DERZEIT Fashion Week Berlin Daily

M A K I N G - O F - L U C A shoot

2011-02-10T20:58:00.001+01:00

F I N / no.3 / D E R Z E I T closing party

2011-01-27T23:02:00.003+01:00

_
pictures by fammivedere.com

T H E -H Y P N O T I C A - I S S U E

2011-01-22T03:59:00.002+01:00

Frills, ruffles, sequins. Dip-dyed silk, mohair knit and cashmere meshes. Did this season’s outfits lure you, lull you, lead you on to a different state of mind? Yet? Get yourself together for Fashion Week Berlin’s last day. As for DERZEIT’s office team, the moment you read this: we will already be done. But trust us we feel hypnotized – or let’s say pixelated. We’ve had the stars shine onto our laptops and seen the sun rise every morning. But nevertheless – HYPNOTICA – here it comes: Madlene’s eyes vs. Michael Mann’s lense, inside Mr. Bessing’s head, taking a trip into the world of “Tron” and: Lala Berlin’s Leyla Piedayesh talks... See you tonight! And: We’ll be back in July... your DERZEIT team.

DOWNLOAD ISSUE 4

T H E - S I L E N T I U M - I S S U E

2011-01-21T09:44:00.007+01:00

Slip into a Zen meditation mode and compose yourself with DERZEIT’s Silentium issue – silence is the best condition to enjoy a newspaper. Tune out the sound – and let the snow-covered landscape on the cover help you to switch off the buzzing noise of the city. The horses, by the way, were the true professionals and had an inner calm: not even the model’s eerie styling made them scatter. For further advice on how to shield yourself from the world, soak in the “seclu- sion strategies” of Sharon Welzel, listen to the silent voice, Jacqueline Huste and take a moment to contemplate the latest runway trends. Or tune in after all: Ben Brunnemer, NY’s fashion week DJ dilates on the sound of fashion.

D O W N L O A D I S S U E 3

T H E - C O G I T O - I S S U E

2011-01-20T08:30:00.006+01:00

Cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. But what am I thinking? – sitting in a white cube, staring at the wall? Am I to think about existence itself? To reflect about the act of thinking? Luckily, the all-encompassing room called earth, in whose surface we move every day, is an overwhelming kaleidoscope of sensual impressions feeding our mind with thoughts. However, it still has to be evaluated what goes really deep and what only superficially pretends to open a new dimension to us. For the COGITO issue, our essayist Marcus Woeller investigated optical illusions and photographer Lena Emery interlaces two dimensions in one fashion shoot; “Word is”-columnist Alexandra Kruse tried to enter Ugo Rondinone’s headspace and on top, there are impressions from the two-dimensional surface called catwalk. Don’t sleep, there’s three more days and issues to come!

DOWNLOAD ISSUE 2

T H E - I N S O M N I A - I S S U E

2011-01-19T09:34:00.002+01:00

We're finally back!
–
Have you lost track of the discussion on where to set up the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week tent? It is where it used to be! As the search is only postponed, here’s our proposal: There’s a parking lot in front of DERZEIT’s new office in Neukölln...
–
In the meantime, enjoy the catwalk shows at Bebelplatz. In your precious leisure time, our INSOMNIA issue will stimulate you visually, intellectually and style-wise with a fashion shoot by Jonas Lindström; Maxime Büchi, mastermind behind Sang Bleu, shares his insight; Mr. Filip Arickx, designer and one half of Belgian label A.F. Vandevorst, talks about “A.Friend” and more.
–
Don’t sleep, there’s three more days and issues to come!

DOWNLOAD ISSUE 1

M A K I N G - O F - S H A U N - R O S S shoot

2010-07-31T19:16:00.002+02:00

M A K I N G - O F - M U T A T I O N issue

2010-07-31T19:08:00.002+02:00

M A K I N G - O F - S T A T E shoot

2010-07-31T19:01:00.002+02:00

M A K I N G - O F - T E N S I O N shoot

2010-07-31T18:47:00.002+02:00

FIN - DERZEIT Closing Party

2010-07-21T14:02:00.002+02:00

_
pictures by fammivedere.com

M A K I N G - O F - I N F I N I T Y shoot

2010-07-20T00:28:00.006+02:00

W A T C H !

