A- LIST LIFESTYLE TV SHOW INTERVIEWS THE SELECTS GALLERY'S FOUNDER
The TV show A- LIST LIFESTYLE interviewed The Selects Gallery’s Founder Marie Audier D’Alessandris.
Discover the video.
Like so many of us, A lister love to look at beautiful things and since a lot of beauty can be found in art as well as in Fashion,
it was only a matter of time until someone found a way to combine the two worlds.
Marie Audier D’Alessandris is the owner of The Selects Gallery , a pop up art store in the trendy Soho neighborhood of New York. And she knows exactly how to elevate Fashion Photography and turn it into a pure work of art.
My name is Marie Audier D’Alessandris and I am the founder of The Selects Gallery, a gallery that is focused on large format photography in limited edition.
We are now in Soho New York and the gallery is mainly online but we do a lot of pop ups and we move around the city, outside of the city to really be able to show the pictures and get to people.
Marie did not start as a gallery owner right away. She worked for 15 years at L’Oreal where she gained a unique view into the world of fashion photography. When she was head of marketing there, she worked with many shutterbugs and that’s where the idea was born to create a gallery focused on this unique artistic niche.
I thought about this project for fifteen years, even more, most probably twenty years. Really at the beginning when I started to work at L’Oreal, I had the chance to go on set to shoot advertising and discovered what it takes to take a beautiful fashion image.
Really that stroke me as “Wahoo, there is so much that goes into Fashion Photography”. I think nobody realizes how much work, creative genius there is in Fashion photography.
Marie wanted the gallery to be very modern and she also understood it was necessary for her clients to have easy access to her art. From there it was a logical step to create a website.
What I mean by modern is been very inclusive. I wanted people not to be intimidated by the gallery and to have access to the photography. When you think about it, Fashion Photography is meant to be featured in magazines and seen by a lot of people. I wanted to respect that spirit that goes behind Fashion Photography and therefore decided to do an online gallery so if you go on theselectsgallery.com, you will the pictures, you will see the prices, it is very open and at the time I thought, I still need to show the pictures.
Showing on her website however is entirely different from seeing it in real life.
As beautiful as the site may be, I see that when people start to look at the pictures, there is that moment of pause. You know the definition of the images, the fact that they are in large format, that’s very powerful and striking and so what I do is actually organize pop ups with the idea of going to the customer.
Instead of having a space where people would come and wait for them to come in, I am coming to people.
There are a lot of photographers in the fashion industry so Marie has to be very strict. She has high standards for anyone who wants to show their work in her gallery.
There is a lot of fashion photographers. The first criteria always is that they need to have been recognized by the fashion industry. So what it means is that they need to have been published by fashion magazines. Think about Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Numéro, Marie CLaire, Elle, depending on the countries. Very important for me that the photographers have this recognition from the industry , that’s the first point and then I would say photographers that have a certain style of photography. I like them to be quite forward thinking and photography that can be timeless. That’s really strong criteria.
The most important thing for me is to make the photographers happy. My mission in this project is to show that fashion photography is art and to really valorize the work of those photographers.
All the art in The Selects Gallery seems to focus on large format pieces. Is there any particular reason for that?
We focus on large format, it is very important to us, it is kind of an ode to the quality of those pictures because only pictures of that quality can be in large format. While, as we all know, on Instagram today, you can find pictures that seem to be amazing ins mall format but the minute you bring them in bigger size it is not the same level of quality. I am very focused on large format and I think it is also a statement. It is the kind of pieces that you would put in your home.
When you embark on an adventure like opening an art gallery in the middle of New York, you must have a powerful dream you are following. So we were very curious, what Marie’s dream would be?
My dream is to achieve that objective that I have to change the perception and really create desire for people - for more people, because it is already the case, when you think about interiors of celebrities and influencers, you go to their home, very often you are going to find large format photography, very often.
But this goal of making that more widely spread, if we achieve that, I will consider that a big achievement for the gallery.