Inside Michael Scanlon’s Inspiration Folder

Before Scanlon puts pen to brief, he asks himself one question: What is the movie we’re about to write? It’s not a metaphor — it’s a methodology. A former NYU film student whose formative aesthetic obsessions include The Shining, Boogie Nights, and 2001: A Space Odyssey — films that share a certain 1970s texture: immersive, atmospheric, slightly dangerous — Scanlon abandoned the path of feature filmmaking when he became more obsessed with Tom Ford’s Gucci campaigns than anything playing at a festival. His first job at L’Uomo Vogue taught him to translate full characters and narratives into a single 2D image on a page. That tension — cinema crashing into commerce — remains the engine behind everything he does.

To help keep his output fresh and cutting-edge, Scanlon is a voracious consumer of culture in all its forms. But those references can lead to something too literal, too expected. “I rarely look at packaging to inspire ideas about packaging,” he explains. “I want art, sculpture, and architecture to inform form and function.” He’s equally obsessive about music: a DJ and record collector transfixed by how jazz, soul, and dance music of the late ’70s saw live musicians collide with synthesizers to create sounds that had never existed before. He sees that same electricity in AI tools today, fusing analogue impulse with synthetic possibility.

For Scanlon, desire is the whole point — see: all those wet, sensual textures — and the algorithm is the enemy. We asked Scanlon to give us some of his more enduring, exciting sources of inspiration and keep his work unexpected and alluring at the same time. Here’s what he had to say:

“The Italian artist and writer Carlo Levi once wrote, ‘The future has an ancient heart,’ and it’s a line I keep returning to. I’m drawn to ancient stories — not to repeat them but to mine them for truth, or sometimes to subvert them entirely. What if the cautionary tale got it wrong? Working on a hotel branding project, I became fixated on Icarus — but as a hero, not falling to Earth on melted wings, but becoming the sun. Or what if Narcissus falling in love with his reflection wasn’t vanity but self-awareness? Wouldn’t we be better off with a little more healthy narcissism? That reframe became an entire fragrance campaign.”

“I wrote my NYU admissions essay about wishing I’d been born in the late ’50s, so I’d be in my prime for Studio 54. Three years ago, I spent a night and day at Berghain. At some point, I lost my friends and found myself deep in Panorama Bar. Jamie 3:26 was DJing, shirtless, chain-smoking, bouncing frenetically while working Stevie Wonder's ‘As’ into a frenzy. I had never heard warm, organic ’70s soul played in a space like that. It was heavenly and demonic at once — Stevie’s voice, those wildly romantic lyrics, love and sex unfolding all around me on the dance floor. When the climax hit, the windows thrust open and God’s light flooded in. Everyone was screaming, sweating, singing. I looked left: two people having sex. I looked right: a European princess dancing and crying simultaneously. It was transcendent — that collision of collective hedonism, audacity, beauty, desire, music, light, humanity, architecture, glamour, and decay. Two weeks later, I walked into a corporate boardroom and told that story in full, connecting the feeling to what makes this brand incomparable. It became an entire campaign.”

“I rarely look at packaging to inspire ideas about packaging. I want art, sculpture, and architecture to inform form and function. When designing the system for Rhode, Hailey had mentioned that her grandmother — who is Brazilian — had passed down all her skincare wisdom. So, I wanted the packaging to feel like a love letter between two generations of women. That led me to ask: What connects her grandmother’s Brazil to Hailey’s Los Angeles? Oscar Niemeyer and John Lautner — their organic modernism, their curves and slopes, and stances. We looked at those buildings, and that’s how we arrived at the shape of the Glaze and the rest of the skyline.”

“Romance as reference: sensuality, intimacy, dread, nihilism. In a world of fast food, I want to make work that triggers real emotion — not just shock or awe. I return often to Bruce Weber’s books, not for the surface, but for the longing in his subjects. The sense of obsession. Narrative. Life beyond the image. I also walk around the city listening to Klaus Nomi’s ‘Chant,’ imagining a voyeuristic psychosexual thriller about the dread of seeing and being seen.”

“Anytime I need a color, I find it in a Bacon. Last year, I set myself the challenge of working purple into a brand system. I kept seeing it — Minneapolis at night, big-haired backup singers in latex dresses — but purple is a difficult color. For it to work, it needed grit: a thick, grey density layered beneath it. I found exactly that in a Bacon.”

“New York is only as great as it is mythologized in contemporary work. The reason we look back at the city from the ‘70s through the early 2000s with longing is that people were making work that painted it lovingly. No one is really doing that now. When Maggie Rogers and I co-directed the video for her lead single ‘That’s Where I Am’ with Warren Fu, we wanted it to feel like a classic Manhattan romcom. For the final shot, we were after something between Jane Fonda in Klute and Blondie on the Autoamerican cover, but now: Maggie in a crystal-woven Khaite dress, bathed in red light beneath the Empire State Building — tall and iconic. When the song ends, we let the camera linger on her and the building as though they were both monuments. Almost too long for comfort. A small homage to Warhol’s very long Empire.”

“The Emerald City as the World Trade Center. Costumes by Calvin Klein. Quincy Jones at an elongated glass piano. A heady mix of location, fantasy, architecture, music, fashion — all at once.”

“I have a YouTube playlist called OF ALL TIME — it’s secret, don’ even bother looking for it — running about 1,000 deep: music videos, strange old commercials, live performances. I put it on shuffle when I work, letting it tease me like a siren in the background. One of my favorite pockets is a series of ‘70s commercials for Jun Rope, often made in collaboration with Serge Lutens, Helmut Newton, or Richard Avedon. They’re a strange hybrid of fashion editorial and TV commercial that I can’t imagine airing on broadcast television today. But then again — if we could have it then, why can’t we have it now?”

“The sets. There’s a workout scene in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes where the gym is a full Greco-Roman playground — spartan frescoes on the walls, bodies arcing through the air. That image was a major touchstone for Hermès Fit, an immersive fitness concept we developed that ended up traveling the world for a year.”

“The sets that Griffin Frazen builds for the Khaite runway shows are always a new architectural puzzle — maze-like, awe-inspiring. Figuring out how to shoot them in a way that honors both the space and the collection, while keeping the audience invisible, takes enormous work with Hanna Tveite and Todd DosSantos. We never want to see the audience. It’s more cinematic that way. I often turn to Kubrick’s use of cameras within architecture — his framing, his moves, his positioning — to find the right approach.”

Max Berlinger is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He writes about the intersection of fashion, technology, and culture. His work has been featured in the New York Times, GQ, Los Angeles Times, and others. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter.