This month, Hedi Slimane traveled to Switzerland to photograph 89-year-old artist and film director Jean-Luc Godard, godfather of the French New Wave. “Godard is someone I have greatly admired since my teenage years, when I was a film buff growing up in Paris,” Slimane tells V. In the 16 black-and-white photos, the Celine creative director captures a debonaire Godard, smoking a cigar and flaunting a fedora in his book-filled study. 

Godard’s dense filmography, marked by experimental and improvisational methods, runs the dramatic gamut—from heist capers (Band of Outsiders, 1964) to sci-fi (Alphaville, 1965). Though his films offer a masterclass in auteurism, Godard is perhaps best understood as an image-maker, often associated with “muses” like Anna Karina and Jean Seberg, whose distinct likenesses have shaped fashion memory for decades. The semi-androgynous mold of the Godard heroine—pixie-haired and Breton-striped—would belong in any fashion campaign today. Time after time—from Kristen Stewart’s 2019 biopic Seberg to Slimane’s sojourn to Switzerland—Godard is ever-present.