Russian. Redhead – « True angels have orange
hair », she once graffitied overnight all over Paris walls. Russian,
redhead, over the top, with her Dostoievskian name and her native town
of Grozny up flames. “Fire walk with me”, Laura Palmer’s
enigmatic message in David Lynch’s movie, could be Irina Volkonskii’s
motto. Fire thrown by the Swarovski crystals she sticks on everyday objects
transformed into childishly poetic jewels. Though Irina says “I
was never a child” – of course, that’s what grown-ups
who never stopped being children say. Irina is always telling stories,
each one of her pieces is born of a story, she can’t stand not telling
the stories, but how could she take aside each one of the buyers at her
300 retail outlets to whisper, in her adorably broken English, the way
she chose each piece? “With Irina, you don’t choose”,
she once decreed, when she sold her work herself in her Parisian boutique:
she used to kick out men who’d come to buy a gift, and bring them
back a wrapped, surprise parcel. “I only do pieces to twist men
around my finger”, says the heart-breaker, who still keeps the words
jotted down by those men to describe the woman they were buying the gift
for: “It was so beautiful I fell in love with each one of those
men.” Then there were the crystal-encrusted handcuff bracelets,
born of a word-play from the French word for tiny hands, “menotte”,
which also means “handcuffs”. And the cellular phone earpieces
to wear as earrings, because she once had dinner with a table-full of
boors who kept talking on their respective phones. Irina recruits a 60
woman thief team in Paris cloakrooms. They steal the offensive earpieces
and take Polaroid pictures of their owners. The result is the “Girls,
don’t go out with the telephone operators” collection. When
she is asked to rework a Philippe Starck Plexiglass chair, she sticks
mirrors on the seat, “For men with shining eyes, to look under girls’
skirts”.
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