Haider Ackermann surely is the modern master of draping. With genuine intuition and sensitivity, he meticulously creates wave-like structures caressing the female figure. Following the force of gravity while denying its rules. Due to his ingenious technique, even leather appears slight and fluent. His aesthetics of random effortless is communicated, translated and respelled throughout each of his collections. A signature design approach whose antique influences and statuesque appearance evolves into an invention of its time. Gathered, wrenched and prolonged, it is persued by a new generation of fashion graduates. Inspired and lead by Ackermann’s sense for the capricious character of fabric, form and structure.

PROPORTIONAL SEGMENTATION
The female figure is divided into exact segments. Each of them revealing and reinforcing the woman’s anatomy. The almost cruel division is accomplished through length, fabrics and colour, always executed with finest virtuosity. Slouchy trousers are layered with transparent skirts. Short jackets in washed leather build up the top part, covering fine structures of organza and accented by sharp belts. Waist, legs and neck are radically emphasized. The Ackermann woman is dressed in severe uniforms of sexuality. Sharp expressions of their gender identity. Highlighted by the use of a complex colour code consisting of greys, blacks and darks, as well as an antithetic use of matt, fluorescent and metallic surfaces. The composition of proportional blocks is strict and repetitive, creating reliable rules for accessible sovereignty.

VOLUMINOUS FLATNESS
A contemporary classic and iconic piece, the coat is transformed into a symbol of thoughtlessness, using a subtle blanket metaphor. The main principle is negation, taking away, pretending to be no particular garment or meant to be worn. The illusion is created through precise cuts and a minimalistic restraint. Brave enough to hide intelligent complexity under manifest dishevelment. The result: a piece of clothing, seemingly thrown into the air and slowly floating down until it coincidentally falls upon the shoulders of its wearer. No further details are needed, the structure reigns thoroughly.

ELUSIVE BREEZE
Dresses, transient and soft like a haze. Ultra light nightmares beleaguering the sleeping beauty. Writhing herself in sheets of transparent organza. A whiff of nothing that builds the sheer armour of female strength and emancipation. Whilst exposing vulnerable nudity, Haider Ackermann reaches for the highest of his capabilities: creating absolute pulchritude. The pure essence of femininity uncovered yet concealed under extremely delicate but complicated structures. It is the subliminal fight between presence and abstinence that seduces the beholder with intensity.

Eugene Rabkin is an American journalist and the creator of StyleZeitgeist, an online forum dedicated to the discussion of fashion design in its purest forms.

A BLOG is delighted to present Eugene as the first external author, as we showcase his work – thorough yet concise articles which are truly relevant in the world of A MAGAZINE.

His first contribution is an abridged text from his article in Haaretz Magazine on A#4 curator Jun Takahashi, published on 31st July, 2009.

*                *                *

UNDERCOVER MAN

Cult designer Jun Takahashi wants to make noise, not just clothes

FLORENCE – There is something oddly beautiful about a mutilated teddy bear, at least when the gutting is done by Jun Takahashi, a young Japanese fashion designer whose label, Undercover, has achieved a cult international following. On a balmy Florentine evening in June, Takahashi stood on a platform on top of a hill overlooking the entire city, ripping into the white plush toy with large tailoring scissors. His two assistants fussed around a half-made man-size doll, while a DJ, accompanied by a musician playing a synthesizer paired with a strobe light, spun hard-core industrial music. Live doll-making was part of a show Takahashi put on during Pitti Uomo, the largest international menswear fashion trade fair, which takes place in Florence. Each time, a special guest designer is invited to present his collection. Past guests include Rick Owens and Thom Browne, both designers popular with fashion cognoscenti but hovering just below the radar of the general public. Takahashi now finds himself in the same position.

Before we had to trek uphill to the beautiful Boboli Gardens that hide behind the Pitti Palace, Takahashi showed his new menswear collection. These days he is preoccupied with the relationship between form and function. This manifests most clearly in the use of high-tech fabrics in the past few Undercover collections. For Fall/Winter 2009, Takahashi used fabrics like WINDSTOPPER, a lightweight material that is completely waterproof and breathable, and c_change, which features tiny membranes that open to let body heat escape as it senses your body temperature rise. As soon as the body temperature falls, the membranes close to retain the body heat.

Using these fabrics for fall and winter allowed Takahashi to create extremely lightweight garments that withstand harsh weather conditions. In his idiosyncratic fashion, Takahashi paired these high-tech materials with beautiful knitwear and flawless tailoring. A particular standout article displayed in his Paris showroom was a dark gray wool women’s blazer lined in c_change fabric (complete with a neat thermometer that monitors the wearer’s temperature hidden on the inside of the jacket ). The techno-fabric tantalizingly peaked through at the garment joints, piquing one’s curiosity about what’s inside. This was not your Mom’s ski jacket.

The Spring/Summer 2010 men’s collection, presented in Florence, continued the form and function theme. The collection, called “Less but Better” was based on the work of Dieter Rams, an iconic German consumer products designer. The title was a rough translation of Rams’ design philosophy, “Weniger, aber besser,” relating to a kind of minimalism of design where all superfluous details are eliminated in order to bring out the object’s usability.

Rams is a legend in the design world −his work has greatly influenced Jonathan Ive, the head designer for Apple. Takahashi decided to apply Rams’ design principle to fashion. The high-tech, functional fabrics, including WINDSTOPPER and COOLMAX, worked naturally here. The dominating color was metallic light gray, the color of many Braun products that Rams has been designing since the 1950s. Many of the jackets the models wore had brown leather inserts or leather handles allowing the jackets to be easily carried. This paid homage to the leather handle on the Braun TP1 portable recorder designed by Rams in 1959. Other pieces had dials sewn into them and some of the buttons mimicked the stark orange on/off buttons of Rams’ products. Again, Takahashi incorporated the techno-fabrics in unusual ways: There were knitted pieces in which he wove reflective fibers together with cotton. Seeing the futuristic- looking models in minimalist clothing march around the highly ornamental fountain straight out of the Renaissance felt positively, well, surreal. And surrealism is what Takahashi does best.

Takahashi was born in 1969 in the small town of Kiryu, in the Gunma Prefecture, into a middle-class family. When he was 18, he enrolled in Tokyo’s Bunka Academy to study fashion. He was highly influenced by punk rock by then and formed his own tribute band called the Tokyo Sex Pistols. It was through punk that he first came to fashion. “I was influenced by Vivienne Westwood’s early designs,” says Takahashi, sitting in a dining room at his hotel in Florence. “She showed that punk fashion can be aggressive, but at the same time elegant and sexy; that it’s not just about sticking safety pins into leather jackets and putting holes in your T-shirts.”

Music has always been a binding force for Takahashi. He is friends with Patti Smith, the legendary New York punk rocker and a poet. “I was always impressed not only with her music, but also with her style,” says Takahashi. Yoshie Tominaga, the first Undercover photographer, used to be a photographer for Patti Smith. He introduced Takahashi to Smith through a series of letters that can be seen in “The Shepherd,” which Tominaga authored. Takahashi asked Smith if she could write a poem for his “But Beautiful” collection. She reworked her poem “Neo Boy,” and sent him a recording of it, and he played it during the catwalk show. Takahashi incorporates elements of Smith’s aura in his clothes. Each pair of Undercover pants and jeans has a small lightning bolt stitched below the left knee, a faithful reproduction of her tattoo. For the Spring/Summer 2009 men’s collection, Takahashi stitched out the words from “Neo Boy” onto pants legs and around the front pockets of his jeans.

It is punk rock that Takahashi invariably returns to – he has a fascination with noise. “We Make Noise, not Clothes,” is a slogan that reverberates through each of his collections. Takahashi puts it on T-shirts and on adhesive tape that holds the seams of his techno jackets together. “With that slogan, I wanted to show that Undercover is not about just making clothes, but about showing my world through clothes,” says Takahashi. The clothes, just like the dolls and the books, become a vehicle of expression, not an end in themselves.

Noise featured prominently in the music that served as a backdrop while Takahashi was making his bizarre doll in the Boboli Gardens. The forceful, loud music, his team of grown-up Tokyo street kids, the freakish dolls, and, finally, Takahashi himself seemed decidedly out of place in that fragile, pretty Renaissance garden. They contrasted sharply with the cocktail dresses and high heels of the audience. But the longer they went on with their work, the more Takahashi’s surreal world took over and became reality on that summer night. He made that evening his own. Finally, after about an hour, he was done. The music stopped. The bicycle light in place of an eye lit up. “Arigato!” the audience shouted.

