Hidden Maverick

‘PORTRAIT OF A MAVERICK’.

Andy Warhol built his career on transforming the ordinary into something impossible to ignore. From Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo Boxes to Marilyn Monroe portraits and Factory figures, he blurred the line between art celebrity and commerce long before it became commonplace. He saw fame as both subject and medium, deliberately becoming part of the mythology he created. Warhol didn’t simply reflect popular culture; he reshaped how it was perceived, consumed and remembered.

Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928 to working-class Slovakian immigrant parents, Warhol grew up in a modest home and was a quiet, observant child. He studied commercial art at Carnegie Institute of Technology before moving to New York, where he began his career as a commercial illustrator.

Later in life, Warhol became one of New York’s most recognisable figures, with The Factory becoming a meeting place for artists, musicians, actors and outsiders. He continued to work across painting, film, photography and publishing, while increasingly turning his attention to celebrity and the machinery of fame. He died in New York in 1987, aged 58, following complications after gallbladder surgery.

What set Warhol apart was his willingness to question what art was supposed to be. He saw possibility in the everyday and challenged the idea that art had to be original, exclusive or removed from popular culture. By treating commercial imagery, celebrity and mass production as legitimate subjects, he changed the boundaries of what could be considered art.

Image credits awarded to Andy Warhol himself (1962, 1964 & 1966), Jørgen Leth (1982), Lawrence Fried (1965), Timothy Hursley (1986) and Robin Platzer (1978).

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‘PORTRAIT OF A MAVERICK’.

A$AP Rocky (A$AP ROCKY) has built a career on making the unexpected seem inevitable.

Born Rakim Mayers in Harlem, he emerged from the A$AP Mob with a sound and image uniquely his own. His debut album ‘Live.Love.A$AP’ launched his career, but Rocky never settled for being just another rapper. He applied his same curiosity to fashion, film and visual culture, becoming as influential in a pair of sunglasses or a runway front row as he was behind the microphone. Collaborations with designers like Raf Simons and Dior followed, alongside his creative collective ‘AWGE’, a world he’s largely built on his own terms.

His journey hasn’t exactly been ‘a walk in the park’. He’s spoken about growing up in poverty, spending time in shelters and losing his older brother at a young age. There wasn’t a clear path to his current success; it was built gradually through persistence, taste and an almost stubborn drive to evolve.

Away from the spotlight, African-American singer and songwriter, Rihanna (badgalriri), has become a key part of his story. Their friendship blossomed into a partnership and a family, with Rihanna consistently supporting him through some of his toughest times. Their relationship mirrors Rocky’s career: neither has followed a conventional path.

Perhaps that’s what makes him a Maverick. Rocky never seems interested in choosing between worlds; he prefers to create his own.

Image credits awarded to A$AP ROCKY himself for RayBan (2025), Robert Gallardo (2023), DUTCH/Bauer-Griffin (2025), Metro Boomin (2021) and Rihanna for W Magazine (2024)

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‘MAVERICKS ON FILM’.

This week, co-CEO Mona Kher (Mona Kher) has chosen one of her film favourites. A classic that revolutionised French New Wave cinema.

Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel and Jean Seberg as Patricia, ‘À bout de souffle’ (1960) was based on an idea by François Truffaut and became one of the defining works of the French New Wave. Yet its importance is not simply in the story it tells, but in the way Godard chose to tell it. It features jump cuts, handheld camerawork, improvised-feeling dialogue and sudden shifts in rhythm. The film beholds an energy that felt spontaneous and distinctly modern at the time.

Godard was less interested in following the conventions of a traditional crime film than in playing with them. Characters talk about films, read newspapers, wander the streets and spend long stretches simply being together. The boundaries between plot and everyday life become deliberately blurred, giving ‘À bout de souffle’ its loose, intimate quality.

The film’s influence would extend far beyond France, helping to shape a generation of filmmakers who saw that films did not necessarily need to look or behave as they always had. More than six decades later, it still feels remarkably fresh and stylish, without being overly polished. It evokes a certain romance that excludes sentimentality, and an omnipresent rebelliousness that requires no announcement.

