Rankin Film Reps are pleased to present an experimental, playful and reflective new project from photographer and director, Rankin.

La Chaise Ironique is a powerful and culturally impactful study of one of fashion’s most iconic and pioneering muses: the chair.

For Rankin, the current trend for “les chaises” in high fashion is just the tip of the iceberg. Themes of history, power, politics and revolution all manifest in what, to many, is just a simple household object.

Rankin: “Fashion is cyclical and the chair is a buoy in the ever changing choppy waters of style, that shift and change like the tide. It is the vacuum of calm in the middle of a twister of haute couture. All around it, as fashion ebbs and flows as fleetingly as

a field of barley in the wind, the chair stands steadfast and tall”. Almost the antithesis of a monarch’s throne, the simple chair has drifted in and out of fashion, whilst remaining a constant from the 60’s till today.

However, where others see four legs and a seat, Rankin, one of society’s most prescient commentators, sees more. Over the past year he has mapped a shift, as the use of the chair has stepped into new realms of self-expression. In what has been a year of creative stifling and artistic frustration, the chair has become a life raft. A go-to prop for hundreds of sincerely introspective and frustrated art photographers. They take solace in this object, using it to explore and express themselves through the pages or platforms of the world’s most forward- thinking fashion magazines.