An excerpt from UNDERCOVER MAN By Eugene Rabkin for Haartetz Magazine, 31st July 2009

For full article, click here.

The raw, untreated hide of an alligator  thrown amongst an array of exotic skins and delicate fabrics. Dark shades and gradients of mottled colour sweep across the leather – tea browns, murky beige and scaly lines of deep grey. Underneath, the oily shine of eelskin glimmers in the low light, and a dull beige crepe de soie gives the opposite effect, in this image photographed by Mario Palmieri.

This is how American fashion designer Rick Owens chose to define his personal vision through an object, a question asked of Olivier Theyskens, Azzedine Alaïa and himself for A#3. The alligator skin is rare and precious, intricate in its anatomical structure, yet here is rendered unpolished and entirely lifeless – awaiting Rick’s transformation into a svelte gilet, a panelled jacket, or the trim on a shoe. It represents Rick Owens in its contradictions, in the sombre melange of glamour and grunge that have made his daringly dark silhouettes so popular the world over.

Be it the shark-fin heel on an a platform boot, the luxury of cashmere knitwear so long it drags across the ground, or a cotton jersey hoodie lined entirely in fox, Owens creates a unique and avantgarde mix of comfort, wearability and unswerving elegance.

The simplicity of a wooden crate, upturned in the corner of a room. The subtle complexity and strict workmanship in the box joints. The design is spartan, never crude, barely embellished save for the rich stain.

This is the object with which Tunisian-born designer Azzedine Alaïa chose to represent his vision, photographed by Mario Palmieri for A#3.

Alaïa is revered amongst his contemporaries and followers as a master of the feminine form, for his body-conscious designs that celebrate a fierce sensuality. His work is precise, streamlined and sits always just out of the spotlight of mainstream and trend-based fashion. This seems reflected by his chosen talisman – sitting askew from the wall and softly lit, while all the time casting a long shadow.

Obscure? Yes, but so seems the man himself.

When Rochas’ designer Olivier Theyskens was asked for A#3 to choose a personal object to represent his vision, he chose this ecosphere – an entire life-cycle preserved within glass.

The soft elliptical shape contains a self-sufficient environment, its intrinsic beauty in the purity and unity of elements: air, water, plants and animals. The silhouette is embryonic – feminine in the egg-shaped curve and cyclical function. Here it sits pod-like on a table, photographed by Marco Palmieri, as though life on Earth being studied by some grand alien spectator.

The object holds a dichotomous nature, in the dependence of the interaction within the sphere contrasting with a complete independence of the entity itself from the wider world.

A fusion of hard and soft, femininity with a hard exterior, subtlety and strength, the ecosphere is a carefully selected, formidable metaphor for Theyskens’ Rochas aesthetic.

British-born Colin McDowell is considered as one of the most influential fashion commentators of the 20th and 21st century. He is the the Senior Fashion Writer of Sunday Times Style, author of ‘McDowell’s Directory of Twentieth Century Fashion’ and founder of Fashion Fringe.
For A#3 he has contributed a thought-provoking article entitled “Elegance”, which discusses the term and it’s evolution and relevance in the modern day. Find excerpts from his article below:

“When we think of elegance, we recall the perfect simplicity of a Grès gown or the rigorous cut of a Balenciaga dress, both as judged in their elegance as Beethoven’s last string quartets…”

“The elegance of simplicity comes from great complexity, of imagination, thought and above all, cut. “

“British couturier Sir Hardy Amies once described when I asked him the essence of his job, as ‘to do honour to the cloth.’”

“Just as women stand and walk differently to fifty years ago, so the statuesque and almost frozen air of clothes from the mid-twentieth century now seems strange, wrong and even alien to modern women.”

“The future for elegance is just that, the future, with few backward glances and no overly fastidious references to the past, otherwise it becomes that most degraded of all things in any artistic cannon: pastiche.”

World renowned Belgian make-up artist Peter Phillips has contributed these two images to Haider Ackermann’s A#3, as a token to Haider, their working relationship and their shared aesthetic.

