Interview with Inez & Vinoodh
for The New Stijl

Notoriously fickle, the fashion world makes it extraordinarily difficult to remain relevant. With a body of work that has kept audiences gasping for over three decades, Inez & Vinoodh have managed to do just that, while simultaneously developing a celebrated presence in the art sphere, an achievement in its own right. Their prolific ability to question norms, challenge perceptions of beauty and predict the future feels uncanny, as if they are the secret architects of what lies ahead for us all.

Put simply, revolutionary thinking is at the core of their practice – one that zigs and zags, evolving with culture seamlessly. And to top it off, the pair, who are a couple as well as creative collaborators, continue to produce work at an unprecedented pace, proving that while their past is littered with acclaim, their sights are firmly set on what’s still to come.

Both Amsterdam natives, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin were exposed to the arts in various mediums from an early age. “My mom was a fashion journalist for the newspaper,” says Inez. “She started doing that, I want to say, a couple of years after the war. She was really young. So, she’d go to Paris and see all the shows as they happened – the Dior new look show and all that. She was also an illustrator and an artist, and so, growing up, she would go to Paris every season and bring home French Vogue, the collection issues. For me, that was what sparked my interest in fashion, in photography, in female representation and images. I basically grew up looking at Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin’s work in French Vogue.”

For Vinoodh, his entry point was the rich landscape of Dutch cultural institutions. “Growing up in the 70s, I remember as a teenager having a CJP – a Cultural Youth Pass – and going to all the museums. That's where I really connected with art and saw photography too. For me, the photographer Ed van der Elsken was a major influence in Amsterdam. I loved his work so much. I saw his book, Eye Love You, in 1977. There was also Yves Saint Laurent’s catalogue of his first exhibition at the Met... I was like, ‘This is art and fashion together. This is what I want to do.’”

The pair initially met studying fashion design at the Vogue Academy in Amsterdam, but after two years, Inez realised, “Design was not my thing.” She transitioned to Rietveld Academie to focus on photography, where she began gearing her assignments towards fashion and portraiture. “I was lucky that early on I already knew the direction I wanted to take.”

From these nurtured beginnings, both were individually tapping into what sparked their curiosity, without yet realising they were heading in the same direction. Post-graduation, Vinoodh had started his own fashion label, Lawina, alongside classmate Rick Bovendeert. When they needed assistance with imagery, Inez immediately sprang to mind, sparking a creative dialogue that changed the course of their respective careers.

The Dutch fashion industry at the time was experiencing a changing of the guard. Traditional couturiers like Edgar Vos and Frans Molenaar, who were all close friends of Inez’ mother, were being challenged by a new era of progressive thinkers like Vinoodh and his contemporaries. In some ways, this moment of turbulence could be considered reminiscent of the current shift from Amsterdam as a capital of denim, to the new wave of streetwear brands populating the modern fashion landscape.

The duo is quick to recognise that the support provided by the Dutch system, which still exists today, was imperative in this phase of exploration. “There was a big push for Dutch designers, fashion designers, and artists,” remembers Inez. “It was actually pretty great because there were quite a few people making their own collections. And it was stimulated, I guess, with subsidies and all that. I feel like it was an amazing moment, and we always say it to our friends here in the States, that in Holland, you can apply for a grant and really make something big. I feel like Amsterdam was, for us, the perfect environment to start thinking about what you want to make and who you are creatively without so much pressure. You were able to experiment for a few years funded by grants.”

“With this financial stimulus, you could really discover and start to work on your own handwriting, basically,” says Vinoodh, to which Inez replies, “You didn't yet have the pressure of having to work or make compromises. So I always say it was an amazing environment to find out who you are creatively… but then you have to get out [of the Netherlands.]”

