Mika – Laser Outfit

Mika - We Are Golden - laser outfit
Mika - We Are Golden - laser outfit

Mika - We Are Golden - laser outfit, photo Alex Lake

Hot out of the cutting room, the racy video for Mika’s brilliant single, ‘We are Golden’ kick-starts the much-anticipated release of his second album. Directed by dynamite Swedish director Jonas Akerlund, the video features Mika suggestively prancing around the set of a teenage bedroom to his boombox in a skimpy pair of boxers. This nostalgic fantasy is intercut with futuristic sequences of Mika dressed in a custom-made Waldemeyer creation of laser-fied gold and white skin-tight attire. The lasers extend his every movement as he creates dynamic and highly sculptural poses – an ultra-kitsch neon Statue of Liberty.

Moritz Waldemeyer is an engineer-cum-designer whose work embraces innovative applications of LED and laser lighting, bringing it into everything from fashion and furniture design to the world of music and performance. Born in East Germany, Moritz moved to London to train as an engineer at Kings College, completing his master’s degree in 2001. He has since collaborated with many of the world’s top designers and architects including Hussein Chalayan, Zaha Hadid and Philippe Stark. Waldemeyer has an equally strong body of independent projects, which illuminate the grey area between technology and creative design.

For this video Waldemeyer was commissioned to customize four pieces of an outfit: a headband, a gold pair of gloves, gold Doc Martens and a pair of white skinny jeans. The headband consists of a line of lasers extending outwards like a halo, transforming Mika into a new-age saint. The gloves and boots use a combination of LED lights and lasers to inject a seismic surge of red hot passion into the golden concept. The final and fabulously Mika-esque touch was to embed lasers along the seam of his trouser flies, giving the outfit a tongue-in-cheek risqué chic. The overall effect of the outfit, worn with a golden jacket, is a spectacularly lurid explosion of red and gold glitz. In motion, as seen in the video, it is incredibly versatile and striking, creating web-like projections that flicker and change as he dances. This collaboration between the flamboyant Prince of Power Pop and the cutting edge designer of our time is a rare delight not to be missed.

The album, also named ‘We are Golden’ is set to be released September 22nd. An adrenaline fuelled apotheosis of his teenage years, it dizzyingly transcends the heights of his debut. The single, officially released September 7th, straddles the line between wide-eyed innocence and candied raunchiness, evoking a transitory state of adolescence. Waldemeyer’s new era of laser-embedded bling projects the fleeting ephemera and glitz of youth, surpassing the song’s lyric, ‘like a magpie, I live for glitter not you’.

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