Frédéric Sanchez loves to explore the poetics of sound. For over three decades, he has shaped the sound of fashion from the inside, creating the sonic identity of some of the most iconic shows in history. He started at the end of the 80s alongside Martin Margiela, at a moment when fashion was reinventing itself, and built from scratch a practice and a language that didn't exist before, defining himself as a sound illustrator at a time when no one quite knew what that meant.
Since then, he has worked with Miuccia Prada, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs, Hermès, Jonathan Anderson and many others, while also developing a parallel career as an artist, exhibiting sound installations in galleries and museums around the world.
We sat down with him to talk about his career, his creative process, and his memories of Paris, the city that made him.
What has been the moment or project in your career that you have loved the most?
The beginning was very interesting: it was the moment where I discovered that I could work with music and sound. It also was when I decided to work in a certain way, using a reel-to-reel machine and a tape recorder, like a cinema editor. I created a way to make this soundtrack my own. Then, at the beginning of the 2000s, I started working with the computer, which made it easier to blend references, to mix them, to create layers. I changed my work at that moment. In 2007, I did a huge exhibition about Serge Gainsbourg in Paris, four years of work. I discovered a lot of things about the subject, but also, through Gainsbourg, a lot of things about my own work.
You started your career with Martin Margiela. Was he an influence for you?
I met Martin through a friend, a very interesting woman named Agathe, a model. Martin was always at her parties. She knew I had this passion with music. One day she called me and said: «The guy who is always in my apartment, his name is Martin. He used to be an assistant at Jean-Paul Gaultier, and he's going to make his own label. I talked about you to him, and I said that maybe you have something to share».
So I started working with him. What was very important for me is that I suddenly met someone who had a sort of aesthetic that was close to mine. I realized I was not alone. Our work together amplified what I had in my head. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes you meet someone who is going to amplify what you carry inside. At the beginning I was also helping him with the casting and the press. Then they asked me to join the company, but I said no, I had found my way with music. So we carried on working together on the shows.
How would you describe that shared aesthetic?
It’s an aesthetic concerned with the memory of things. Memories that you can find in sound, in old movies - life's memories. What I'm reaching for is poetry. Like when you remember someone by their perfume, or when you hear music coming from a car in the street and suddenly you feel almost like you're in a film. I quite like this idea of the difference between reality and something more artificial, and the sound that almost infuses life, a kind of contamination. When Martin showed me his dossier, I understood it very quickly. What might seem strange to others was not strange to me at all. We both loved Andy Warhol films, the Velvet Underground, Fassbinder's movies and Pina Bausch. And performance was very important too, the idea of seeing the show like a happening.
You have described yourself as a sound illustrator. What does that mean?
When I started working with Martin, I didn't want to mix the music together. For me it needed to be cut, very abruptly, like cinema editing. Because each look was like an image, and the idea was to tape them together. It was a lot about collage. I decided I was going to call myself a sound illustrator, which referred to the people from radio in the 50s and 60s and Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète, a moment when radio was very experimental, with people doing experimental things to create stories. I also took the term because radio was part of my world: I come from a family that had to leave Spain during the Franco era, and my grandfather was always listening to the Spanish radio. It felt like being in two different places at the same time.
Do you think the modern pace of fashion has changed the way you approach your work?
It's very different from when I started, because back then it was for a very small audience, just fashion journalists and buyers. The show was a very small moment. The big change today is that with the internet, it's more like an event. The venues are huge, the spaces enormous and the people watching are millions. The approach is completely different, like that of a TV show or a cinema production.
You've also worked a lot in the art world. Was there an experience there that shaped your approach to sound?
In the 2000s, I was very interested in making sound travel through space. I worked on creating software that made you feel the sound moving around the audience. We did a beautiful exhibition with Jil Sander in 2017 in Frankfurt, with installations in every room where the sound was truly traveling, almost like memories of sound. One project I particularly loved was with photographer Bettina Rheims, called Gender Studies. She had this idea of photographing people who were transforming into the other gender, and then she came to me and said: «There's something incredible, the voices. You can change the appearance, but it's very difficult to change the voice». I built a sound studio next to the photo studio, interviewed them all, recorded their voices. We made a beautiful installation with all the pictures and all the voices. It was fantastic, very human. I really loved that project.
Has living in Paris shaped your taste for sounds?
Maybe it's the story of the city that influenced me, the poetry of the city, its writers, the people who made films. There was a moment when I went to New York, in the middle of the 90s, when I started working with Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein and Anna Sui. I needed the energy of New York at that moment. Cities are very important for what you create, and Paris is a very big influence.
Is there a specific fashion show that felt quintessentially Parisian?
All the shows I did with Martin were very Parisian, they couldn't have happened anywhere else. The people in the audience, André Putman, people from Studio Berçot, they were all very interesting people from Paris. But there was also another important show with Jean Colonna in the 90s. His studio was very far and getting there was always a nightmare. Once he did a show called The Room, influenced by Nan Goldin and Bettina Rheims, about a woman in a hotel room at 5am, searching for something. I said, «But she's calling a taxi». So I made the entire soundtrack from music cut from those taxi radio transmissions, very Parisian. It was very influential. The next day, Steven Meisel asked for everything, and they did a beautiful reportage in Italian Vogue.
What's the sound of Paris to you?
For me, the sound of Paris is very much related to theater and opera. I grew up with that. I love Debussy, and I also love Wagner. But actually, I love the sound of the sea. I live between Paris and Normandy. So, I have the opposite: the melting pot of sounds in the city, and here, the sea, the wind. It's very important.