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(L-R) From left: Brian Gonzalez, Angela Donhauser, Sean Ono Lennon, Gabi Asfour, and Adi Gil at the 'threeASFOUR: Full Circle' premiere at Tribeca in June. Erik Tanner/Getty Images Sean Ono Lennon didn’t understand the full scope of the documentary he directed, threeASFOUR: Full Circle, until editing it. On the surface, he had made a 94-minute film about his friends, the three designers behind the avant-garde fashion house threeASFOUR and how they struggled to make artistic styles in money-hungry New York City. But as he lived with their stories and thought about how the designers, Gabi Asfour, Angela Donhauser, and Adi Gil had Lebanese-Palestinian, Tajik-German, and Israeli roots, respectively, he recognized a bigger picture.
“It was actually quite a few years into working on the film that I suddenly realized that the main subtext to it is that art and beauty and love conquers tribal differences,” he tells Rolling Stone by phone. “That is a message that really resonates with me personally because of my family, but also because I’m a pacifist and I’m against war. It feels very meaningful.”
The trailer for the film, which will open at New York’s Film Forum on Nov. 13 with a subsequent national theatrical run, shows a cross-section of the trio’s creative process and what they were up against. In one scene, the designers affix plush clothing and mirrored piping to models as they wonder, “Are we making fashion or are we making something else?” and “It’s all beautiful but how do we put it on the body?” In another, it shows them figuring out how to make themselves into a viable business as New York Fashion Week approaches, with a friend advising the trio that they need a big-box store, like Neiman Marcus or Saks Fifth Avenue, wanting them to mass-produce their clothing. Meanwhile, they owe their landlord tens of thousands of dollars.
It’s the latter part of the story that initially caught Ono Lennon’s interest. He’d befriended the trio a couple of decades ago as part of a friend group that included Vincent Gallo and Natasha Lyonne. “I just had watched them struggle so much in terms of having their work be recognized or become commercially viable,” he says. Around 2012, he figured someone ought to make a film about them. “I woke up one day after having rewatched Grey Gardens by the Maysles brothers, and I remember just thinking threeASFOUR are even more interesting than those people in Grey Gardens,” he says.
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“I just thought, ‘OK, well, I’ll make the film,'” he continues. “I didn’t realize that it would be such a complicated endeavor, and I really underestimated the enormity of the task.” He put about five years’ worth of filming into the picture, which Brian Gonzalez co-directed.
Although the film ostensibly is about the fashion industry, he sees it more about functional art. For 25 years now, though, threeASFOUR have impressed fashionistas with their “couture-on-the-street” looks. Björk, Chloë Sevigny, and Meredith Monk have all worn their designs. The trio won the Cooper Hewitt/Smithsonian National Design Award in 2015 for some of their more avant-garde ideas. They’ve since come out with a more mainstream-focused denim line and returned to New York Fashion Week after half a decade away, but one of the aspects of their story that appealed to Ono Lennon most is how they stayed true to their artistic ambitions through thick and thin.
“They represented the New York–American dream to me,” Ono Lennon says, “with one person coming from Tajikistan, another from Germany/Israel, and another coming from Palestine via Lebanon. And they’re working together and finding this sort of family with each other in New York. It just feels like such an incredible New York dream. Their artistic vision and their relationship with each other in the context of where they come from and how they’ve triumphed over adversity for so many years and remained this sort of really tight-knit family that they created out of nothing is what interested me.”
