In conversation w/ Claire Koron Elat and Shelly Lea Reich
SEPTEMBER 26, 2026
angels.sc3 is the Paris-based cultural project founded by Claire Koron Elat and Shelly Lea Reich, born out of a shared creative world that moves between art, fashion, music and nightlife. Over the past years, they’ve worked with cultural figures including Martin Margiela, Gerhard Richter, Aus Taylor, Fai Khadra, Dozie Kanu, Jon Rafman, and Jordan Wolfson, while creating projects and bringing people together across Paris, Berlin, Switzerland and beyond. Their circle moves easily between artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, collectors and fashion figures, with ANGELS becoming as much about the people in the room as what happens there.
On September 28, during Paris Fashion Week at Kramer, Paris, the duo will open their latest exhibition, bringing together The Drama director Kristoffer Borgli, Playboi Carti producer F1LTHY, 550BC’s Pouria Khojastehpay, Sonny Hall, Noemie Ninot, and Yury Belyavski. If angels has a defining quality, it might be that it knows how to make culture feel social, seductive, and slightly unpredictable.
For people hearing about angels.sc3 for the first time, how would you describe what it is and what brought the two of you together?
Shelly Lea Reich: angels.sc3 really came out of our friendship and the worlds we were already moving through individually. There wasn’t necessarily one moment where we decided, “This is what we’re going to build”. It was much more organic than that. We were constantly meeting interesting people, going to things, having conversations, discovering artists and ideas, and realizing that there was a very natural chemistry between the things we were both interested in.
Claire Koron Elat: I think what brought us together is a shared instinct. We both respond very quickly to people, images, and ideas that feel distinctive. We’re not particularly interested in things that are overly polished or obvious. There has to be some kind of tension or personality there. angels.sc3 became a way of making something out of that instinct—to create projects, bring people together and give those relationships a physical or visual form.
SLR: And we don’t want it to feel like a company in the traditional sense. It’s more fluid. It can be an exhibition, a dinner, a collaboration, a screening, a party, or something that we haven't even thought of yet. The people involved usually determine what it becomes.
angels.sc3 exists somewhere between art, fashion, music, nightlife, and image culture. How do you define what you do?
CKE: I actually like that it’s difficult to define. We’ve both worked across different parts of culture for a long time, despite being still very young and at the beginning of our careers, so separating everything into categories has never felt natural to us. Art, fashion, music, nightlife, architecture, film—they constantly influence each other anyway.
SLR: A lot of our relationships also exist across those categories. Someone might be an artist in one context, producing music in another, working with a fashion brand somewhere else. We’re interested in that fluidity. We don’t really want to decide that someone belongs to one particular scene.
You’ve worked with very different figures, from Martin Margiela and Gerhard Richter to Aus Taylor, Fai Khadra, Dozie Kanu, Jon Rafman, and Jordan Wolfson. What connects the people you choose to work with?
CKE: It’s definitely not about a particular level of success or recognition. If anything, we’re more interested in people who have a very strong internal world. Someone can be incredibly established or completely emerging, but if they have a very specific way of seeing things, we’re interested.
SLR: There has to be a point of view. That’s probably the biggest common denominator. We’re attracted to people who have created their own language rather than simply participating in an existing one. And chemistry is important. Sometimes you meet someone and immediately know that there are ten different things you could potentially do together. Those are usually the relationships we follow. We’re less interested in forcing collaborations because someone looks good on paper.
CKE: I think that’s also why the network has become quite broad. Once you start connecting people across disciplines, one relationship naturally leads to another. Someone introduces you to someone else, who introduces you to an artist, who ends up becoming a friend. It grows in a very organic way.
How important is your social world to angels.sc3? Do you see bringing people together and creating connections as part of your creative practice?
SLR: Completely. Social interaction is probably one of our biggest creative tools. We both genuinely enjoy people and being around people, and we’re very curious about what happens when different personalities come together.
CKE: I think there’s a misconception that social life and creative practice are completely separate things. They really aren’t. A lot of ideas begin at dinner, at a party, in someone’s studio or during a conversation that wasn’t supposed to become a project.
You also founded 032c Gallery. What was it like building a gallery within an existing fashion and cultural institution?
CKE: It was a formative experience. The gallery gave us the opportunity to extend the angels identity into a different context and work directly with artists and their practices.
