The Cannes Film Festival is the site of much power-brokering and networking. But for Ten lingerie designer Daphne Javitch, it was the airport afterward where the magic happened. On her way home from attending the festival with her friend Michelle Williams, Javitch spotted a hero of hers in passport control: the French photographer Brigitte Lacombe, who over the course of decades has shot celebrities and politicians, and undertaken long-term collaborations with Miuccia Prada, David Mamet, and Martin Scorsese.
Behold the power of the fandom. “She was so striking-looking and so direct and wonderful in her approach to me, I said, ‘Let’s speak when we are both back in New York at some point,’ ” Lacombe recalled by phone from—again—Cannes. The two kept in touch, and while Williams was filming My Week With Marilyn, Javitch suggested that her old friend and her new one get together. “When you do a project with no assignment, something you do on your own for the pleasure of doing it, because you’re taken with the idea or with someone, for the beauty of it, to just do it—every time I did a project like that, something good usually comes of it,” Lacombe said. The results of the Williams-as-Monroe sitting eventually went far and wide: One of Lacombe’s photos became the film’s poster. Another ended up on the cover of German Vogue. Javitch and Lacombe went on to work together on a variety of projects, like the series of covers the latter shot for New York magazine’s Fall Fashion issue in 2011.
So when, between her design consulting and the occasional styling gig, Javitch embarked on Ten’s first-ever collaboration, on two styles of Italian cotton underwear and two bras with Mona Kowalska of the New York label A Détacher, Lacombe was a natural—if not a given—to call on for help. And she obliged, shooting the two women wearing their creations in her studio, another assignment-free project with a happy ending: It debuts here on Style.com. “I was stunned when you wrote that she was willing to do it,” Kowalska admitted at a preview in her Mott Street shop. “There’s been a lot of hand-shaking,” Javitch confirmed with a smile. Of the trembling, rather than the power-brokering, variety.
The Ten x A Détacher knickers, $45, and bras, $60, are available today at A Détacher, 262 Mott Street, NYC, (212) 625-3380, adetacher.com. For more information, visit tenundies.com.
— Matthew Schneier
Photos: Brigitte Lacombe
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