Rodeo Drive has gone wild. Visitors to the luxury street have fallen in love with eight colorful, life-size sculptures of animals – Wild Kong, Standing Bear, Panda and Crocodile – designed by the French artist Richard Orlinski, and part of this summer's “Rodeo Drive Celebrates Fashion”.

But sculptures are only part of Orlinski’s multifaceted output. He was the artist of record at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, he mixes up art with music and stand up comedy, and he has partnerships with international brands including Lancome, Hublot, Puma, and Disney. Now he has written a book – Pourquoi J'ai Cassé les Codes, or “Why I Broke The Codes” – about his life of going against the grain.

He stopped off recently in Beverly Hills, and talked with Lyn Winter, host of Rodeo Drive - The Podcast, about his unconventional approach to art and life, starting with why he chose to celebrate wild animals in his sculpture.

Animals, he says, have much to teach humans, as they “obey a virtuous circle,” and kill only for food, while humans kill for nothing. He spoke about his personal experience with a violent father, which also laid the ground for his future self: “I realized very early that I have nobody to trust, so I was very alone. And when you like that, you're angry, and you want to succeed.”

He says that his fighting spirit helped him deal with initial rejection from the Parisian art world, and develop his mass appeal with a sense of freedom to do his own thing. “I'm not like a niche artist,” he says. “I'm popular, but popular in a good way. I create an emotion, even a bad emotion, but it is emotion.”

Orlinski explains his admiration for Andy Warhol, why he opened his own chain of Orlinski galleries, and how he treats art more like fashion - with seasons, and a branded experience that is meant to be fun for people of all ages. The future of art display, he says, is big spaces, where visitors can eat, spend time, and enjoy a multisensory experience. “The competition is always the same. So you have to create, invent something new, and I think the artist and the galleries and the people in this industry need to create something like that.”

He also talks about his book, Pourquoi J'ai Cassé les Codes, which has been a hit with the French public. It’s a self-help guide of sorts, delivering life lessons from his own experiences. “Many people are very thankful about this book, because it helps them to change, to listen to the little voice inside, to follow their dreams.”

While seven of Orlinski’s wild creatures will leave Rodeo Drive, one work will remain permanently on view. Which one might that be, asked Winter.

“I think it's the Kong with a big heart, and written on the heart is ‘Rodeo Drive’, responds Orlinski. “It fits with the place, and it was made for it. This is the only piece that was really made for it.”

Season 5 of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Two Rodeo Drive, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season 5 Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kay Monica Rose

Scriptwriter and Editorial Advisor: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso

Listen, subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Visit the website: https://rodeodrive-bh.com/podcast/

Join us on Instagram @rodeodrive

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For over 100 years Women’s Wear Daily has been the bible for the fashion industry, and its archives include numerous hidden contributions of Black designers and models. Now that history has been gathered in a stunning new book, BLACK IN FASHION, by Tonya Blazio-Licorish and Tara Donaldson, showcasing the indelible influence of Black culture on a global scale.

On Episode 5 of Rodeo Drive-The Podcast, host Lyn Winter spoke with the authors about the book and the revelations they found in the WWD archives.

“Fashion has a flawed public history because it hasn't included all the voices,” says Blazio-Licorish, also a visual culture historian and editor with PMC Media Archives. “We were always there, and not just there in marginal roles, but in important roles, in roles that were shaping fashion,” adds Donaldson, most recently WWD's executive editor and Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Fairchild Media.

Dating back as early as the Harlem Renaissance, the Black community was making its mark on clothing and style, from Black dolls for young Black children, early fashion shows, business associations, and fashionable scenes like at The Cotton Club.

The authors single out early “influencers” such as Josephine Baker, who even had a hosiery color named in her honor, the dancer Katherine Dunham, who was all the rage in 1940s France, and then the Black models, including Pat Cleveland and Bethann Hardison, who shook up global fashion at the famed 1973 Battle of Versailles.

