A heart-shaped Le Creuset casserole dish, orange foam from Walkman headphones, an ice cube necklace designed by Martin Margiela, bouquets of papal money, a spiral staircase by Roger Tallon, the sweater worn on the shoulders , rubber garden clogs, Princess Diana’s Ford Escort… This enumeration The Complaint of Progress, by Boris Vian, is a sample of the immense visual patchwork patiently developed by Laurent Laporte since 2012. That year, while he was a designer-editor for the advertising agency CLM BBDO, he created a blog called “Where is the Cool?” », jumble of photos captioned with a few words.
A digital moodboard that the young creative from Toulouse enriches day after day, according to his inspirations and favorites: “I didn’t want to just line up beautiful images, and at the same time, I wanted to do it… It was a bit like Pinterest before Pinterest. » In June 2017, “Where is the Cool?” » takes its first steps on Instagramto take its current graphic form three years later.
On each vignette, Laurent Laporte applies the same bold black typography, “inspired by those used in old Nike or Volvo ads”, to present the objects, places, atmospheres, characters or details that he chooses to highlight, through one or more visuals, or even offbeat vis-à-vis – bringing together, for example, the face of Harry Dean Stanton In Paris, Texas (1984) and dinosaur-shaped cookies.
Without conductive wire
An assembly “where we go from cock to donkey” that this compulsive curator assumes, happily drawing from the Google Images collection as well as from the photos of articles on the Leboncoin site. Generally speaking, whatever the photographic source, Laurent Laporte’s “cool” exudes a sweet scent of vintage: “It’s true that a certain nostalgia emerges from our aesthetic. Besides, the Japanese cousin of cool, the wabi-sabi, designates the beauty of worn, weathered things…”
In parallel with the social network with 55,000 subscribers, “Where is the Cool?” » also became a biannual magazine in 2020. Here again, the images produced also seem to have escaped from the 1970s or 1980s, evoking the work of photographer and artistic director Harri Peccinotti for the magazine Nova, “the absolute reference”, saccording to Laurent Laporte. If the latter signs some of the photos and texts, published in English, he also surrounds himself with loyal contributors, including his partner, Marie Christoforou – at the origin of the Instagram account @fragile_objectwhich presents glass pieces – or the photographer Henrik Purienne.
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