Kenzo Explores the Relationship Between Artist and Muse in This Spectacular New Film

Fashion brand Kenzo has become quite adept at creating beautiful, albeit sometimes puzzling and thought-provoking films to debut new collections. And the brand’s latest film for its spring-summer collection is no different.

“Yo! My Saint” has everything you’ve come to hope for in a Kenzo campaign. The nine-minute film is filled with stunning fashion, great music and a captivating story about a photographer (played by Alex Zhang Hungtai) and his two muses. Plus, two women headed up the project: Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) directed and Yeah Yeah Yeah’s front-woman Karen O wrote the original song, “Yo! My Saint,” for the film.

“The beautiful part about this is it’s two women that decided to make this film together,” Carol Lim, creative director for Kenzo, said in a statement. “It’s an amazing artistic endeavor and a conversation between two women. A female musician and a female director. That’s kind of the starting point of this. We’re so excited for it to finally come out.”

The idea for the story was developed by Kenzo’s creative duo of Lim and creative director Humberto Leon.

“We always have a storyline that at least helps us to start the mood board for the collection,” Leon said. “Sometimes it’s a made-up story. For this one in particular, we wanted this fictitious meeting of someone who’s alive and someone’s who’s dead and create this romance between the two of them, in this case Ryuichi Sakamoto and Sayoko Yamaguchi, the model.”

What at first seems like a potentially creepy plot about a photographer’s obsession with his subjects (played by Jessica Henwick and Kiko Mizuhara) soon turns into a deeper exploration of the relationship between an artist and a muse (or muses in this case). Karen O’s song beautifully carries the story as it unfolds.

“One of the best things about this project is that we met Karen so far in advance that it informed the show, and just everything felt integrated,” Lim said. “It’s a personal dream to be able to work on the music. Normally with a film you think of the music second, and this was the reverse, so it was really exciting.”

The fashion brand has made a name for itself in the marketing and advertising scene after releasing the award-winning, jaw-dropping short film by Spike Jonze. Since Jonze’s “My Mutant Brain” rolled out in 2016, Kenzo has continued to deliver striking, thoughtful films including one by Carrie Brownstein and another 13-minute film directed by Natasha Lyonne.

For those intrigued by the Karen O’s song, “Yo! My Saint,” the track will be available for fans to stream globally across all major streaming platforms. There will also be a select number of copies of it available on vinyl.

“For the music, I immediately wanted to do melodramatic and romantic and with lots of yearning and high stakes—all that good stuff that’s in any Korean soap opera,” Karen O said in a statement. “It just started flowing through me. Also, I wanted there to be something authentically romantic about it in some kind of slightly unconventional way.”

Katie Richards

@ktjrichards

Katie Richards is a staff writer for Adweek.