“From the first second, there was this natural click and we totally understood what we were talking about.” For Inez, “It was like meeting your other half, literally. So, it was interesting. You’re immediately aligned. And most of the time we still don't have to talk so much because we just know,” she laughs. “We know that we think the same. We say the same things at the same moment. We just feel it and know it. And it’s always stayed like that.”

The couple are often asked if this dynamic of working and living together is challenging, but in reality, they can’t imagine it any other way. “If I think about it,” says Vinoodh, “it must be so strange when you have a partner and you don't see each other. When you only meet for dinner and you talk for an hour and that's it.”

On set, their telepathic connection creates a seamless creative dialogue. Inez shares, “Because we shoot together at the same time from different angles, there’s always a moment where we look at each other and the pictures on the back of the camera and ask, ‘What did you do? Which angle are you taking?’ And then, you see, ‘Oh, great. Go in that direction. Let's focus more on this or that.’ So we very much each have a vision of what's in front of us, but by the end of the day, it sort of moves in one direction or the other. The fun part is always asking, ‘What did you do?’”

“I mean, we want to make the best picture,” says Vinoodh of their competitive streak. “So if I show something to Inez, she's like, ‘Oh, I like this.’ She’ll try to redo it to make it even better. And sometimes it is better! But then in the end, when we do an edit, we don't care who took the picture. And it’s also so crazy that you do a shoot and in the end you choose one image and you forget the other 99%.”

Since the 1990s, the photographers have been based in New York, bringing their idiosyncratic style to an international audience. Their first exposure to the city, a residency program at MoMa’s PS1, was not a resounding success. “We were super lonely,” says Inez. “It was actually an amazing initiative, again, from the Dutch government to provide young artists with money and a home in New York for a year, along with a place at PS1. It's an incredible opportunity, and it was a great program… In our case, when I look back at it, I know I wasn't really ready for it.”

After the year passed, “Just reading and watching TV,” as Vinoodh puts it, they returned to the Netherlands in order to prepare for their end-of-residency show. Even at that point, the digital world piqued their interest. “We were a little ahead of the curve,” posits Inez. “This sounds a bit strange, but the things we wanted to do were not possible in New York. So we had to go back to Amsterdam where we had access to a computer. In the US, everybody was saying, ‘Oh, computers will never happen.’’

The resulting series, For Your Pleasure, caused a sensation. It was originally printed by BLVD in the Netherlands, tragically omitting the photographers’ credits, and subsequently republished by The Face out of London in 1994. Overlaying imagery of models on disparate and disconnected cityscapes, the effect was unnerving and sublime.

“What was great was that the foreground and background are equally sharp, which you can never achieve in a real picture. It just offered this strange, hyper-realistic way of looking at things… I think, conceptually, the idea of cutting into time and disrupting the ‘decisive moment’, which was, until then, so predominant in photography. For us, time was no longer an element because you could shoot things in different moments or incorporate elements that were not even from your actual picture. It's a background from an image bank! That was really exciting,” says Inez. The images, now almost 30 years old, still exude a sense of dreamlike timelessness.

Once The Face was published, American Vogue was on the phone courting them. “The same in the art world too,” recalls Vinoodh. Works from these explorations were shown at the Stedelijk Museum, which led to an exhibition at the Venice Biennale and representation at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. “We love [the] Stedelijk Museum.”

As their portraiture and still lifes gained traction in magazines and galleries, themes organically emerged, one of the most prominent being gender stereotypes. “To see that many years later, the issues are still the same but the exposure or the conversation has opened up is exciting,” Inez puts forward. “We made a series called The Forest in ‘95 that talked about why our men are pushed to be the ones that don't cry, the ones that are never soft.” “Why do men always feel afraid to show that they're emotional? It's still that way today for a lot of men – it's impossible,” adds Vinoodh. In the images, adult men are photographed in passive poses, with delicate female hands replacing their own. Their hypothesis: “Once you let your feminine side, or what people consider your feminine side, come through, there will be much less friction, conflict and aggression.”

