Photo by Paolo Zerbini

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http://sangbleu.com/sb5/

Sang Bleu: How did you get to where you are now?

Anthony Vaccarello: Where am I? I’m still working hard every day. I studied at La Cambre in Bruxelles, then won the Grand Prix Mode at the Festival of Hyères in 2006, then worked for Fendi and came back to my first love. After that it’s all about how you love what you do, people you meet and people you trust to grow with.

SB: What do you find exciting about womenswear at the moment?

AV: I think what is exciting is that codes have changed. People want new things, customers know fashion better than before and want new and particular things. They pay more attention to new designers than big established brands that take less risk. They understand new designs and a new way to show them.

SB: Geometric structures feel like an important element in your work, do architectural and engineering theory have a strong influence on your approach to design?

AV: Not directly, of course I love architecture. Modern architecture. But I never create a dress looking like a building. It’s more about lines. Some architects I like are very inspiring but not literally, otherwise it will be too obvious. For the F/W 10/11 collection I was really inspired about the perfection of art deco line. Everything is so tough, so perfect and smart.

SB: What are the qualities that inspire you in the materials you use? Transparency, texture, and sheen seem like strong stories – emphasising the contrast between matte and shine, tactile and polished surfaces, sheer and opaque, and so on.

AV: Everything is in the question! I love transparency… I love working directly on a body. Skin also inspires me. It’s the best fabric but you can’t go around like that (well, not all the time). That’s why I like to create texture, to hide it sometimes and reveal it in a way. To pay attention to a strange part of the body that isn’t normally interesting, then try to make it sexy. I always try to create texture since I started at school because I studied ‘textiles’ before fashion so to me it’s a cool way to be different and to propose something that is not flat. Even if the shape is really simple sometimes, when you play with texture it’s always more interesting.

SB: Does the concept of deconstructing, or reinventing classic shapes have any bearing on your aesthetic?

AV: I love classic shapes. There is a lot to do to always reinvent them in a new way to wear them. Classic is the base of everything. But I hate deconstructing… Too 90s isn’t it? I prefer the word reinvent.

SB: How important is hand-finished craftsmanship and traditional technique in achieving your angular, almost Art Deco-feeling pieces?

AV: I don’t want to be confined as the hand-finished designer. It really depends on the collection and the pieces. Some need to be hand-finished, some not. I like clothes that create an emotion that manufacturers can’t produce. Sometimes you need to touch, destroy some surface finish, or just fix some point to make the clothes more exceptional. Less flat.

SB: Can you envisage a boundary at which the garment ends, and the jewellery begins? They appear to exist symbiotically in your work.

AV: When I’m doing clothes I think accessories are very important but not always visible. For instance, for the S/S 11 collection there is no jewellery in a way. I mean you will not see them directly but it’s more in the structure of the dress. The jewel becomes a dress but without any shining effect outside. I think it’s the ultimate boundary for me. When you wear a dress that hangs as a collar but you seem naked. It’s just about shape and fabric. I love that.

SB: Do you have a muse, or strong feminine ideal that drives the silhouette each season?

AV: I always think about a woman when I’m doing a collection. I think it’s important to see the woman I want to dress, imagine her moving, walking down a street, or smoking in a bar. It’s always a strong woman with some faults. Not the aggressive one but a woman that knows who she is. The best is my friend Lou Doillon, who is perfect for me. I would rather have a living icon in mind than a dead woman. My work is for now; there are no references to the past.

SB: Can you describe the mood and inspiration for your autumn/winter 2010/11 collection?

AV: I played on the contrast of textures around a palette of black, mainly in transparency, like urban and graphic lingerie. Mixtures of velvet and veils, assembled by embroidery stitches to create a graphic silhouette that plays with the body – for a woman who wears her femininity as armour. When worn, transparent parts of the garment create unexpected lines, almost strange, like a new angle, which can be topped by a straight double coat or masculine jacket. The pure lines and graphics that characterize the collection, where Art Deco meets Metropolis, are gathered in a series of jewellery, structures without stones, like cold metal folded into its body, purified to its simplest form.

SB: What are your immediate plans for the future?

AV: I’m working on the S/S 11 collection that will be shown in Paris on September 28th, in the official schedule. The loop will continue but with more and more enthusiasm. It never ends, that’s why I love fashion. I would like to find a cool collaboration in order to make the brand grow healthily.

Photography by Julia Champeau (of Sang Bleu V cover fame)

http://anthonyvaccarello.blogspot.com/

Iris van Herpen twists leather and metal into a beautiful state of submission. Holed up in Arnhem where she graduated from the ArtEZ Academy of Art and Design in 2006, the 24-yr-old womenswear designer is fast becoming an Amsterdam Fashion Week highlight. Her acclaimed collections have a multi-dimensional depth that combines architectural severity with ethereal movement. Emphasis she places on painstakingly handcrafted details and sharply sculpted silhouettes further enhancing her ultra-modern aesthetic. “A photographer told me not so long ago that seeing my catwalk shows opened his mind to a new way of looking at things,” say van Herpen. “He had never seen anything else he could compare them to.”

