People of the 21st Century book launch

People of the 21st Century, Hans Eijkelboom's new title from Phaidon Press, is available as of last month, but has it's official launch next week.

Colette in Paris is hosting a launch and talk with Erik Kessels on the 13th of November, from 5 to 6:30pm. The next day at Dirk Bakker Books there will be a book signing from 6 to 8pm.


"The book is fascinating to flick through – in part to see the changing fashions (remember when everyone was wearing lumberjack shirts?) but also in the deeper questions it provokes. Are we all fashion automatons? Do we not have any unique style? When advertising is so often focused on promoting the idea of free expression and individuality, it is somewhat disheartening to see that in actuality, we all end up looking the same."

- Creative Review

"The results, collated in a 500-page book, are simultaneously mundane and compelling. Laid out in a grid, the shots of women wearing pink T-shirts or businessmen carrying briefcases have a hypnotic, repetitious quality, but the longer you look at them, the more nuances become apparent. Eijkelboom used a similar technique in an earlier project, Paris-New York-Shanghai, an exhibition and a trio of books documenting everyday life in those cities that was widely perceived as being a deadpan comment on globalisation’s effect on national identity. The point seemed to be that people increasingly dressed the same all over the world.

People of the Twenty-First Century offers a more positive message. Eijkelboom occasionally documents a fashion trend, or a tribal allegiance, where people are trying to look alike: bikers, Rolling Stones fans wearing the band’s logo. But more often, the similarities between his subjects’ appearances reveal themselves to be superficial. Eijkelboom might have chanced upon a dozen people all wearing yellow T-shirts, but they’re not a uniform and their significance changes with each person: one shirt is pledging allegiance to a football team, another to a band, another to surfing."

- The Guardian