An interview with Bless

Full article via Blend.

Ines Kaag and Desiree Heiss, who founded Bless in 1997, exist in the design-as-art, art-as-design school of production, creating objects and clothing that both question the nature of consumption and fuel it as well with their highly coveted limited edition products. Each Bless collection starts with an object, an idea, a garment or an all-encompassing design solution for life – the Bless version of “basics” – often incorporating recycled goods as materials. They have sought out alternative business models to continue production according to their own vision, through creative funding, in some instances, via corporate sponsorship and collaboration. In this sense, they are like commodity artists, using the language of contemporary commodity culture – the buying and selling of goods – as their medium. Not surprisingly, their work sits equally well as a gallery installation, a pop-up shop or on the racks of a (carefully chosen) boutique. For the customer also seeking substance as well as style at the point where art and fashion blurs, Bless is the go-to, always ready with a new answer to everyday life that is as fashionable as it is functional. Here, we talked to Bless about their take on denim – the greatest symbol of the “everyday” if ever there was one – as well as their past collaborations and future dreams.

Betsey Johnson Turns 30

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on August 1, 2008

Betsey Johnson’s Soho store in New York pulsed with pretty young things in party frocks on Thursday, July 31, for a very special birthday party. As guests tried to stave off sweat with glasses of chilled pink champagne, Betsey Johnson and her business partner and CEO Chantal Bacon celebrated the 30th anniversary of their business surrounded by their friends, family and fans.

Johnson and Bacon met in 1975 after Bacon moved to New York from London – Bacon was selling Johnson’s children’s wear line at the time – and they instantly clicked, both sharing a mutual glam rock style sensibility and unbridled energy to make clothes.

“We had even dated some of the same men!” said Bacon.

Johnson and Bacon officially launched Betsey Johnson the brand in 1978, on Johnson’s birthday, Aug. 10.

“We were very much in the moment every day,” said Bacon. “There was never a big grand plan, we just wanted to have a nice time, make good clothes and have a successful business.”

“When we started, we were doing everything. It was crazy!” chimed Johnson.

Calvin Klein’s Modernist Mix

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on March 28, 2008

Kevin Carrigan, the creative director of Calvin Klein and Calvin Klein Jeans, looked perfectly at home in a trim gray suit, standing against a monolithic plywood structure erected in the center of the Calvin Klein showroom’s stark, white interior, which he had specially constructed. The fresh, polished faces of models, in an assortment of indigo denim, tweed pants and jackets, navy coats and performance wear, were arranged on three stepped levels, as though plopped down onto an unfinished mock-pyramid for a movie about teenage tourists visiting ancient Mayan ruins.

This was the setting for the Calvin Klein Fall 2008 presentation on Friday morning, March 28, and given the longstanding association with Calvin Klein and minimalism, it made sense that the set was inspired by the sculptures of minimalist artist Donald Judd.

Vera Wang: Fauvist Femme

New York – Dutch fauvist painter Kees van Dongen inspired the artful, frequently stunning Fall 2008 collection by Vera Wang, which she showed early Thursday morning, Feb. 7, in Bryant Park. Van Dongen’s charged portraits of women, with their crimson lips, emotive, smoky eyes, and draped in loose folds of richly colored fabric, proved to be a ripe starting point for Wang, who was an art history major in college. Wang’s collections exude romantic eroticism in a way that is as sensuous as van Dongen’s paintings are.

Fauvism (“les fauves” or “wild beasts” was how this circle of artists was known, Henri Matisse and Georges Braque among them) is characterized by strong brush strokes and vivid colors in their depictions of French bohemian society.

In van Dongen’s paintings, silk stockings might peek out from underneath a lifted hem. For Wang, opaque stockings could be viewed beneath sheer slips of silk gauze, with an overpowering allure of transparency taking hold. That which is revealed (the legs) still remains concealed.

Marc Jacobs: The Emperor’s New Clothes

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on Sept. 11, 2007.

The Marc Jacobs show started two hours late last night, but then again, who ever expects it to start on time? All the conventions of a typical fashion show are hardly the point at Marc Jacobs, one of the only designers in New York who can get away with doing just about anything he wants and still retain pope of American fashion status.

