Sara Brajovic: Model, Pianist, and Collector
Antakly Projects · The Conversation
Sara Brajovic
Model, pianist, historian, and collector, on symbolist art, churches and mystics, and treating the street like a history book
Paris · London · New York
Why this conversation
Sara Brajovic came to me sideways, the way the best subjects often do. A friend in London, Malika Dalamal, sent me her blog with the kind of note that is really an instruction, you have to see this. I did, and I understood it at once. Here was someone who had been photographed since the age of eleven, trained as a pianist, taken a history degree, studied acting, and folded all of it into a single restless way of looking at the world.
What I recognised was the curiosity. Sara collects, in every sense, photographers and films and saints and street art and seventies furniture, and she arranges them the way you might arrange a private cosmology. She once put this site on her own list of favourite places to look, which I will admit flattered me, but the real reason I wanted to talk to her is simpler. People who refuse to be one thing tend to be the most interesting company. So I asked her to walk me through the collection she keeps in her head.
Just walking down the street is like opening a history book.Sara Brajovic
Discovered at eleven
She was born and raised in Paris, of Serbian and Italian descent, into a family already steeped in the entertainment world. Her mother had modelled for Yves Saint Laurent and produced a film with Carlo Ponti, and as a child Sara remembers crossing paths with Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Modelling found her early and almost by chance, through a snapshot taken by Peter Lindbergh, a friend of her father, when she was eleven and on holiday in the south of France. By twelve she had been sent to boarding school in Switzerland.
The years that followed read like a deliberate refusal to specialise. Piano at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. A history degree from King’s College London, and then a post in the Impressionist department at Sotheby’s. Acting at the Lee Strasberg studio in New York. Modelling for IMG alongside the photographers of the era, Demarchelier, Comte, Kadel, and the rest. It is a biography that resists being summarised, which is exactly why it is worth slowing down for.
The Conversation
Modelling, music, history, acting, writing. Which of them do you identify with most?
It is all part of who I am. I think it matters to express yourself in as many ways as you can, and to stay relevant. We gather experiences as we move through life, and we learn more about ourselves because of them. We grow, and that growth shows up in the work we make. The important thing is to stay curious and to keep your zest for life intact.
Where does your inspiration come from?
Art, films, music, and yes, some of those eighties and nineties music videos. Symbolist art above all, then art nouveau, street art, religious art. Churches in general, mystics, nuns. The films of Polanski, Buñuel, Bigas Luna, Kusturica, and Lynch. Derelict spaces and street culture. Mylène Farmer’s videos. And music is enormous for me, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, Nightmares on Wax, Bauhaus, to name only a few.
You collect, and you source vintage design now. Tell me about that world.
I grew up in a Paris home full of nineteen seventies French and Italian furniture, and I have collected that period my whole life. Before fashion I spent a little time at Sotheby’s, in the Impressionist department, and that fascination with the past never left me. Now I source vintage design, furniture and objects, and I love the design galleries and shops in the sixth, around the Rue de l’Université. Inspiration is everywhere. Just walking down the street is like opening a history book.
Why did you start the blog?
I have always loved sharing my thoughts and ideas with friends, and I wanted to do the same with people I had never met. I imagined it as a kind of visual encyclopedia, image first, with very little text. I have kept a detailed diary since I was nine, and I love to write, I have published in Serbian Elle and Russian Harper’s Bazaar, but on the blog I wanted the pictures to carry it. I pay enormous attention to aesthetics, from my home to the way I dress, and my style has a kind of split personality, total tomboy one day, completely feminine the next.
The places and people you keep returning to?
Images speak better than words, so mostly I would just point you toward what I am looking at:
- VisualsEmilie Richard-Froozan, Place Hacking
- AlwaysNinunina
- ArtistsHugo Wilson, Mat Collishaw, Faile, Blu, Petroc Sesti, Vuk Vidor at Magda Gallery
- BooksAssouline, Taschen, Franco Maria Ricci
New talent we should know about?
A wave of young graffiti artists, a lot of them coming out of the north, who I am only starting to write about. And brands like Willow, Sunettes, and Ender Legard. More interviews with interesting people are coming, so stay tuned.
The achievements you are proudest of?
The Music Academy. And, more than anything else, staying true to myself.
I have gone back to that one line of hers more than once, the street as a history book. It is the whole method, really. Collect widely, look closely, refuse to settle into a single self, and let the images do the talking.
@sarabrajovic
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