IN CONVERSATION
WITH MARTIEN MULDER

CREATIVE DIRECTOR EMILY SMITH CHATS WITH THE PHOTOGRAPHER WHOSE MARFA, TEXAS, PORTFOLIO INSPIRED PRE-FALL 2024. ​

Lafayette 148’s Pre-Fall 2024 collection, Seeing Marfa, is inspired by Marfa, Texas, and the poetic vastness of the raw terrain that surrounds the region’s iconic art foundations. As well as her own experiences of visiting Marfa, Creative Director Emily Smith also looked for inspiration in photographer Martien Mulder’s portfolio of images shot around the region, their nuanced color tones acting as the conduit between the Texan landscape and the collection palette. What follows is an extract from a conversation in which Emily and Martien swap notes on Marfa for CULTURED magazine…

MARTIEN MULDER:

Marfa has always pulled me, ever since I became interested in art. But the experience there, how was that for you?

EMILY SMITH:

I flew into El Paso, and was hit by the massiveness of the sky, the dryness of the desert. I didn’t expect there to be so much life on the ground. The drive was so, so beautiful. Marfa itself was full of very creative people, which was so exciting to be around. The same people working at the Judd Foundation were the ones I saw working at the barbecue stand the night before. It’s such a small town in that sense. In your work, how do you capture those textures of the peeling walls, the concrete, that kind of heat?

MULDER:

I was just trying to define what that tonality is. It’s a haziness. It’s a graphic quality. Of course, it’s the shadow work on all the faint-colored walls. You picked up on the warm hues, instead of the bright blue skies of the vast American West.

MULDER:

Absolutely, more indirect. Maybe a little bit more cerebral. It’s a little bit drawn to maybe a shadow of a thing, fragments also. I think that helps. It’s not like the vast landscape of this insane sky and then the buildings or whatever. It’s always quite close in a weird way, like close ups of smaller details, of course in beautiful light.​

SMITH:

It felt like intimate moments. There was an appreciation for things that maybe other people would overlook. There are those desert—how those kind of blended together into such a pretty palette. And then, the concrete and the gravel and that plaster that you found in your work—and particularly how you captured it. There’s the softness of the pink that was actually on some of the buildings, but also maybe a bit of a reflection from the sun. That really informed color, which I find is sometimes the hardest thing to figure out: how to make colors feel fresh. But then when seeing it through how nature puts colors together, it gives you a different perspective to mix them, to make them feel new. ​​

SMITH:

Which trips have inspired you the most?

MULDER:

I must say trips to Japan. The country invites you to slow down and to celebrate every moment. My eyes are on fire there. How many collections have you made that draw from a particular place?

SMITH:

I don’t always like a kitschy travel collection, because it feels maybe not so authentic for me. With Marfa, because of the art, there was a reason to go there.

MULDER:

You see something that resonates in someone’s work and then you take a bit of that into your own work. It all goes back to Le Corbusier for me. I went to India to the city he built there. Chandigarh is a big city, one of those places where you walk and walk and walk. Everything is in some way directed by that vision for the city, by a group of architects and designers. Another one for me is Susan York. She lives in Santa Fe and works from there, so there’s that relationship to the desert landscape.