The latest collection is brazenly leather-heavy but any parallels with fetish subculture are purely in the eyes of the beholder. Just as her preoccupation with enhancing the female form has nothing to do with sex appeal. “If I make something out of black leather with metal details people will automatically associate it with sex. No matter how organic, free-formed or romantic the design is,” says van Herpen. “Some see fetish and some see romance. But what people see says more about themselves than it does about my work.”

1. To mark your 30-year jubilee you reformed and toured again. I saw you live in London and felt that you still hit the zeitgeist just as much today. How do you see your own development, the scene’s and above all the music’s over the past three decades?

That we still hit the zeitgeist is of course flattering, I think it has something to do with our knack for originality and our pioneering work. It is often said that we were ahead of our time – that our style of music was copied by other bands – and even when imitated it was successful. We have never had anything to do with the general development of music, we stand for ourselves and that’s enough for us! 

2. The end of the 70′s, Punk, the beginnings of early electronic music. How did this evolve at the time, the fusion of guitars and electro? Did bands such as Kraftwerk play a role?

With Punk everything changed! Nobody wanted 70′s music anymore – it was not only the style of the music – also harder lyrics – this is what we liked! Kraftwerk was too harmless for us. We were into the Sex Pistols, but we didn’t want guitars anymore – we preferred the electronic. Electronic with live drums, so more or less EBM. I also have a weakness for good Pop music.

3.  Düsseldorf and Berlin were two German cities, which emanated immense musical creativity during this time. What do you think were the reasons for this and how did this develop over the years, from Punk to Industrial and later into Techno, especially within the scene that you were a part of? I ask this question because I come from Düsseldorf and have lived in Berlin and today see very little of what was once created there.

As I said before the reason for this was definitely Punk. At the same time there was also an uprising in the art world, “die Jungen Wilden” (“the wild youth”) and they were also into Punk, for example Beuys or Immendorff! Of course everything has moved on – today the majority of these kinds of people have adjusted, they are not wild and less creative! But in time this will also change again.

4. The Ratinger Hof, the SO36, today they are well-known but what did these venues stand for at the time? I went to Techno parties at the Ratinger Hof when I was a teenager. What I’m interested in is the scene at the end of the 70′s, beginning of the 80′s, and how it developed later, musically as well as socially.

We were always at the Ratinger Hof – that joint was like my second home. At the time I was essentially there every day – and it was in the damp cellar of that place that Gabi and I founded DAF.

5. “Du bist jung und Du bist stark, Nimm dir was du willst, Verschwende deine Jugend” (“You are young and you are strong, Take what you want, Waste your youth”). If the scene is looked at as a sub cultural movement, what did this track or rather the statement mean to you at the time?

This track is an absolute youth track – and we wanted youth to be lived out to the extreme or basically to be wasted!

6. What is the biggest misinterpretation about DAF? And how was DAF rightly or wrongly received in terms of fascist connotations?

That the media tried to pigeonhole DAF into the fascist corner never bothered us! We just thought it was strange how stupid the media were!

7.  What was your experience of leaving Germany and moving to Mute Records in the UK, and your collaboration with Daniel Miller?

England was a big adventure for us – we went there without any money. We had this idea that our music would be viewed in a better or more neutral way there, and this was the case. The British Media loved us a lot – that’s no exaggeration. D. Miller more or less discovered us on the street and really wanted to produce our music.

8. Did you suddenly feel a bit naked or exposed alone as just the two of you? How did you approach this minimal presence, this new appearance?

As a duo, Gabi and I found our vocation – the fact that there were five of us at the beginning, then four was of developmental importance, but no more than that. Gabi and I worked towards the realisation of us a duo from the first minute we founded DAF. The very first DAF rehearsal was also as a DUO – in the cellar of the Ratinger Hof.

9. What was your relationship with the other bands at the time, for example Liaisons Dangereuses, Mania D and the local Punk bands? What or who inspired you then, and today?

We hardly had any contact with other bands, we were much too busy with our own music. Of course we new Malaria, Liaisons Dangereuses and a lot of the others. Inspiring for us was the Punk movement, however we had our own ideas about how we wanted to sound – unlike many Punk bands we were interested in synthesizers and not guitars, even if we initially had a guitarist. Even today it’s like this – I can only be creative when I concentrate fully on myself and not on others. Our main focus has always been originality, things that already exist are not our thing.

10. What is your take on the music scene nowadays, do you think that subcultures exist in the same way?

The music scene today is as it always has been, beaten down by commercial music formats – I have the feeling now more than ever. Since when has the subculture had it easy? The club landscape will always be the home of the subculture. Thankfully!
 

Body Snatcher

From The Box gallery in Los Angeles to the Whitney Museum in New York, which both hosted exhibitions related to the work of filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek (1927-1984), it seems that the Spring 2009 aspired to question the birth of experimental video.

As an artist, Vanderbeek was persuaded that his function was to invent a universal language as “It is imperative that we quickly find some way for the entire level of world human understanding to rise to a new human scale. The scale is the world”.

I just can’t get enough.
I just can’t get enough.