No one enjoys chaos more than Edward Buchanan. “The creative process, for me, simply consists of regurgitating everything that I see around me,” the Ohio-born, Milan-resident designer says. And by everything, he means everything: highbrow, lowbrow, tabloid, catwalk, sidewalk, street and elite collide in his high-speed brain, translating into a streamlined, pragmatic vision. Continue reading “Edward Buchanan: An American in Milano”
Tag: Fashion
Hans Feurer talks to Filep Motwary
I wasn’t sure how the legendary, legendarily private photographer Hans Feurer would react to my call. But he answered with a friendly tone. It seems he was ready to talk, maybe for the first time in a while. Continue reading “Hans Feurer talks to Filep Motwary”
Sarrasine: Junya Watanabe and the Death of the Author
“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”
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”
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”
Takashi Nishiyama talks to Filep Motwary
Photography by Genevieve Majari
Takashi Nishiyama, a 23-year-old designer inspired by computer games and monsters, is the winner of this year’s ITS competition: a seal of approval bestowed by judges including Viktor & Rolf and John Galliano. Nishiyma’s collection features voluminous layers of dark fur, drowning the models in monster silhouettes; it is simultaneously fantasy and nightmare. Continue reading “Takashi Nishiyama talks to Filep Motwary”
Walter Pfeiffer talks to Filep Motwary
Walter Pfeiffer has been making pictures since the early 1970s. His photographs and short films evoke both the glamour and the grit of hedonistic youth. His influence is seen in the work of photographers like Juergen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans, who have achieved the kind of recognition he has never enjoyed. He has published six books with Ringier and Hatje Cantz: odes to homoeroticism, drama and imperfect beauty, measured out in off-kilter crops and that omnipresent flash. Here, he chats with Dapper Dan from his home in Zurich. Continue reading “Walter Pfeiffer talks to Filep Motwary”