June 12, 2011 |
FROM THE VAULT (WINTER 2010)
He works for (and our sincerest apologies for the Sister Sledge) “The best designers, heaven knows… Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci”. Well, maybe not Halston or Fiorucci, but most certainly the Chanels and the Pradas. He has also worked with Cher and Celine Dion. It’s probably easier just to mention those he doesn’t work with, otherwise we could be here all day. He sells himself as a boy from Vegas who kicked ass. His first big job was for TV Guide and he’s, like, really tall. His name? Stefan Beckman.
Even if you haven’t heard of him, you’ll most definitely know of his work. He’s been creating some of the best set design you’ve witnessed for at least 13 years. Remember those Marc Jacobs runway sets? The hall of mirrors? The town house interior? The lollipop brick road? The marching band strutting their stuff down that catwalk? All him. The Prada ad campaigns? The ones with the Liz Taylor lookie-likie, among others? All fur coats, red convertible and snow-filled backdrop? Him, too.
Then there’s every Chanel campaign ever shot by Karl Lagerfeld, along with the Linda Evangelista/Naomi Campbell “fight” for DSquared² and too many Dolce spreads to even know where to begin. And what about his film work? Well, just the one so far, but then Carter Smith’s Bugcrush did win the best short film at Sundance in 2006, despite the fact that the bugs Stefan had been cultivating for weeks died the day of filming.
He started young. His father was a landscape architect. It feels as though they moved around quite a bit when he was young – well, more than your average: Las Vegas with the tumbleweed and peacocks, San Francisco, flashy oil-soaked Houston, Austin for college, LA after that. The perfect setting for constant self-reinvention or, if you prefer, a new room, a blank canvas to do with as you wish. “I was obsessed with Lego as a kid, as I’m sure most people are,” he admits. “Also loved TinkerToy sets, building forts with sheets in my living room…
As I got older, I wanted to express myself by making sure my room looked a certain way, whether it was by making a Brooke Shields shrine above my bed or throwing out everything and starting over only using Marimekko fabrics and baskets for storage. Personal space is important to me. In one word, gay. I did a lot of theatre in high school – we did everything – acting in the plays and working behind the scenes as well. In college, I majored in theatre and film. In my film-directing classes, I loved being behind the camera, but more importantly, I loved designing and building the sets for the productions. One of my college productions was Christopher Durang’s The Nature and Purpose of the Universe. I was a huge fan of his work at that time – super sick and funny.”
After college, he indulged in that well-known rite of passage, moving to a big city, or from one big to city to another in his case, but in reverse – LA to NYC – away from the home of “set design”. But, he says, “it always just seemed like the thing to do”. He had been working his way up in film “from a producer’s assistant to working in the art department on TV projects. My first jobs in the art department were answering phones and driving a truck around, picking up furniture as a member of the swing team.
I sold my convertible, gave up the LA lifestyle and decided to make a go of it [in New York]. It wasn’t all glamorous in the beginning. The first year I waited tables and just tried to meet people. Early on, my first commissions were for TV Guide. I thought that was pretty big. Whitney Houston was my first cover and I did a set with coloured spheres all around her. I thought that was pretty cool at the time”.
Through friends of friends he wangled his way into the orbits of Fabien Baron (who, at the time, was still a novice at Harper’s Bazaar), L’Wren Scott, Herb Ritts and, most significantly to him, Steven Miesel, whom he has described as “incredibly inspiring, especially because he pushes the limits and forces you to bring the best you can to the table”. From then on, there was no turning back.
His claim-to-fame breakthrough, however, was meeting Marc Jacobs, though nothing much happened at the start. They met on the set of Marc’s first Louis Vuitton campaign shoot. They both survived it and went their separate ways until a few years later when Stefan got a last-minute call to go and meet Marc again. They hit it off. “The first Marc show was done in less than a week, literally being designed as we were building it. Truly exciting in terms of something on such a grand scale, involving lighting and everything else that goes into a runway show. When the models walked out, I was afraid some of the set pieces would fall onto the runway or the models. Thank God they didn’t. None of the models fell either.”
Don’t think for a second, though, that he can be defined merely by his work for Marc, despite his creation of the LCD-screen bag for Louis Vuitton playing SpongeBob SquarePants that Mr Jacobs carried down the runway after he’d just sent out the supers dressed in Richard Prince nurse outfits. This, after all, is a man who has worked with both Celine Dion and Cher, which may mean a pittance to you but, to us, is two-thirds of the holy trinity. We would happily go back to the warm bosom of the ex Mrs Sonny Bono, whose dream it is to “bring back the glamour of 1960s Las Vegas and do an intimate show/supper club with various entertainers and show the world the Vegas that used to be”. As Stefan puts it, “you can do so much crazy shit with her”.
He has also gone down the route of shop proprietor with Property, which “came about as an idea for a prop house. After a short time my partner and I decided to do a retail store. It was the late 1990s and seemed like the time to do it. It is still open – my partner bought me out years ago. I don’t miss the day-to-day or the Saturdays when I was shop girl in the store. But what I do miss is searching out interesting pieces around the world and creatively displaying them in the store.”
His favourite projects, though, “would probably be our big installations – some of the Marc shows, the Swarovski couture exhibition in Paris, the Cartier centennial exhibition in New York and LA. These projects involved a lot of research and several months’ time. I draw a lot upon art, architecture and general design. Also, I have an amazing staff and crew that keep me inspired and always on my toes. It is hard to always find something inspiring and creative for different clients. I try to travel when I can to exotic locations.
Contrary to what people say, New York is still inspiring every day. You see things all the time, even walking in the street. I think it keeps the creative juices flowing. It’s hard to say what the worst was, because some of these projects at times were the worst. But I feel like those times turn out as great learning experiences of the design process”. Is being a perfectionist problematic? “Yes. This is a problem. My staff sometimes think I’m never happy. It’s hard for me to let things go, although I usually get my way. But not always.”
His life, in case you were wondering, is “like a really sick reality show. Making dreams happen in such a short time… I’ve done some amazing things but deep down I feel like there is so much more for me to do.”
by Natalie Dembinska
