“My entire body of work should and can best be perceived by observing all of the garments that are presented each season,” the Japanese designer Junya Watanabe says. One of contemporary fashion’s most inventive minds, Watanabe is also one of the shyest. Pas mal: in the era of the fashion designer as tabloid megastar, such a rigorous focus on the clothes alone is admirable. Not that Watanabe inclines to the polemic; he is simply polite and reserved to the point of cryptic silence. Continue reading “Sarrasine: Junya Watanabe and the Death of the Author”
McKenzie Wark in conversation with Ilias Marmaras
McKenzie Wark is an Australian writer whose many books examine hacking, game theory and, most recently, the Situationists. He teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York. Ilias Marmaras is a media artist based in Athens. Continue reading “McKenzie Wark in conversation with Ilias Marmaras”
Helmut Lang talks to Filep Motwary
Dapper Dan has waited two long years for this conversation to take place. The visionary independent designer whose work most definitively embodies the 1990s, Helmut Lang was considered an artist long before he decided to become one. His work as a fashion designer is still relevant, though it’s been almost seven years since he left it to focus on sculpture instead. The designer who refined an era now intrigues us with a new spectrum. Continue reading “Helmut Lang talks to Filep Motwary”
The Glamour Of The Clandestine
In Dapper Dan’s fifth issue, the media theorist McKenzie Wark dissects the everyday life and glorious times of the Situationists; the visionary designer-turned-artist Helmut Lang talks about his past and future; Eric Isaacson, co-owner of the iconic label Mississippi Records, insists that “it’s still amateur hour round here”; the artist AA Bronson sits down with pirates, Indians, shamans, Nazis, demons and Joseph Beuys; We also visit the engimatic designer Junya Watanabe; the international street-collage gangster Michael Anderson; the charismatic front man Ben Wallers; the quintessential American in Milano, Edward Buchanan; While the writer Angelo Flaccavento muses on presence and absence; and the legendary fashion photographer Hans Feurer talks to Filep Motwary.
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Issue 05 on Press
Coming out February 27 in Paris and London, closely followed by the rest of the world, Dapper Dan magazine’s fifth issue features, among others, AA Bronson, Helmut Lang, McKenzie Wark, Ben Wallers and Junya Watanabe. More from our S/S 2012 issue soon.
Robert Rabensteiner: All Power To The Imagination
Wrapped in a paint-splattered coat in his painterly portrait, Robert Rabensteiner is, nevertheless, not a painter. A famously literate, literary fashion editor, he chose to be photographed in no ordinary clothing. The coat belonged to his hero, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, better known as Balthus, and is tied with a rope in the style of the late Polish artist. (In Irving Penn’s raffish 1948 portrait, Balthus’s own none-too-clean overcoat is belted with a fiercely knotted piece of near-identical twine.) The brocade-upholstered armchair, too, was Balthus’; the photograph was taken in his vast, mythical chalet in Switzerland. Rabensteiner cultivates an aura in which it is difficult to tell where truth ends and myth-making begins. His wardrobes are poems where others’ are scribbles. Continue reading “Robert Rabensteiner: All Power To The Imagination”
Paolo Roversi talks to Filep Motwary
Paolo Roversi is the past and the future in one. He never set out to be a fashion photographer, though he is one of the most referenced in the world. His is the great paradigm of signature; of identity. He is the only photographer who truly owns his colour palette. The young man who left Italy to conquer, by chance, la mode Parisienne has become the inspirational story of our times. Despite his precision and constancy over 47 years of photography, he continues to surprise. His sweet voice salutes me on the phone; my heart beats faster when I ask my first question… Continue reading “Paolo Roversi talks to Filep Motwary”
Kris Van Assche talks to Filep Motwary
Balancing a nostalgic sensibility with radical modernism, Kris Van Assche has created a distinctive, refined world of nonchalant elegance. His latest show for Dior Homme, for autumn/winter 2011/12, offered a strict outline for the modern man who wants to dress in fluid forms. Boys strolled down the catwalk in wide-brimmed hats and drapey cloaks, chandeliers and fireplaces in the background. The Belgian-born designer graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and moved to Paris in 1998, where he worked with Hedi Slimane at Yves Saint Laurent and then Dior Homme. His own label was first introduced in 2005; two years later, he was appointed artistic director at Dior Homme. Continue reading “Kris Van Assche talks to Filep Motwary”
Siki Im Talks to Angelo Flaccavento
Photography by Erik Madigan Heck
Born in Germany to Korean parents, educated at the Oxford School of Architecture and now an adoptive New Yorker, Siki Im is a master of cross-pollination. After a stint at the radical New York firm Archi-Tectonics, he moved into fashion, first as designer for Karl Lagerfeld and Helmut Lang, then striking out alone with his eponymous menswear label. Since his official debut in summer 2009, he has quietly forged his own sartorial and conceptual niche; it did not take long before he secured the coveted Ecco Domani award for emerging talent. A sharp mind with even sharper scissors, Im works by a process of subtraction, charging architecturally pure forms with an eerie intensity. His mixture of strict tailoring and challenging conceptualism brings to mind the anthropologist Michael Foucault, who once said that the work of an intellectual is “to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will. Continue reading “Siki Im Talks to Angelo Flaccavento”
Entering The Dust Era
In Dapper Dan’s fourth issue, Kris Van Assche outlines the modern man; Ann Demeulemeester proclaims freedom as the biggest luxury; Richard Wirick looks at the new face of superstition; Paolo Roversi finds new ways to tell his story; Robert Rabensteiner recounts tales of lavish adventure and elegant abandon; Philip Aarons confides in AA Bronson about his fascination with now-defunct artist’s publication Semina; Berlin-based typographer duo Jung and Wenig reveal their weird mental processes and the musician Piero Ilov wants to share his latest project with all the humans and the animals on earth.
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Dapper Dan 04 is out now in Europe and will be available soon worldwide, at selected newsstands, galleries and fashion boutiques.