SLR: It was also a lesson in how much goes into creating a cultural space. The exhibition itself is only one part of it. You’re thinking about the artist, the audience, the architecture, the opening, the people you want in the room, the conversations that happen around it. I’m not sure though if we would want to do a physical space again.
CKE: I mean you never know.
SLR: True [both laugh]. The challenge was als to be embedded in a preset environment, which could sometimes be restrictive.
Budgets and sponsoring is something that is not talked about enough in both the arts and fashion industry. You’ve worked with many brands including Courrèges, Dr. Martens and Samsung but also private sponsoring from collectors. What makes a commercial collaboration feel genuinely relevant to angels.sc3?
SLR: The brand has to have a cultural point of view. We’re not interested in simply attaching ourselves to a brand because it has a large audience. There has to be something about the brand's history, identity or current direction that gives us something to respond to.
CKE: And art is such an important field that all brands want to venture into nowadays but don’t necessarily know how to do it in-house. The best collaborations are when the brand understands that you’re bringing something they couldn’t necessarily create internally. We don’t want to reproduce an existing campaign language. We want to find a space that feels unexpected but still makes sense for them. Ideally, the end result shouldn’t feel like “a brand collaboration”. It should feel like something that could exist within culture on its own, and then you discover that a brand was behind it.
You move between established art-world figures and a much more internet-driven generation of artists and creatives. How do you navigate between these different worlds?
SLR: We don’t really experience them as separate worlds. The internet has completely changed how culture circulates. An artist with a long institutional history can be just as influential to a younger generation as someone who became known online.
Can social visibility itself be a form of cultural production today? Where do you see ANGELS.SC3 within that?
SLR: Shelly: I think it can be. The way people gather, who they choose to spend time with, what they wear, what they photograph, what they share and what they create together all contributes to how culture is produced now.
CKE: But I think there’s an important distinction between visibility and relevance. Being seen isn’t necessarily interesting. We’re much more interested in what happens because you’re visible. Can you use that visibility to introduce an artist to someone? Can you create a collaboration? Can you give someone access to a room they wouldn’t otherwise be in?
SLR: And that’s probably where ANGELS.SC3 sits. We’re interested in the social side of culture, but also in turning those social relationships into something tangible.
For this exhibition, you’re bringing together Kristoffer Borgli, F1LTHY and Pouria Khojastehpay from the publishing house 55BC. What connected these three practices for you?
SLR: They have very different practices, but all three have a strong relationship to contemporary image culture and the way identity is constructed and consumed.
CKE: Kristoffer has this very particular way of looking at contemporary life and turning it into something surreal and unsettling. F1LTHY comes from a completely different cultural language through music and sound, while Pouria has his own visual and conceptual vocabulary. Putting those worlds together felt much more interesting to us than creating an exhibition where everything already speaks the same language.
SLR: We like a little friction. If everyone in the room is doing the same thing, there’s not much to newness.
For the past years you’ve focused on Europe but you’re now looking toward the US. What interests you about bringing ANGELS.SC3 there, and are there particular cities or communities you want to connect with?
CKE: The US feels like a very natural next chapter for us. There’s such an enormous concentration of artists, musicians, filmmakers, fashion people, collectors and people working in completely new forms of culture. And the budgets are also very different if we’re honest.
SLR: There are already people we’re excited about connecting with, but we also want to leave room for unexpected relationships. We’re particularly interested in creating something around different momentums for example Art Basel Miami or Frieze La. But of course New York is also on our radar.
CKE: Ideally, the American chapter should feel like an evolution rather than an expansion plan.
What do you ultimately want angels to become? An agency, a creative studio, a brand?
CKE: I think the answer is that we don’t want to define it too tightly yet. The flexibility is part of what makes it interesting. Ultimately, we want ANGELS.SC3 to become a place where interesting things happen before they’re completely obvious. A platform people want to be part of because they know they’ll encounter something or someone they wouldn’t have encountered in this particular context otherwise.
SLR: And hopefully it continues to attract people who are doing something distinctive. We want artists to want to work with us, brands to trust us with ideas they wouldn’t normally do, and people from completely different worlds to meet through what we’re creating. If we can keep that feeling while allowing angels to be a universe that continuously evolves.
