes, make them as luxury Hi-Fi sculptures or use them as simple print on a t-shirt, they tell the same story but the interesting thing is the new feel that is created by the unexpected use of Cap&Pep. They have been created without any master plan and grew organically. Sarah at colette knew the concept behind them and she pushed us to make something visible. She offered us this great visibility at colette by opening up her website, then the shop and collaboration on products. But I know she wanted us to go further and publish the stories we have written on a large scale!

I was going to ask you about that actually. How did you two begin working with colette?

Florence: Sorry, but I will give you the full story…

In 1998, we had directed a full advertising campaign for an Yves Saint Laurent fragrance for men, “Live Jazz”. It was very unusual that underground directors were commissioned, YSL campaigns were mostly directed by Mondino or David Lynch. It seems like the YSL people had seen and loved some music videos we had directed for the Sparks band (from Los Angeles) and Dimitri from Paris. For the TV commercial we had the idea to involve in the casting not only models but real personalities, that in our mind would carry the feeling of contemporary and young “Jazz”. And among them, we involved Hiromix , the Japanese photographer, who appeared in the commercial as herself, taking snapshots. Then YSL people invited Hiromix to participate in a photoshoot to celebrate the 40 years of creation and history of Monsieur Saint Laurent, and offered me to follow this photo session and make a kind of “making-of” with my drawings. This making of became a book that was sold at colette who contacted me for an exhibition of the drawings. At that time we were finalizing our short movie “Winney” with Olivier and when Sarah discovered it at our workplace she proposed us a large Winney exhibition at colette for Christmas 1999. It was a huge party of 2000 guests and a most exciting event. The whole store was Winney-related, from windows to galleries to water bar, not a wall without Winney. And all the goodies that were produced were subsequently sold out.

Wow. So its been a pretty long-standing relationship with Sarah (colette). What has been your favorite joint project thus far?

Florence: Each project was a pretty fun development, Winney, Cap&Pep, Com-pet… The idea of a favorite project is not the point, but rather a favorite relationship is! With Sarah and her mum colette, we always have a feeling that all is possible, because they can decide by themselves. We once had the same feeling when we worked on the Steven Spielberg movie “Catch Me If You Can”, because all of it was so unexpectedly easy. We assume this is because he is his own producer and can decide by himself. The decision process was short and fast, as with Colette and Sarah. We love the independence given to us and we respect the hard work they do, always with a smile on their face.