Over the past few years, Hedi Slimane's ongoing design collaborations with musicians on their stage costumes has allowed him unfettered access around the stages of live concerts by David Bowie, The White Stripes, Beck, The Rolling Stones, Blondie, The Strokes, and The Libertines...in Paris, London, Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles. This juncture between fashion and music has evolved into a personal photographic investigation on the mythology of the rock concert. In Slimane's pictures, the stars of the shows are often conspicuously absent; what the images reveal, instead, is a meditation on the creation of a rock personality, the silent ritual that goes on in the space he (or she?) inhabits. His images capture, as Slimane himself puts it, "the sacred--almost sacrificial--space of the stage."

Brad Pitt was married in one of his suits, John Galliano dressed in one of his jackets to receive a prestigious award, Karl Lagerfeld never wears anything else, and women as dashing and fashionable as Madonna, Catherine Deneuve, and Cecilia Dean go drag to wear his designs. Hedi Slimane, the young designer who left Yves Saint Laurent to reinvent Christian Dior's menswear image, embraces "the cosmopolitanism of the old-school couturier" as well as "the conventional trappings of the modern-day überdesigner." He reconfigures classical pieces via subtle tailoring tricks, discreetly adding such dandified details as black leather carnation buttonholes, tiny emerald-cut diamond pins clipped to a pant fly, and clear sequins dispersed in the folds of pleats. He is the leader of an anti-technological, anti-velcro revolution that is striving to take men's fashions forward to the luxurious, armorial, sophisticated standards of time past. As Slimane himself has said, "For me, tradition is now." Intermission was conceived and built by Slimane himself as an artist's book. Published in collaboration with Pitti Immagine.