In conversation w/ Claire Koron Elat and Shelly Lea Reich
SEPTEMBER 26, 2026
angels.sc3 is the Paris-based cultural project founded by Claire Koron Elat and Shelly Lea Reich, born out of a shared creative world that moves between art, fashion, music and nightlife. Over the past years, they’ve worked with cultural figures including Martin Margiela, Gerhard Richter, Aus Taylor, Fai Khadra, Dozie Kanu, Jon Rafman, and Jordan Wolfson, while creating projects and bringing people together across Paris, Berlin, Switzerland and beyond. Their circle moves easily between artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, collectors and fashion figures, with ANGELS becoming as much about the people in the room as what happens there.
On September 28, during Paris Fashion Week at Kramer, Paris, the duo will open their latest exhibition, bringing together The Drama director Kristoffer Borgli, Playboi Carti producer F1LTHY, 550BC’s Pouria Khojastehpay, Sonny Hall, Noemie Ninot, and Yury Belyavski. If angels has a defining quality, it might be that it knows how to make culture feel social, seductive, and slightly unpredictable.
For people hearing about angels.sc3 for the first time, how would you describe what it is and what brought the two of you together?
Shelly Lea Reich: angels.sc3 really came out of our friendship and the worlds we were already moving through individually. There wasn’t necessarily one moment where we decided, “This is what we’re going to build”. It was much more organic than that. We were constantly meeting interesting people, going to things, having conversations, discovering artists and ideas, and realizing that there was a very natural chemistry between the things we were both interested in.
Claire Koron Elat: I think what brought us together is a shared instinct. We both respond very quickly to people, images, and ideas that feel distinctive. We’re not particularly interested in things that are overly polished or obvious. There has to be some kind of tension or personality there. angels.sc3 became a way of making something out of that instinct—to create projects, bring people together and give those relationships a physical or visual form.
SLR: And we don’t want it to feel like a company in the traditional sense. It’s more fluid. It can be an exhibition, a dinner, a collaboration, a screening, a party, or something that we haven't even thought of yet. The people involved usually determine what it becomes.
angels.sc3 exists somewhere between art, fashion, music, nightlife, and image culture. How do you define what you do?
CKE: I actually like that it’s difficult to define. We’ve both worked across different parts of culture for a long time, despite being still very young and at the beginning of our careers, so separating everything into categories has never felt natural to us. Art, fashion, music, nightlife, architecture, film—they constantly influence each other anyway.
SLR: A lot of our relationships also exist across those categories. Someone might be an artist in one context, producing music in another, working with a fashion brand somewhere else. We’re interested in that fluidity. We don’t really want to decide that someone belongs to one particular scene.
You’ve worked with very different figures, from Martin Margiela and Gerhard Richter to Aus Taylor, Fai Khadra, Dozie Kanu, Jon Rafman, and Jordan Wolfson. What connects the people you choose to work with?
CKE: It’s definitely not about a particular level of success or recognition. If anything, we’re more interested in people who have a very strong internal world. Someone can be incredibly established or completely emerging, but if they have a very specific way of seeing things, we’re interested.
SLR: There has to be a point of view. That’s probably the biggest common denominator. We’re attracted to people who have created their own language rather than simply participating in an existing one. And chemistry is important. Sometimes you meet someone and immediately know that there are ten different things you could potentially do together. Those are usually the relationships we follow. We’re less interested in forcing collaborations because someone looks good on paper.
CKE: I think that’s also why the network has become quite broad. Once you start connecting people across disciplines, one relationship naturally leads to another. Someone introduces you to someone else, who introduces you to an artist, who ends up becoming a friend. It grows in a very organic way.
How important is your social world to angels.sc3? Do you see bringing people together and creating connections as part of your creative practice?
SLR: Completely. Social interaction is probably one of our biggest creative tools. We both genuinely enjoy people and being around people, and we’re very curious about what happens when different personalities come together.
CKE: I think there’s a misconception that social life and creative practice are completely separate things. They really aren’t. A lot of ideas begin at dinner, at a party, in someone’s studio or during a conversation that wasn’t supposed to become a project.
You also founded 032c Gallery. What was it like building a gallery within an existing fashion and cultural institution?
CKE: It was a formative experience. The gallery gave us the opportunity to extend the angels identity into a different context and work directly with artists and their practices.
