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The Flyers of Les Folie’s Pigalle

The graphic designer behind one of the French Touch’s most famous nights recalls his creations

September 6, 2016
By Raphaël Malkin

Back in the 1990s, Michel Poulain got expelled from a very prestigious private art school: “the administration at Maryse Eloy had heard that I worked in Pigalle. They thought I was prostituting myself.”

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And while the young man was indeed a denizen of the famous red-light district, it wasn’t by pounding its pavement that he was making a living – although he was certainly a creature of the night. Poulain was already known to Pigalle revelers as La Shampouineuse (“Shampoo Girl”) an alias which endures in creative circles to this day.

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There, he cut his teeth by creating the visual universe for the Folie’s Pigalle, a neighborhood club that functioned as the incubator for the French Touch. So while Dimitri From Paris, Daft Punk, Philippe Zdar, Patrick Vidal, DJ Gregory were filling the dingy venue with their brand of tasteful house, La Shampouineuse would carpet-bomb the city with his colourful, pop art-indebted flyers: “Folie’s Pigalle wasn’t yet famous, and was trying its best to rival the much more popular Queen nightclub. Our promotional efforts had to be top notch,” he recalls.

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The kitsch-obsessed young designer’s ’50s- and ’60s-inspired images quickly became synonymous with the nascent club, helping it become a sensation in the fickle Parisian nightlife metaverse. Not bad for a 20 year-old who loved partying and suddenly had a bunch of free time on his hands. Getting the boot from school in no way hindered his professional progression: he later went on to handle the art department of defunct gay magazine Têtu, and now takes care of fellow Folie’s stalwart David Guetta’s image. Poulain takes us on a tour of some of his most memorable pieces.

The idea behind Ultra, the flagship night at the Folie’s Pigalle, was to bring out all of Paris’ nighthawks in one place on Thursdays. Its initiator, Axel Huyhn, was this slightly sinister looking beanpole with very long hair. He was the Folie’s mascot in a sense – you could spot him from a mile away. I met him on a night out, and he offered that I work with him. We both shared a love of pastiche, and so most of the flyers I would go on to design made use of iconic images. That’s how this Evian-flavored Ultra logo came about – which didn’t exactly please Evian’s people as I recall. I guess the naked girls bothered them, which they let us know by sending a cease-and-desist. That was too bad because those girls were a perfect match for the Folie’s!
Our communication budget for the Folie’s was fairly modest, so we had to be resourceful and keep cranking out ideas. Most of the graphics I used for flyers came out of a pile of old Life magazines that I had brought back from New York. I would scan them in and modify them on my immense old-timey desktop computer, which only had about 10 megs of RAM and took forever to do one pass of color correction. However, sometimes we would produce our own visuals. Axel Huyhn had met this photographer on the dancefloor, and signed her up to shoot some original stuff for our flyers. So this one time, we found ourselves in a studio, with a makeup artist, a hairdresser and, more importantly, a model, who was one of the club’s dancers. Axel styled the thing and Emmanuelle Faucheux was the photographer. I was 20, and it was my first important photo shoot.
At the end of that photo shoot, I asked the photographer if she could take a minute and shoot this box of laundry detergent. I then replaced the logo with “Ultra,” which was an amazing name because you could adapt it to any old graphic. The idea for that came to me by osmosis, because it was very popular with ad agencies at the time: “ultra clean,” “ultra white whites,” etc. It was really the superlative of the day. We would send the Folie’s flyers in transparent envelopes to this whole list of clubbers, labeling and stamping them in my living room. This time around, we sprinkled a bit of detergent in each envelope. Recently, I had some work done in my apartment, and I found some of that very detergent underneath the old carpeting.
Speaking of girls – one of the Folies’ regulars was this boy, Christophe Le Friand. He was this DJ who went by the name of Chris the French Kiss, who also had his own label, Yellow Productions. He was this really high-strung character, very straightforward. He really stood out at the Folie’s: we were always wearing really flashy, synthetic, colorful clubwear outfits, and he would always show up in plain overalls. He loved girls, this guy, especially when they were naked. He loved this flyer and asked me if he could use the design for a Kid Loco record cover. A few years later, Christophe became really famous under the name Bob Sinclar.
A friend suggested that I would use a bowl of vitamins as the main image to this Corn Flakes parody, to make the flyer stand out from the Kellogg’s universe. Obviously, nobody saw it for what it was – it would make people snicker, and I didn’t understand why. The connection between vitamins and ecstasy eluded me – I think I was a bit naïve. Eventually, the local precinct ordered Axel to stop handing out the flyer, claiming that it was an incitement to drug use.
Wonder Woman’s loud colors and tacky, super optimistic vibe quickly turned her into the Folie’s emblem. We started using her in the fall of 1994, and the club’s diehards adopted her. I found this picture in an old book, and we made the flyer a die cut to match the model’s shape, with even the negative space under the arms cut out. At the end of the night, people would often come up to give us their address so we would send them flyers, as if they were avidly collecting them. A lot of Paris’ hip stores would hang them up like garlands.
There was this kid who was always on the dancefloor dressed up as a manga character. His name was Olivier Boscovitch. He wore his hair in a Dragonball Z-style Mohawk and his t-shirts were always super tight. He also drew in that anime style, which he was incredible at. We asked him if he could come up with a few illustrations for our flyers and he said yes right away. So yeah, the colors, the party vibe, manga – this piece of his is the incarnation of that era’s ethos. We were all about clubwear, everything that was flashy and plasticky. Olivier now works for David Guetta (whom he met at the Folie's of course), overseeing part of the set design for his live show. He also directed some of his videos.
How could I forget this maniac? Some American dude who’d moved to Paris to make it in fashion – Jeremy Scott. He loved to dance, and so we booked him as a dancer for this club night. He was a really funny guy – he would come in wearing a really trim-fitting Yves Saint Laurent-style suit, but with stiletto pumps. Sometimes he would wear fake vampire teeth. He had this tagline that he loved repeated all night long, regardless of the conversation: he would say “avant-garde” in a really thick American accent. According to Jeremy Scott, everything had to be “avant-garde.”
I met Dimitri From Paris at the Folie’s. He played sets there from time to time, and I ended up back at his place on more than one occasion trying to wrap my head around his collection of Japanese mini-robots. Dimitri was crazy about those robots! One time, he asked me to come up with the graphics for one of his first albums. He knew my knack for old school aesthetics and thought it worked well with his own kind of dandy, almost tacky taste. He wanted an image of the Eiffel Tower, but I wasn’t so sure. Instead, I showed him this image of old ladies at a fashion show. I thought it was perfect, super kitschy and original at the same time: this type of women had long deserted Fashion Week. But Dimitri wasn’t digging it, so I used it for a club night flyer.
Everybody at the Folie’s was in love with this good-natured, 6-foot-6, 18-year-old kid who drove around town in his mom’s Austin Mini. He was always ready down to party, and equally ready to help. He started out by passing out flyers for Axel, and eventually started putting on his own night at the club, “Hype.” His name was Pedro Winter. He very much cared about his night’s image, and always wanted to stand out: while all the flyers for the club’s other nights were in English and French, he made his in Spanish, which I thought was very funny. He was the one who first brought Daft Punk to the Folie’s. Also, when David and Cathy Guetta enlisted Pedro to put on nights at the Palace’s famous Fumoir smoking lounge, I tagged along and took care of the flyers.

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