How This 22-Year-Old Collage Artist Landed At Louis Vuitton's Palm Springs Collection

Models, dinosaurs, Palm Springs… The colourful, Surrealist works of young Parisian artist Juliet Casella are a blend of urban life, architecture and oddity. This is Casella’s vision of the world. “I like building new spaces through my collages,” she says. “My goal is to make it possible for everyone to find their own story within my collages.”

Just 22 years old, Casella’s work has a bold point of view—unapologetic, vibrant and graphic—qualities Nicolas Ghesquière of Louis Vuitton clearly loves. Ghesquière invited her to the brand’s cruise 2016 show in Palm Springs and gave her carte blanche to produce a set of works that would best showcase its collection.

To create this project Casella spent five days in Palm Springs, wandering around the city and getting inspiration, taking as many pictures as possible for the collages. She then, as with all her other projects, started visualising what she wanted the pieces to look like and how she could render them to create her unworldly vision. The only brief to her was to have the “Palm Springs atmosphere” in the images.

With such an open creative brief, Casella spent the next two months putting the images together—the only challenge she was faced with was mainly being able to trust herself. However, she adds, “But they trusted me, so I had to create the most beautiful series possible.” Her favourite shot is the one with the woman in red staring at the dinosaur with the shoe in its mouth. “It’s the one that says the most; you can imagine a lot of things,” says Casella.

These collages were created at her studio in Paris, with music on full blast and a constant hive of activity. “I always have a ton of ideas in my mind, some unfinished, or not even started, but this makes me produce a lot. I kind of live for this, creating all the time. I want to do everything, but unfortunately, I only have two hands,” she says with a laugh.

By Claire Turrell