Minus the masks, they looked much the same when. Five years later, I found myself seated across from Daft Punk in the Paris office of their record label. I’d been fortunate enough to secure a face-to-face interview with the publicity-shy pair, who’ve only spoken with the press on a handful of occasions.
At the time, Guy-Manuel and Thomas were in the process of promoting an animated feature film they’d made in collaboration with manga legend Leiji Matsumoto – Interstellar 555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, an interconnected series of video clips for Daft Punk’s 2001 album, “Discovery”. The movie tells the tale of a group of aliens who are kidnapped, brainwashed, dressed up and given a makeover, then forced to serve an evil Svengali as a pop band on Planet Earth. They’re prisoners of their fame, essentially.
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It was this fate that Daft Punk sought to avoid, first by donning masks and then, by creating their robot alter egos in 1999. Perhaps predicting that the presence of several catchier-than-coronavirus tracks on the “Discovery” album would transform the French duo from darlings of the underground to bona fide pop stars, they built shiny new identities that could serve as the public image of Daft Punk, while the pair maintained their anonymity.
In 2003, the year I interviewed Daft Punk, Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell’s reality TV pop star-manufacturing machine was the biggest thing on television and in the charts. Thomas and Guy-Manuel told me they were horrified by this new “religion of fake”.
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“People are proud to be transformed, proud to be taken and manipulated,” Bangalter said. He was aghast at “the supremacy of the star system, the manipulation of art, people just wanting to be picked by the television system and be made into stars, and in a very passive way – they don’t want to act, to change things, they just want to be changed.”
Conversely, Daft Punk had actively changed themselves into visually impactful but verbally mute robots. They’d seized control of the image they presented publicly, while refusing to play the game of pandering to media or allowing their own personal identities to become a commodity. “It’s a statement,” Thomas told me, “saying we’re not part of this whole circus.”
The initial idea for the band’s signature robot helmets was sketched out by music video directors Alex Courtes and Martin Fougerol (better known simply as Alex and Martin), then developed and materialised by Tony Gardner of Alterian Inc., a Los Angeles special effects studio famed for its work in animatronics.
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Continuing the collaboration, Slimane again dressed Daft Punk during the promotion of what may well be their final album, 2013’s hit-laden “Random Access Memories”. He also photographed the duo, clad in sequinned Le Smoking tuxedos, for a Saint Laurent advertising campaign, and provided less spangly black suits for a 2013 US Vogue fashion editorial, featuring Thomas and Guy-Manuel alongside supermodel Karlie Kloss.
The immaculately tailored YSL suits are as much a part of the Daft Punk costume as the helmets, however. Search images of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo in civilian attire and they just look like regular guys. To pass them on the street, you’d never guess they’re one of the world’s most successful musical acts. And that is exactly the idea.
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