Michel Gaubert’s Lockdown Playlist

The sound designer for Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Loewe, and Raf Simons, among many others, Michel Gaubert is an unmissable figure at the fashion shows. If you don’t recognize him by his omnipresent sunglasses, cheery shirts, and impressive sneaker collection, you’ll recognize his mixes. Gaubert likes to mash up unlikely genres, and make the familiar seem new.

He sent us this playlist from Paris under lockdown. On Friday, the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode announced that the spring 2021 menswear shows and fall 2020 haute couture collections, typically presented in June and July, have been canceled due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. “The crisis is definitely changing my habits,” Gaubert says. “I go deeper into research and information and take the time to listen to albums without skipping, which can be both satisfying and disconcerting. A lot of musicians are home making music and what comes out of it will be very significant.”

Gaubert’s Vogue playlist is 30-songs long. “I built it like a rollercoaster of emotions featuring tracks that mean something to me or remind me of shows and moments.” The opener, the Pet Shop Boys’s “It’s Alright,” he explains, is “the song I listened to in September 2001 when I came back from New York, it’s hopeful. It also closed the Chanel demonstration show” for spring 2015.

Isaac Hayes’s “Walk on By” made the cut because it soundtracked Phoebe Philo’s fall 2013 show for Céline—“I still cherish that moment,” he says—while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s version of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” is dedicated to Raf Simons. “It’s one of his favorite songs ever.” The Soul II Soul classic “Back to Life” is the optimistic closer. “It will happen, eventually,” Gaubert says, referencing the famous lyrics, “back to life, back to reality, back to the here and now, yeah.” To listen to the full playlist on Spotify, click here.