Hedi discovered his second home in 2000 during an intermission between his work at Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche and Dior Homme. He now divides his time between his Paris apartment, and what has been described as a "shoebox", located within the Kunstwork art project in the German capital.

In an interview with Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator of New York's PS1 contemporary art center, Hedi explained "Berlin is an open space for me, I don't feel like I need to make any effort when I am here. I take the overnight train from Paris, and I arrive really early in the morning, when the city is only slightly awake and silent. The train going from west to east creates a sort of urban intimacy. It's a very pleasant, slow journey."

The star designer has been carrying around a camera since childhood, and Hedi originally took his Contex G2 along on his weekend getaways to shoot pictures for casting. In each Dior Homme catwalk show, amateur boys from Berlin take their place alongside professional male models.

The photography in the Berlin collection, made between 2000-2002, is a very personal and intimate look at Hedi's places and friends. Black and white pictures capture scenes from Mauerpark to Wansee, Warshauer Sraße and Friedrichschein to Karl Marx Allee, Alexander Platz and Kreuzberg.

From a group of swarthy boys at a Biergarten festival, to glimpses of the underground Club scene, the images conjure up the same world of intrigue, decadence and chance that Christopher Isherwood once evoked in his Wiemar-era Berlin Novels.

There is haunting elegance to it all of course, the same erotic undercurrent that threads its way through each Dior Homme collection finds its way to the glossy pages: beauty, darkness and friction erupting into high art.

Hedi's real genius transcends fashion and photography, and strikes at the magical art of allure. Like both Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent, he has the uncanny ability to seize ideas, thoughts, and images and to crystallize them into a masterpiece. In so doing, he also captures a fleeting slice of contemporary urban life.

The stark lines of Bauhaus architecture, or a ghetto blaster frozen in the ice of a Tiergarten lake, all have a poignancy, a sharpness that is as captivating as the words of a good novel.

Translating thoughts and emotions into image requires enormous talent and skill, and that is precisely where Hedi Slimane excels