Fashion Heroes

2025 Book

limited edition of 500 copies

Ha ! Ha ! Ha !

Showdown !

The 2025 Book

While preparing his contribution to the 2025 Culture Shift exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Stephane Sednaoui decided to revisit the Fashion Heroes series he worked on for The Face magazine in 1989, now reimagined in the form of a book.

With this series, Stephane expanded his world of cut-outs, merging the bold aesthetics of pop art with the kinetic visual language of superhero comics. It became a body of work that was both playful and inventive, turning five designers (Gaultier, Westwood, Alaïa, Mugler, and Sitbon) and their muses into characters within a larger vision—a cosmic spill odyssey fueled by the electric pulse of pop culture, which still resonates today.

This book stands as both a time capsule of late ’80s energy and a celebration of its cultural spirit.

But this is not merely a book—it is a sculptural object, an unfolding experience. For its design, he drew inspiration from the installation he had first conceived for the 1993 exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art in Miami.

Enclosed in a solid slipcase—its weight is immediately felt in the hand—it bears the heroic presence of the five designers on both sides. Inside the case, there lies a second protective box, from which a striking tri-fold folder slides out, revealing panoramic images. As the folder opens, the book nestles at its centre—resting like a stratified black monolith.

The “book” defies conventional format and must be opened flat: it has no spine, no turnable pages. Instead, it is a layered assemblage of seven fold-out panels—with each section in a leporello structure—all anchored to the center page. Each section unfolds in a single direction—either horizontally (to the left or right) or vertically (upward or downward)—and when fully extended, it measures more than 2.7 metres wide by 1.1 metres deep.

The reverse side features solarized black-and-white images that offer a shadowed, behind-the-scenes counterpoint. These hidden layers reveal themselves only in the act of folding and unfolding, inviting tactile exploration and rewarding close engagement.

Part archive, part collage, part sculpture, this book is a celebration of Fashion Heroes not just as a photographic series, but as an immersive, physical encounter—an artwork in itself.

Attack !

Each book comes wrapped in tracing paper with a minimal sticker finish.

The Original Project

At the heart of a transformative era for youth culture, Stephane unveiled Fashion Heroes in the pages of The Face magazine. Opening with the magazine’s cover and unfolding across 26 pages, he added his signature to the already vibrant world of 1980s pop culture photography—it was his way to close the decade with a firework of energy and fun.

”You’d be surprised how hard it is to teach people to fly” says photographer Stephane Sednaoui. His epic Fashion Heroes cover story is the fruit of over two months hard labour, of which the initial shoot was just the start. After taking the pictures, Stephane spent weeks cutting out the images by hand, creating montages that he photographed, and making 10 to 15 transparencies of each idea with different effects and colours.

excerpt from The Face Magazine,
October 1989

Charles Cowless Gallery
New York City

July 1993