Interzone

Interzone: The Hedi Slimane Book is Slimane's contribution to Purple's Purple Books series, issued in 2005 as the artist's book accompanying Purple Fashion's fourth issue, the same year he published London Birth of a Cult with Steidl.

Like the other titles in the series, Interzone was produced and distributed alongside its Purple Fashion issue rather than sold as a standalone trade release. It gathered Slimane's photography in the small-format, single-artist paperback the Purple Institute used throughout the run. It followed Terry Richardson's Terry and Richard Prince's The Hippie Drawings as the third book in the sequence. It arrived at the point in Slimane's career when he had left Yves Saint Laurent's menswear studio but had not yet begun at Dior Homme. In that window, he was documenting the Paris, Berlin and London rock and club scenes in black and white.

Slimane (b. 1968, Paris) worked as creative director of Dior Homme from 2000 to 2007, Yves Saint Laurent from 2012 to 2016, and Celine from 2018 to 2024, running a parallel photography practice throughout, with books including Berlin (Steidl/7L, 2003), Stage (Steidl/7L, 2004) and London Birth of a Cult (Steidl, 2005), and later photographic work spanning album covers for Phoenix and Lady Gaga and exhibitions on Los Angeles and Robert Mapplethorpe.