Erik Torstensson Exhibition. New York

When a store also contains a possible biography

There are references one doesn't fully discover, but rather recognizes. That's what happened to me with Erik Torstensson at a time when my own career was branching out in too many directions at once. There was the agency, there were the campaigns, there was my work as a photographer, and that urge to build something more personal, closer to a brand, to a universe, to a complete way of looking at things, was also starting to emerge. For a while, I wondered if this dispersion was a mistake or, in fact, my nature.

Then he appeared.

First, it was the images. Campaigns, portraits, a way of photographing women, clothes, and attitude without needing to overemphasize anything. Then came the rest: the agency, the creative ecosystem, the brand, the feeling that everything was part of the same visual intelligence. In his journey, creative direction, photography, media, and product coexisted. Not as noise, but as language. Saturday Group, Wednesday Agency, the connection with Mr Porter, and then FRAME were not just professional milestones for me: they were proof that a sensibility could take many forms without losing coherence.

"A small space for many obsessions"

That's why that visit to New York was about more than just a store for me. Claudia and I went expressly to one of FRAME's stores because there was a small exhibition centered around Women in FRAME, the book with which Torstensson gathered a decade of images linked to the brand. That volume, conceived almost as a piece of art and a time capsule, quite accurately summarized everything that had always fascinated me about his universe: the possibility for a brand not to be limited to selling clothes, but to build an atmosphere, a visual memory, a form of desire.

The exhibition was simple, almost silent. Nothing spectacular. The photographs coexisted with the garments, with the furniture, with the normal life of the store. And precisely for that reason, I liked it so much. It wasn't separated from the commercial context, but neither was it reduced to a mere backdrop. It was a very specific blend of fashion, photography, and space; a blend that deeply resonated with me because it spoke to many years of personal questions. How to give artistic dignity to a campaign. How to make a brand have cultural depth. How to turn a store into a scene and not just a point of sale.

I remember the calm of the place, the absence of people, enough time to look without interference. We looked at the clothes, the book, the enlargements, the frames, the cleanliness of the whole. I took everything in: the inspiration of the store, the consistency of the brand, the way the images breathed within such a controlled environment. Some of the models I have always admired were also there, and that added another intimate layer to the experience. In a very small space, many things that are part of my history came together: photography, fashion, the desire to build my own universes, and also that old dream of one day taking my own brand images to an exhibition format.

What I saw there was not a grand lesson in scenography. It was something more useful and deeper: a confirmation.