Vice Style

The most surprising thing about French street art guy Honet is that he isn't awful. Back at high school in 1988, all his contemporaries were calling themselves things like 'Fuck Your Mother', but he somehow weaved through this titular minefield and decided to name himself 'Honet', it means ‘honest’ in French. Anyways, since then he’s kept painting, and having caught the eye of the people behind Lacoste L!VE, Honet designed a capsule collection for the firm.

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Vice: So graffiti - explain the appeal.
Honet: What I liked most at first was going out at night with my friends to mess around and do illegal stuff. Punks fascinated me. Paris was sort of a lawless zone back then. There were many gangs—Zoulous, skins, mods—it was quite dangerous.

“Zoulous”?
Groups of black guys who hung out around Les Halles or La Défense listening to rap music and getting into fights every night with skinheads, redskins, and guys who listened to rock music. Everyone had his own crew with his own color, but I loved the mix between rock, punk and rap. I was always into Bérurier Noir  as well as Public Enemy, and all those guys.

I’ve heard you’re the king of the catacombs.
Ha ha, I don't know about that, but I am always hanging out there. I like it, but then again, it’s sort of palliative. I calmed down a bit with illegal graffiti and started doing urban exploration; finding places where people don’t think of going or that they can’t gain access to - historical places, hidden places. When you’ve done graffiti for years you end up feeling a bit as if you owned the city. After a while you know the tube by heart—all the tunnels, the forbidden passages, the obscure spots—then you start wanting to know a little more.



I’ve heard the Opera House is great too. Apparently there’s this round room where the dancers train?
Yeah, the round room where the domes are leads to the roof. There’s a small window there without bars, we opened it and were able to access the roof and the golden statues with the really powerful lighting. It’s very beautiful. When you go down to the basement the architecture is quite strange. There are stairs everywhere, and if you open the trap doors there’s a lake underneath.

Wow. So that old Parisian urban legend is true?
Yeah, you can go down and swim if you feel like it.

Is the fashion industry just trying to buy into some youth culture thing or is it about more than that?
With time, I realized that what graffiti is a form of advertising. It was all about putting emphasis on a name, putting it everywhere. When we paint a train we know that it might only go through a station once so we think of what shapes and what colors will have the biggest impact on people. That’s what all the people who are working in image and advertising are looking for - people who think about impact. I’ve basically spent twenty years instinctively learning advertising without knowing it.

So what’s your relationship with Lacoste?
Like I said, when I was young I was really influenced by crews hanging out together. All these groups recognized each other by the clothes they were wearing, there was always a kind of fetishism around clothes. It’s always been important to me and all the clothes I wear have a specific meaning. Lacoste was the brand that my parents and my grandparents wore. They were the first clothes that I wore when I was a kid, so for me there’s a history behind the brand, and I always wore polos. It’s a bit of a staple garment for me.

Some of your Lacoste L!VE designs are based on the old warship Dazzle painting, right?
It was actually the British who first asked artists to think of camouflage systems for warships. Dazzle was less about disguise and more about breaking up the ship's shape so that it was impossible to estimate its distance, or what it really was. In the end it didn’t work at all so the experiment was stopped, but it provided some crazy results. Some ships have been painted in this way. They looked really pop. I love exploring, I'm always looking around for old World War II bunkers - war and camo are big inspirations for me.

 

TEXT: VALERIA COSTA-K

TAGGED: Lacoste, Honet