The late André Leon Talley recalled this momentous event in conversation with the authors before his passing. “You could almost just reach out and touch the energy they gave in the air. It was like quiet thunder, and because everyone saw that and felt that at the battle, French designers – Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent – they started wanting black models.”

Black fashion has been intertwined with politics – and BLACK IN FASHION explores how clothing reflected the moment:

“During civil rights, that time was really about respectability politics,” explains Donaldson. “It was coming in your Sunday best, to assert dignity. It was a kind of a polite request for human rights. By the time you get to the 70s, the mood changes, the look changes…then the Black Panther movement, it's more powerful, it's more assertive…You have the leather jackets, you have the turtlenecks, you have the berets. And then we see that evolve even into the 2020s. And there's the branded T-shirts, Black Lives Matter.”

Finally, the story is still unfolding. Black designers are still not getting the high level industry jobs they deserve, argue Blazio-Licorish and Donaldson, and are even ambivalent about being labeled as Black.

So Blazio-Licorish says they finished on a question: “We purposefully left the conversation open to, who's next, who's now, and what do they have to say about where fashion is going to go?”

Season 5 of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Two Rodeo Drive, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season 5 Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kay Monica Rose

Scriptwriter and Editorial Advisor: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso.

Listen, subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Join us on Instagram @rodeodrive

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Watchmaking may date back two centuries but in the hands of Maximilian Büsser, it has been revived as a contemporary art form. Büsser is the founder of MB&F, or Max Büsser and Friends, which he describes as a “horological concept laboratory.”

Now MB&F has opened a gallery on Two Rodeo Drive, filled with his collective’s kinetic art and mechanical art devices, like World Sky by Breakfast Studio with whirring discs that spin between functions: camera, mirror, and weather report; and the MB&F’s Architect HM11, inspired by an organic Charles Haertling house in Colorado, and comprising multiple “rooms.”

“We deconstruct traditional, beautiful, high end watchmaking and reconstruct it into sculpture, which gives time,” Büsser tells Lyn Winter, on the latest episode of Rodeo Drive - The Podcast.

Büsser shares his journey from being a directionless teen in Switzerland to reaching the top of the watch business at Jaeger-LeCoultre and Harry Winston, and then realizing he needed to “find his true north.”

“I started imagining this fairy tale, I was going to have my own little company, where I would create only what I believed in. I didn't want any investors. I didn't want anybody telling me about growth and profits and all that stuff. It was all about, we're going to create some incredible watchmaking, even though we know there are no clients out there for it.”

Now MB&F has built a strong clientele willing to pay top dollar for the company’s unusual timepieces. But it was not always easy. Büsser reflects on the financial ups and downs, life lessons learned along the way, and the things he wished he had told his father. Finally, he revels in the joy of crafting mechanical instruments with a group of “friends” who share his obsession with “balance wheels,” “perpetual calendars” and other analog components of horology.

Winter closes by asking if there is a future for such an old world craft, and Büsser talks about the appeal of his company’s products to young people.

“MB&F is all about, ‘Live your dreams’. Do whatever you believe in. It is possible. Look at us. It seemed totally impossible, but we managed. And so it resonates strongly with a younger client base, and I love it.”

Season 5 of Rodeo Drive – The Podcast is presented by the Rodeo Drive Committee with the support of The Hayman Family, Two Rodeo Drive, Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel, and the Beverly Hills Conference & Visitors Bureau.

Season 5 Credits:

Executive Producer and Host: Lyn Winter

On behalf of the Rodeo Drive Committee: Kay Monica Rose

Scriptwriter and Editorial Advisor: Frances Anderton

Editor and Videographer: Hans Fjellestad

Theme music by Brian Banks

Production Assistant: Isabelle Alfonso.

Listen, subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Visit the website: https://rodeodrive-bh.com/podcast/

Watch moments from the series on YouTube

Join us on Instagram @rodeodrive

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.