There’s a massive vintage steel refrigerator in Alix Lacloche’s kitchen.It used to make unbearable noise, so one day she turned it off for good and converted it into a closet for her tablecloths. An oversized metal fork hangs on the wall above the sink: a common decoration in French restaurants and an easy find in secondhand markets. Here, however, its massive presence looks surreal, as if it was meant to be actually used, by a very tall, very big magical creature.
Though she might well impersonate one, Alix Lacloche is not a fairy tale character but a 40-year-old cuisinière—a chef, food stylist, set designer, artist, and the mind behind our book A Playbook About Glasses. She was born in Paris into an American-French family where creativity was much encouraged and healthy food was a must. “At home we would cook a lot, and it just stayed. You know, I like to transform stuff.”
Suspended on single nails, ordinary objects adorn the walls—covering each and every surface of her apartment and making it resemble a three-dimensional Dada collage. Here hangs a wrought iron chair, children-size. There, a crumpled plastic bottle. Looking up, a fake lettuce head pops out from above the mantelpiece. On a shelf, Alix has assembled a collection of drinking glasses snitched at events and parties—-ranging from a Christofle crystal goblet to plain paper cups. What makes a tumbler worth stealing? I wonder. “Nothing, I want them all. I don’t care about the design.” She limits herself to one glass per event: “It’s a project about creating a collection of stolen drinkware.”
Her favorite piece, however, was notstolen, she says, proudly showing a folding aluminum cup she bought at Fondazione Achille Castiglioni, in Milan: it’s the replica of an unsigned design from Castiglioni’s private collection.“It’s a glass that you can put in your pocket. It’s such an ingenious thing. You see, objects should not just be about beauty. First of all, they should be useful.”
As we sit in a home packed with beautiful but indisputably useless trinkets, her comment sounds reactionary. What about the chickens she makes out of folded napkins; the concrete eggs and cakes; that king-size Ferrero Rocher; or her sugar glasses and dishes?
“It’s true,” she admits. “I do so much stuff that’s not useful! Wait, I have to show you something.” She presents a plastic box containing apparently random props: fake food charms, a plastic frankfurter, a bone, a long potato chip folded on itself. “These are my littlethings…This is a chip. Isn’t it beautiful? There’s, like, an error in its shape. Errors are beautiful, you know.” There’s also a plastic contact lens case that might easily be repurposed as a “salt and pepper for a picnic.” She believes this box embodies the essence of her job: “Transforming something that we all use into something [else] that we all use.” It’s a form of détournement: hijacking apparently insignificant things by placing them out of context or subverting their function—to reveal their hidden meanings and unexpected beauty.
From converting her fridge into a closet to painting her curtains in order to make the fabric look like paper, transformations are the common theme of Alix’s diverse work. As a professional chef and caterer, this is especially true when it comes to preparing food: “It’s a transformation towards pleasure.” Her first job was cooking for Ed Filipowski, the late head of the communications firm KCD, who used to visit Paris during the annual fashion weeks. “I had the keys to his apartment, and I would just leave boxes of food in the fridge.” She later took on several gigs, cooking in restaurants and selling macarons at Pierre Hermé.
After a while, making pop-up dinners, residencies, and catering for brands seemed a valid alternative to the exhausting, underpaid jobs in restaurants. In a pre-Instagram era, the fact that she was talented (and fun) was enough to quickly gain her a solid clientele. “Before social media, it was word of mouth. [Brands and private clients] knew who worked well and who they should work with—that’s how I started, and that’s how I exploded.” In the 2010s, the catering business was still extremely mainstream and conservative. There weren’t many independent chefs yet, but “showrooms were interested in hiring someone who had good taste and was capable of creating something unique for their events.”
Her career “really popped” after she began cooking recipes on TV in 2015. Her ten-minute slot aired every Friday for two years as part of the French comedy show La nouvelle édition. “It was pretty iconic.” Up to now, her clients portfolio includes names such as Jacquemus, Lemaire, Hermès, Aesop, alongside editorial collaborations as a set designer with magazines like M Le Monde or The Gentlewoman.
All the same, she’s not comfortable with the present state of her art. “Now the world of food styling and catering is about who you are. I hate that.” Fancy caterings and food influencers—alongside their massive food sculptures and meticulous installations—have multiplied in the past five years, after the lockdown had pushed millions of amateurs towards new levels of cooking, tablescaping, and posting.
“Brands have always done dinners, there’s always been beautiful cutlery, crockery, and tableware. Tablescaping has always existed, even if under different names.”She acknowledges that what she sees is just a new, not necessarily worse, way of doing the job. However, “Instagram opened the market to people who were not in that field, [allowing them] to come in… Based on how they looked.” And she doesn’t fully approve. “Imagine that anybody who does beautiful work would also show who they are, physically. It’s odd, you know? Can it just be about the work?”
In the world of “food influencers,” she considers herself a pioneer. Yet, her relationship with social media remains complicated. How can you stay authentic when most of your assignments come via Instagram? “I’ve always had the intention of making something beautiful because it amuses me. Then it became, You’re doing it for an audience. You’re making projects that need to look goodon Instagram. But we should work for ourselves first, and then the audience comes.” Living through what she calls an existentialistemoment—trying to figure out who she is professionally—she’s struggling to come to terms with the fact that she would probably need an agent, well-scheduled content calendars, and algorithm-friendly strategies if she wants to maintain her spot in the industry. “I feel like I have to become an influencer if I want to continue to make money.”
As she still manages to keep her voice genuine and spontaneous on social media (while also posting viral content like this one,) this approach doesn’t sit well with her personality. “I wanna make projects that have a lot of meaning, that are not just for a little group of Parisians but that everybody can understand.” After all, she says, “I’m a Scorpio. I like things that are profound and intense.” Scorpios are also known to be driven by fearless ambition: “In general, you have to be the first one with the idea.You don’t want to be the second or the third. You want everyone to follow you, not the other way round.” In the food scene at least, she definitely got this.
“Is it working? Is it weird enough?” She asks as she stands behind a curtain, cutting eye-shaped holes in the crustified fabric so she can peep at us. In a moment of self-reclusion and meditations on her future, this is how she wants to be portrayed.
In everything she does, Alix invites you to play along. That’s the beauty and the utility of her “little things.”
“It is weird.” I reassure her. “Why don’t you draw her eyebrows, too?”