The artists have witnessed a cultural shift in this area while raising their child, Charles. “There's so much amazing openness and acceptance. We see it in our son’s generation where none of his friends are concerned with whether someone is gay, straight or their gender identity.”

Similarly, beauty ideals have been a source of fascination for the duo, who have over the years dedicated multiple series to unpacking the complicated expectations and assumptions that are implied by society’s arbitrary standards. “This idea of physical perfection, which now is so extreme with fillers and the like. Even the face filters that are happening on Instagram – I feel like we're trying to be so perfect, yet no one has real physical contact anymore. Everything is through Zoom or through a computer screen,” articulates Inez. Vinoodh agrees, “The end result will be that everybody will be perfect or fake, but there is no connection anymore… there is no intimacy.”

“Now it's very extreme. And we're about to enter the Metaverse,” says Inez. “It's really interesting because it's everything we predicted with Thank You Thighmaster,” a 1993 series shown at MOMA PS1 that obscured the genitalia and distorted the facial features of female models, rendering them censored and inert. “We're all locked up in our perfect bodies, but with no way to connect.”

When reviewing their own work in its entirety, they see their heritage and its influence clearly. “We're showing a certain sense of unease, a certain sense of surrealism, a certain sense of flatness,” suggests Inez. “There’s manipulation, whether it was done live in-camera, like in the picture of Christy Turlington and Dick Page [page XYZ], where we just glued Mylar [a sheet form of polyester resin] in between them for real on the street, and other examples where things are completely altered. When I was looking at all our work and what I wanted to select, I was really thinking about Dutchness and what influenced us as we were growing up in Holland, imagery-wise. There's a sense of straightforwardness, somehow a directness that feels very Dutch, both in the mentality of the people, but also in all the art that was made before us.”

That innate cultural legacy manifests in other ways throughout their practice. “Our Dutch side is also the part that likes to go against the grain. But that's not even something that we consciously do; it's just something that's in us. Just trying to subvert stuff all the time,” offers Inez. “We're definitely trying to challenge ourselves,” says Vinoodh.

As they reflect on the current landscape in their field, Inez points out, “It's a very dualistic moment, I feel, in the world of photography – let's put it fashion and photography. I feel that everyone's a photographer now because of Instagram, which is extremely great. I love that the entire world is communicating with images!... There's always surprising, exciting imagery coming along. And the fact that we can discover young, talented people that otherwise we would have never seen because they're somewhere in Indonesia, that’s incredible for us to see and to be inspired by. But at the same time, because of the speed of it all, I feel there's a lack of attention to the actual quality of the work. We still feel that whether an image appears small on Instagram or as a gigantic billboard, the amount of attention around beauty, finishing, lighting etc. still needs to be of the highest quality we can achieve. We noticed that a lot of people are sort of like, ‘Oh, it's just 15 seconds on Instagram,’ and then everyone moves on to the next image. It just doesn't matter and I feel sad about that.”

“Also,” Vinoodh interjects, “because there is such a volume of imagery on Instagram, it becomes a blur. Everybody sees something and you forget it because it's also so small. It doesn't really make an impact.”

The pair, who are active on social media, painstakingly finesse their work, no matter the medium. Visit a newsstand in any corner of the world and you’re still likely to see their images emblazoned upon its pages. On Instagram, you might catch a high-profile artist, model or personality posting about their collaboration with @doubledutchcash, Inez & Vinoodh’s charitable gift-giving platform. In this sense, their cultural ubiquity extends beyond the realm of photography, exponentially increasing their impact.

For these consummate makers, creativity has a central role to play in an increasingly volatile world. “I think it’s a way to reach people,” muses Inez. “I feel like if people talk to each other through images, art is the answer. Especially now – images go around the world at the speed of light, so you better think twice about what you're putting out there. It's an amazing opportunity to talk to people and try to change their minds if you need to.”

Katerina Furrer

Writer—Astrologer