Belgian photographer Willy Vanderperre realised this vision for Peter in two contrasting yet equally beautiful photographs. The first is a black & white shot of a model’s almond-shaped eye bereft of makeup, very close-up and with a fresh, clean look. The second is a pair of ruby red lips, in blazing colour and perfectly shaped for a siren of the silver screen.

Alone, the images are simply glamorous – together they are a cohesive dialogue of Haider Ackermann’s disparate elements – the hard and the soft, the shine and the matte, the dark and the light.

In our final recap of the events of Pitti Immagine fashion trade show in Florence in June, we present a documentary behind the scenes at Villa della Petraia, in the lead up to Proenza Schouler’s fabulous event showcasing their Pre-Spring collection 2010.

Watch as Kembra Pfahler directs her Florence ballet dancers for last-minute auditions in the gardens, witness Haim Steinbach’s precision as he constructs an installation of Proenza Schouler accessories in the foyer, and walk with Art Production Fund’s Yvonne Force Villareal as she places Kalup Linzy’s photographs against the villa’s façade.

Then watch as evening falls and the beautiful people come out to play,  with exclusive footage of the evening’s proceedings including the devilish performance by The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black and the dramatic genius of Kalup Linzy.

The video also contains an interview with Jack and Lazaro of Proenza Schouler as they discuss the curation of the event, providing further insight into the multi-faceted multimedia collaboration.

All footage is brought to you courtesy of Pitti Immagine.

Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler hosted the party of the week in New York city on Monday night,  when they invited their collaborators and friends to toast the US launch of A#9. Their choice of venue was a townhouse in Soho Mews, the new luxury condo development in West Broadway.

The crisp pages of their ‘Made in the USA’ edition were showcased inside the townhouse for guests to see the beautiful work of the designers and their collaborators, including that of performance artist Kalup Linzy (who was also in attendance).

And what would the A#9 NYC party be without it’s cover girl, the divine miss Chloë Sevigny? She dazzled in a Proenza Schouler leather belted jumpsuit, exclaiming “I feel a little bit like a super-slut superhero!”

Other guests included cover photographer Richard Burbridge, Derek Blasberg (who interviewed Bruce Weber for a piece in the issue) and Yvonne Force Villareal of Art Production Fund, the veritable ‘force’ behind much of Proenza Schouler’s brilliant spectacle in June at Pitti Immagine in Florence, Italy.

The party was as low-key an event as such a New York society crowd permits, with beers in icebuckets and a tire swing on the terrace (albeit a designer one by Aaron Young of Cumulus Studios!). ‘Kids’ actor Leo Fitzpatrick and artist Nate Lowman hit the decks to dj for the event, as various art, music and fashion personalities enjoyed the summer evening sipping beers and champagne, including P.S.1‘s  Tim Goossens, model Sigrid Agren, Vogue’s Hamish Bowles and up-and-coming young illustrator Aurel Schmidt.

Surely a last hurrah for Jack and Lazaro after riding a crazy wave in the past few months, culminating in the completion and launch of A#9, their reception of CFDA Accessories of the Year award, and their work with Pitti Immagine as the special guest of the womenswear pre-spring collection presentation. Congratulations guys!

Photos by Steve Eichner, Sherly Rabbani and Josephine Solimene.

As our exploration of the world of Jun Takahashi draws to a close, it is only right to leave you with the work of another great Japanese designer and their interpretation of Mr. Takahashi.

We present an artwork by Rei Kawakubo, the divine mistress behind the juggernaut that is Comme des Garçons, a woman who paved the way for a revolution in the first wave of Japanese fashion design in the 1980s (alongside Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake).

Rei’s portrait series of Jun Takahashi is darkly graphic – with screen-printed camouflage, pixelation, spliced images, etched-lino effects and heavy contrast creating a collage effect that is beautiful, violent, and covert. In most images Jun’s focus lies elsewhere, his back is turned, he wears dark glasses, or he turns away from the audience to an unseen figure.

The intimacy lies in Rei’s thematic indulgences – the grungy, raw aesthetic and artistic techniques she has employed. The work successfully alludes to, yet does not exemplify, both Comme des Garcons and UNDERCOVER – rather it suggests a more personal artistic dialogue between the artist and her subject.

To Jun Takahashi, Rei Kawakubo and all the extraordinary people who have become a part of the journey of A#4, we thankyou.