Essay by Eric Troncy, art aritic curator and museum director.

Lucas Meyer-Leclère crafts unique pieces out of
existing garments, bridging couture know-how and hand
painting with sustainability. As a statement, the work he
creates under his brand LMLStudio is placed under the
aegis of Elaine Sturtevant’s words: « remake, reuse,
reassemble, recombine. » (1)
To Bruce Hainley she said : 

« What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks
copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion,
and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse,
reassemble, recombine - that’s the way to go. » (2)
In the 1960s, the American artist (who for 30 years lived
in Paris) convinced Andy Warhol to let her use his Flowers
silkscreens so she could deliver her own version of them.
Way into her nineties, perched on stilettos and clad into
denim that tightly clung to her leggy silhouette, she often
wore Day-Glo nail polish with great panache.

In a 1992 photo shot by her daughter Lauren and
published on the front cover of Frog Magazine, Sturtevant,
carefully hiding her face, wore an old, frayed Chloé silver
jacket, its colorful embroideries worn out.
This Chloé Jacket had certainly morphed into something
else, but like a ghost the memory of its original state
propped up this new thing. Of her artworks – for her entire
career she « remade » works by Duchamp, Beuys, Warhol,
Gonzalez-Torres – she would say, « the brutal truth is that
there are not copies. » 
Believe me, she was not playing with
words.
Like Sturtevant indeed, Lucas Meyer-Leclère has built
his creative activity on rather improper relations with the
history of his discipline: you do not remake a Warhol
painting, you do not shred a Dior jacket. LML doesn’t
remake anything, rather he unravels, reorganizes,
reconstructs, redecorates even.
Yet like Sturtevant his creations carry into themselves
the questions inflicted on their respective disciplines by
their eras. For Sturtevant these questions dealt with
originals and copies, copyright, tradition, innovation and
freedom. For LML Studio some of these questions – not all
– are without a doubt similar, assorted with others having
to do with « custom-made » and « zero waste » issues, with
fashion-induced guilt maybe, and the
melancholy triggered by the passage of time.
Establishing a brand under Sturtevant’s aegis is far from a
trivial gesture. Rather, it is the closest thing to a manifesto.
Sturtevant never thought she was playing a trick on the
visual arts; on the contrary it was for her a very serious
matter.
To me, it seems that in the 20th century no other oeuvre
has ever expressed better than Sturtevant these two feelings
clearly and simultaneously: fear and joy.

(1) Elaine Sturtevant, 1924-2014
(2) « Sturtevant Talks to Bruce Hainley », in Artforum, vol. 41, no. 7,
March 2003