SLR: It was also a lesson in how much goes into creating a cultural space. The exhibition itself is only one part of it. You’re thinking about the artist, the audience, the architecture, the opening, the people you want in the room, the conversations that happen around it. I’m not sure though if we would want to do a physical space again.
CKE: I mean you never know.
SLR: True [both laugh]. The challenge was als to be embedded in a preset environment, which could sometimes be restrictive.
Budgets and sponsoring is something that is not talked about enough in both the arts and fashion industry. You’ve worked with many brands including Courrèges, Dr. Martens and Samsung but also private sponsoring from collectors. What makes a commercial collaboration feel genuinely relevant to angels.sc3?
SLR: The brand has to have a cultural point of view. We’re not interested in simply attaching ourselves to a brand because it has a large audience. There has to be something about the brand's history, identity or current direction that gives us something to respond to.
CKE: And art is such an important field that all brands want to venture into nowadays but don’t necessarily know how to do it in-house. The best collaborations are when the brand understands that you’re bringing something they couldn’t necessarily create internally. We don’t want to reproduce an existing campaign language. We want to find a space that feels unexpected but still makes sense for them. Ideally, the end result shouldn’t feel like “a brand collaboration”. It should feel like something that could exist within culture on its own, and then you discover that a brand was behind it.
You move between established art-world figures and a much more internet-driven generation of artists and creatives. How do you navigate between these different worlds?
SLR: We don’t really experience them as separate worlds. The internet has completely changed how culture circulates. An artist with a long institutional history can be just as influential to a younger generation as someone who became known online.
Can social visibility itself be a form of cultural production today? Where do you see ANGELS.SC3 within that?
SLR: Shelly: I think it can be. The way people gather, who they choose to spend time with, what they wear, what they photograph, what they share and what they create together all contributes to how culture is produced now.
CKE: But I think there’s an important distinction between visibility and relevance. Being seen isn’t necessarily interesting. We’re much more interested in what happens because you’re visible. Can you use that visibility to introduce an artist to someone? Can you create a collaboration? Can you give someone access to a room they wouldn’t otherwise be in?
SLR: And that’s probably where ANGELS.SC3 sits. We’re interested in the social side of culture, but also in turning those social relationships into something tangible.
For this exhibition, you’re bringing together Kristoffer Borgli, F1LTHY and Pouria Khojastehpay from the publishing house 55BC. What connected these three practices for you?
SLR: They have very different practices, but all three have a strong relationship to contemporary image culture and the way identity is constructed and consumed.
CKE: Kristoffer has this very particular way of looking at contemporary life and turning it into something surreal and unsettling. F1LTHY comes from a completely different cultural language through music and sound, while Pouria has his own visual and conceptual vocabulary. Putting those worlds together felt much more interesting to us than creating an exhibition where everything already speaks the same language.
SLR: We like a little friction. If everyone in the room is doing the same thing, there’s not much to newness.
For the past years you’ve focused on Europe but you’re now looking toward the US. What interests you about bringing ANGELS.SC3 there, and are there particular cities or communities you want to connect with?
CKE: The US feels like a very natural next chapter for us. There’s such an enormous concentration of artists, musicians, filmmakers, fashion people, collectors and people working in completely new forms of culture. And the budgets are also very different if we’re honest.
SLR: There are already people we’re excited about connecting with, but we also want to leave room for unexpected relationships. We’re particularly interested in creating something around different momentums for example Art Basel Miami or Frieze La. But of course New York is also on our radar.
CKE: Ideally, the American chapter should feel like an evolution rather than an expansion plan.
What do you ultimately want angels to become? An agency, a creative studio, a brand?
CKE: I think the answer is that we don’t want to define it too tightly yet. The flexibility is part of what makes it interesting. Ultimately, we want ANGELS.SC3 to become a place where interesting things happen before they’re completely obvious. A platform people want to be part of because they know they’ll encounter something or someone they wouldn’t have encountered in this particular context otherwise.
SLR: And hopefully it continues to attract people who are doing something distinctive. We want artists to want to work with us, brands to trust us with ideas they wouldn’t normally do, and people from completely different worlds to meet through what we’re creating. If we can keep that feeling while allowing angels to be a universe that continuously evolves.