Thomas Lélu Reimagines His Viral Aphorisms as Witty W Hotels Souvenirs
Thomas Lélu Reimagines His Viral Aphorisms as Witty W Hotels Souvenirs
By Laura Regensdorf
The Paris-based artist has a sly, poetic way with images and words, as seen over his career as a creative director, curator, and advertising savant. Lélu’s widely shared Instagram posts—pithy sentences in his recognizable ballpoint scrawl—have inspired a set of tote bags and stationery for W Hotels.
The first stops on Thomas Lélu’s recent trip to Manhattan have a characteristic high-low bent. On the Upper East Side, the artist dropped by a handful of blue-chip galleries, reconnecting with friends and taking in the latest exhibitions. Midtown was another port of call. “What’s the name of the place with all the advertising?” he asks, fishing for a familiar name: Times Square. The neon-bright temple of commerce, chaotic with shoppers and selfie-takers, makes a worthy muse for the Parisian. A former creative director of French Playboy, Lélu understands how to package desire for a broad audience. Luxury fashion ads are his cheeky playground, as reflected in the mock campaigns he once dreamed up (“Pradada,” starring Marcel Duchamp; young Jane for “Birkinstock”). Lélu’s sensibility—primed for irony on the one hand, earnestly curious on the other—makes him particularly suited to this more-is-more city. That, and an appreciation for walking. “That’s my favorite activity in New York,” he says, likening it to meditation. “There is a quote from Nietzsche,” he adds, paraphrasing the line: “Only ideas won by walking have any value.”
Thirty blocks south, Lélu is sitting in a suite at W New York – Union Square, looking at the fruits of such ideation: note cards bearing his handwritten musings. To anyone familiar with his devotedly followed Instagram account, the tableau is something of a digital-to-analog translation, blank slates and blue ink. The stationery sets, together with accompanying tote bags, comprise a new collaboration between Lélu and W Hotels, with playful phrases drawing on the theme of travel. “Wake me up when there’s no wifi,” reads one—an ode to the kind of technological lapse that ushers in true vacation.
Lélu began his Instagram series while adrift, as the world was, during the early months of the pandemic. “Those first messages were just for me,” the artist recalls. He had read a book by Peter Sloterdijk, called You Must Change Your Life, and in it the philosopher argues that one must carve out time to make every day better—“like a rendezvous with yourself,” says Lélu. This regimen of scribbled ruminations gave his days a steady rhythm; it also fostered an ever-widening community across the globe, with fans reposting whatever resonates on a particular day. “The reality of the process is all those quotes, all those sentences, are in the air,” Lélu says. “If you open your eyes or your ears, they are here.”
As part of his collaboration with W Hotels, Lélu sat down with us to offer insights into his creative process, and how walking through the New York City inspires his ideas.
Laura: You’ve said that books are immortal, speaking as someone who has published several over the years. How do you characterize this body of Instagram-based work, in terms of its longevity?
Thomas: I have made a book with quotes recently, with a French editor called RVB Books. [The year-long project, titled No Rain, No Flowers, is due out September 19.] Actually my project is to make [it so that] those quotes don’t disappear because, yeah, it is ephemeral. It’s about connecting with the moment, and it’s a viral project for me: I post these quotes and people repost them. It’s like a family, actually. It’s collaborative.
How does it feel to bring these quotes from the digital world into tangible reality—on a note card or a tote bag?
It’s exciting, of course. It’s different things that we can, how do you say, partager—share with everybody. It’s important for me that people can touch the words. It’s not just ideas; it’s material. And I’ve seen [with] projects like this that people want to come home with something. It’s a sort of fetishism. Recently there was an event and people had the possibility to get a fake tattoo, but the tattoo was not a good product. So I decided to propose to people [that I] make the tattoo with my pen directly on the skin. “You will never find another me”—that was the best one. The tattoo is surprising, more intimate.
What’s your method of note-taking on a regular basis—a notepad, the Notes app, scraps of paper?
Most of the time I have a lot of ideas in my mind. It’s like a party in my brain [laughs] and I don’t write anything. I wait a long time, and then I decide Sunday morning to write something, like 20 or 30 quotes. I want to be pertinent. I need to say something about the context, about the moment, the mood but not only mine—the mood of the world. So in the morning before I make a post, I have a reflection about what does it mean today.
“I don’t like the word work. For me it’s passion. It’s a love affair.”
One of your phrases became the title of your recent La Cité exhibition: “Today I did noting.” It’s interesting, that relationship between nothing and noting.
It was an error at first. I posted it like that, but nobody told me it was a mistake. Then someone told me that you could write this like this—that it was possible, and everybody understood. So I decided to conserve it like this. That’s the name of my enterprise: “Today I did nothing.”
A serendipitous moment, forgetting that H. But there are probably people who don’t consider such work on the internet to be real work.
A journalist [once] asked me what was my work—my real work. And I said I’d never worked in my life. I don’t like the word work. For me it’s passion. It’s a love affair. The pleasure is fundamental. If there is no pleasure, it’s boring. But it’s difficult to do nothing, with results. It’s an equation that takes time. It took a long time to arrive here—to arrive at a simple thing like this. I’m not young [laughs].
One of your earlier phrases is: “What are the things that make you forget about your phone?” What is on that list for you?
To make love. To have a good time with good people. To discover new countries. To swim in the sea. It’s important to walk—you need to walk. It’s the secret. And to dream. It’s important to dream.
Is there a phrase of yours lately that you keep coming back to?
It’s difficult. I have so many quotes, but I think maybe this one. [He pulls up a post from May 15: “I have no idea what I’m doing out of bed.”] I think this one can be a good synthesis of my philosophy because it’s a feeling. It’s a mood. Many people are stressed by their life or give too much attention to their feelings and their anxiety. But you need to be free from that. Me, I surfed when I was young. I skateboarded. I made paintings, and I met many people who had an attitude. It’s about the attitude. You need to be cool with yourself first.
This is turning out to be a stand-in for therapy.
My mother was a psychanalyste, so I think there is a reason. And my father was a musician, an actor. He had a band, but he taught literature at school, so there were many books.
When you go from Paris to New York, does that affect your creative rhythm? Can you sense that people in New York need a different set of messages?
New York is so different from Paris. Paris people, they always want to have a drink and to take a coffee on the terrace. And when you arrive in New York, everything is bigger, everything is faster, and the people [operate with] a bit more speed. But I like this, really, because I’m like this.
There seem to be two takes on love in this batch of W Hotels quotes. “Are you in love? / No, I’m at the pool” seems very…
Ironic, exactly.
And another—“Can I stay a bit longer? / Stay forever”—is quite dreamy and romantic. Where do you fall between the two?
In the middle? More, I think, I’m a romantic. I don’t know if there is a word mixed between romantic and ironic. We need to create this: romantironic.
W Hotels x Thomas Lélu
For more on Thomas Lélu, follow him on Instagram @thomaslelu.
Follow writer Laura Regensdorf on Instagram @lauraregensdorf.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