Indeed, it’s almost like taking a semi-annual trip to church to worship at the altar of MJ. For good reason. Whether you love his collections or hate them, they have a way of setting the tone of the season. And because he and his people are so clued into what’s cool, you are pretty much guaranteed to find out what trends to expect from fashion in the next six months. Will it be Wednesday Addams goth punk? Grunge? Soviet Constructivist? Jacobs had everyone waiting at the edge of their steamy seats for his Spring ‘08 presentation, held in the Lexington Armory, wondering what would happen next.

Donna Karan: Bright Lights, Big City

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on February 12, 2007

Everyone has their first fashion memory, the “a-ha” moment when you realize that there is more to dressing than simply putting on a set of clean clothes in the morning, regardless of what they look like. Some of us have that moment early on in life – that would be an early indicator we were “fashion people,” one supposes.

I had that moment when I was 12, an avid reader of Vogue, obssessed with New York City and certain that I wanted a haircut just like Linda Evangelista’s (my favorite supermodel at the time) that changed colors just as often (and why I started dyeing my hair various shades of red, a practice that continued well into college). I was also obsessed with finding a perfect white shirt and a black body suit, all because of Donna Karan and her concept of seven easy pieces. She, and the wardrobe she created, represented everything that I, as an awkward student in a backwards town, wanted in life: to be a successful woman living and working in New York City with a fantastic, but deceptively simple wardrobe to go with that.

On the Sublime and Beautiful at Costello Tagliapietra

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on February 10, 2007
The painter Romaine Brooks was quite unlike her Symbolist and Aesthetic movement contemporaries of the early Twentieth century – think Gustav Klimt or Georges de Feure, with their emphasis on rich, decadent multicolored palette and graphic patterns.

Brooks, a woman with an affinity for wearing custom designed men’s wear, made her mark as a portraitist in the Teens and Twenties and was known as the “Master of Gray” for her focus on painting subdued, nearly monochromatic works that might have only the occasional dab of ochre.

Like Brooks, the collections of Jeffrey Costello and Robert Tagliapietra, which they’ve been showing for the past two years in New York, have had little to do with trends du jour.

By Invitation Only: Hysterics at Heatherette

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on February 7, 2007

Throngs of near-hysterical people waved meaningless pieces of white paper in the faces of security guards on the steps outside of the tents at Bryant Park on Tuesday night, February 6, the site of many shows during New York fashion week. But it wasn’t enough to get them past the barricades and into the Heatherette show, which has become one of the most circus-like shows on the fashion calendar.

It wasn’t fall fashion that Heatherette hungry people were hoping to witness. Rather, they were hoping to catch a glimpse of a celebrity – or see and be seen – as though they were at a hot Manhattan nightclub and not at an industry press event.

But, as most in the industry know, it’s not about the clothes at Heatherette, designed by Richie Rich and Traver Rains – there were practically no wearable or saleable looks on display Tuesday night, save for a few of their moneymaking items like embellished denim and scarf print dresses made for department store clients like Bergdorf Goodman, one of the few members of the industry we saw in the audience. It’s about the entertainment.

SANS: The New Now

Originally published in Fashion Wire Daily on February 5, 2007

There has been a lot of talk recently about fashion’s so-called “futurism” moment. In the latest issue of the New York Times magazine, columnist Guy Trebay questions, rightly so, just how futuristic and forward-thinking is it for fashion designers to be referencing a backwards B movie version of the future, all Jetsons and Tron. Yes, the clothes might be shiny, metallic or cut to make one look like a robot, but these are all very quaint notions of “futuristic.” Critiquing that by saying that there’s something very surface about fashion embracing such ideas, and one sounds very naive about the role of fashion, which is all about the surface. But Trebay ends his article at exactly the place we will start this review: that perhaps the future in fashion is not so much a futuristic fantasy vision of 2025, but rather a heightened consciousness of “the now:” the world we inhabit, the way we live and how our clothes are a reflection of it.

What we’re talking about, of course, is that dreaded and much-used phrase “eco-friendly.” There’s no need to rattle off a list of cliches usually associated with the term, because the point is that it is on a steady path away from its stigma as the domain of the unfashionable and even beyond being something that is fashionable but wholly self-conscious of its status as eco-friendly.