Michel Poiccard may be a criminal, but his real maverick quality lies elsewhere. Belmondo’s character moves through the world as though the rules are there for someone else. And perhaps that is what makes ‘À bout de souffle’ such an enduring film; it never seems entirely interested in playing by the rules.

© À bout de souffle / Breathless (1960), a film by Jean-Luc Godard, featuring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg. © STUDIOCANAL.

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Untitled Fire Painting F 101, Yves Klein (1961).

Pigment, synthetic resin, and partial fumage (charred paper) mounted on cardboard and wood.

This piece is part of Klein’s famous ‘Peintures de Feu’ (Fire Paintings) series, which he created late in his short career at the testing grounds of the French Gas Board (Gaz de France) near Paris.

Klein used a massive industrial gas blowtorch to scorch the surface of specially treated compressed cardboard. He manipulated the flames to leave soot stains (fumage) and burned shapes. He often combined this destructive elemental process with water to instantly freeze the patterns of the flame, leaving behind abstract, symbolic voids and haloed rings.

Hidden Maverick® has always had a strong connection to art. It reflects the brand’s belief in creativity, individuality and the idea that the things we surround ourselves with should have meaning beyond their function.

Copyright of the Mumok Museum (mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien).

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‘PORTRAIT OF A MAVERICK’.

Tom Ford (TOM FORD) built his career by refusing to see fashion as something that existed only on a catwalk. After studying art history and architecture at NYU University, he brought a different sensibility to the industry, one rooted as much in cinema, photography, interiors and art as it was in clothing. At Gucci, he helped turn a struggling Italian house into one of the defining names of the 1990s, making fashion feel provocative, glamorous and, importantly, relevant again. Acclaimed fashion journalist Suzy Menkes (Suzy Menkes) noted, “Tom Ford didn’t just change the way people look; he changed the way they look at fashion. He made it dangerous again”.

What makes Ford particularly interesting is that he never seemed satisfied with simply being a fashion designer. He directed his own campaigns, designed stores and products, developed fragrances and built an entire visual language around his work. His interest in film eventually became another chapter of his career, directing ‘A Single Man’ (2009) and ‘Nocturnal Animals’ (2016), both films marked by the same precision and visual control that had defined his fashion. Even his own art and personal style feel part of that wider picture: polished but often provocative, highly considered without losing its edge. He has always understood that design is about creating a feeling as much as creating an object.

There is something distinctly maverick about the fact that Ford has never really stayed in one place creatively. Fashion was his foundation, but he was never willing to let it become his limit. He followed his own taste across different forms of art and culture, building a career that feels less like a single profession and more like a body of work.

Image credits awarded to Jeff Burton (2011), Ezra Petronio (2003) and Filippo Fior (2023).

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INTRODUCING ‘MAVERICKS ON FILM’.

There is perhaps no better place to begin than Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Le Mépris’ / ‘Contempt’ (1963), a film that is as interested in the making of cinema as it is in the collapse of a marriage.

Based on Alberto Moravia’s novel, the film follows Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a French screenwriter hired by an American producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), to rewrite Fritz Lang’s adaptation of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. Paul’s decision to take the job, and the compromises that come with it, begin to alter his relationship with his wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot). What begins as a professional arrangement gradually becomes a study of pride, money, desire and, ultimately, contempt.

But ‘Le Mépris’ has always resisted being reduced to its story. Critics have variously called it a “deeply cynical study” of artistic compromise, an “ideal balance” between self-reflexive cinema and something more elegiac, and “possibly Godard’s most melancholic film and probably his most beautiful.”

American film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum went further, calling it “one of the great films of the 1960s”, while arguing that beneath its apparently classical beauty it remains as transgressive as ever. For him, the film’s fractured rhythms, cinematic references and, above all, refusal to behave like a conventional story are precisely what make it work.

Film critic and lecturer Philip Strick, writing for Sight and Sound, saw something even more personal in it. He described Godard’s film as a kind of self-accusatory letter, one whose “naked longing” captures an almost unbearable sense of tragedy.

And at its centre are Bardot and Piccoli, surrounded by Capri, colour, Delerue’s aching score, Fritz Lang, ‘Homer’ and the machinery of filmmaking itself.

© Le Mépris / Contempt (1963), a film by Jean-Luc Godard, featuring Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. © STUDIOCANAL.

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