Exclusive: Cibelle’s Exotic Pop hits Selfridges

Cibelle to perform at the Vivienne Westwood party for Melissa

Following in the footsteps of Vivienne Westwood, Zaha Hadid and Jean-Paul Gaultier, Tropical songstrel and Notion favorite Cibelle has collaborated with shoe manufacturing giant Melissa. Cibelle will be celebrating at Selfridges on Monday 20th September with a gig for Vivienne Westwood’s closing party. It will be covered live for Planet Notion by Cibelle herself.

This shoot by Cassia Tabatini (courtesy of Plastic Dreams Magazine) is a Planet Notion Exclusive.

PlanetNotion: Hi Cibelle!

Cibelle: Hi Honey.

PN: How did the Melissa collaboration come about?

C: It’s like we’ve been dating for years. They wanted me to do a collaboration after the first album. It was a matter of good timing. Eduardo at Melissa said he was in a shop in New York and my song was playing and then he got into his car and it was playing on the radio. It was like the music was chasing him down. Spooky.

PN: Do you think that the marriage of music and fashion is a natural one?

C: I think that my role in all this is more to do with the visual arts, not only fashion. Melissa as a company is heavily involved in the arts in Brazil and has their own gallery, which I’m going to be doing an installation at next month. It feels great to be following in the footsteps of people like Zaha Hadid and Vivienne Westwood who have also worked with Melissa. It’s great to see my artwork getting exposure on a larger scale, physically as well as in a publicity sense. It’s lovely to be connected with the fashion industry, although it’s not in a trends sense, I’m more into the art side of fashion.

PN: Tell us about the shoes and how they tie into your music.

C: Well I wrote a piece about imagined products for the universe that I created for the Las Venus album. We made “the blue shoe”, aka, ‘meu sapato azul’ like the song in the album – It’s one of the ‘Sonja products for a better life’ from the Las Venus Resort Palace Hotel Gift Shop. The product are ‘The Fuck-it Button’, ‘The Poetic License Card’, Fresh Eyes Eyedrops (to see the world with no emotional luggage or pre-conception), Anti-skeptic lotion and The Blue Shoe (which is the only product living in physicality). The idea is that the Melissa shoes are made from 100 percent sky, and when you put them on, you can automatically view the world and your life from a higher point.

PN: How does this tie into the Melissa Gallery work?

C: Well at the gallery I’m doing a series of infomercials/video installations for the retro-future for all the products. It’s great to see the album coming to life. It’s amazing that people can actually buy the shoes from a song that I wrote. The album was never just about the music. It was about taking people somewhere. A larger conceptual universe. It’s beyond perfect because I’m actually selling fictional products that wrote about on the album. My songs are becoming a physical reality and its wonderful to be able to hold in your hand something you wrote about.

PN: Will you cover your Selfridges gig for us?

C: Hell Yeah!

- Aaron Francis Walker