2010-07-13T01:21:00.000+02:00

T H E - M U T A T I O N - I S S U E

2010-07-10T03:57:00.000+02:00

Marvel explains that the rate of mutant births spiked sharply after the blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That comes as no surprise to DERZEIT, which becomes more homo and more superior with every gallon of oil that spurts from the ocean floor.
–
Bouncing on the cap is Ingo Niermann, who projects the politics and robotics of a post-spill world – where everyone may end up looking like Nick Cave's furries. Emily Segal posits a more toothsome alternative with her fetish for grillz, while Stefan Milev documents model Tess in her preemptive cocoon.
–
After just a week, the DERZEIT gene pool may seem slight. But the greatest spike is yet to come.

DOWNLOAD ISSUE 4

T H E - S T A T E - I S S U E

2010-07-09T08:45:00.001+02:00

As Ted Kaczynski so eloquently figured: state of mind and state of the union are intimately linked. For DERZEIT, the state of media naturally follows.
–
Michael Ladner consults Luis Venegas, who tracks hot teen boys from nation to nation in Electric Youth; Emily Segal follows the book from digital to physical and back via the travails of aaaaarg.org; Frank Leder maps a new Germany within his atelier. On the Baltic coast, Amos Fricke shot model Anne Sophie before a set of ominous DERZEIT flags. As usual, the catwalks put our reporters in a state.
–
Are you miserable? DERZEIT's the cause and the solution! Don't leave your bags (or your mail) unattended. - the D E R Z E I T team

DOWNLOAD ISSUE 3

T H E - T E N S I O N - I S S U E

2010-07-08T08:31:00.002+02:00

According to Wilhelm Reich, it’s the tension between the outer armor and the inner turmoil that links fashion and fascism – the border on which D E R Z E I T is certainly operating.
–
With us is Joachim Bessing, who dives off a boat full of Prada into an ocean of violence; Rachel Blatt, who pokes at the void in Barbara Bloom’s Presence; a firey fetish; semi-analogue explosions at Tempelhof; Nina Trippel’s visit to the knit-swaddled atelier of Boessert/Schorn; catwalk reviews, and other orgastic impotence.
–
Our bladder’s about to burst. After the final spill, who’s gonna be around to clean up?
– the D E R Z E I T team

DOWNLOAD ISSUE 2

T H E - I N F I N I T Y - I S S U E

2010-07-07T11:20:00.005+02:00

DERZEIT is back, standing on the precipice of Volume III and a whole new fashion week.
Even though it's just our one year anniversary, we're not worried about next season – instead, our googly eyes are staring deep into INFINITY.
–
Inside, you'll find Calvin Klein's creative directors on keeping eternity in forward motion, the piety of model Sarah Batt, and Matthew Evans on the science of trend forecasting. Plus a fetish for Texte zur Kunst, the anticipations of Alexandra Kruse, and a visit to Vladimir Karaleev's studio, where time is no object.
–
The clock is ticking. May the divine light shine upon you!

DOWNLOAD ISSUE 1

Cora Isabel David

2010-07-05T23:00:00.009+02:00

Studio Visit

___
Cora Isabel David is busy. The 27-year-old designer is currently involved in several different shows, at Wedding Dress #5, at the Showroom-Meile, and as a nominee of the P&C Designer for Tomorrow Award at the tent. Her studio and flat are in the heart of Kreuzberg at Kottbusser Damm.

If your current collection was a building, what would it look like?
It would be big, wide, airy. I imagine large windows that allow many perspectives, since my current collection works with contrasts between closeness and openness.

What type of building would you choose as a temporary studio?
The more space, the better. A loft is probably the standard answer, but a large, wide space above everything else would be great. I love it when no one is moving above my head. I love a wide view and to not feel too restricted. I tend to leave my stuff lying around. Being able to let things lie scattered across the space for a while often helps develop new ideas.

How would you describe your relationship to your studio?
Very intense. I am very happy with the combination of living and working. I find peace here.

How important is the space for your design process?
I simply have to feel at ease. I need personal things, my walls are full with pictures. I find these anchors to my own person, which accumulate automatically over time, very important. I like being surrounded by memories, but also new things which are added to that.

Whose studio would you like to take a look at?
Those of all the designers whose work I’m interested in: Marc Jacobs, Hussein Chalayan, Giles Deacon, Riccardo Tisci, Rick Owens, Maison Martin Margiela, especially now that Margiela left the house. I’m interested in inspired spaces, where also unusual things and personal stories pile up.

What inspired your new collection?  
My collection is inspired by the global economic crisis: what psychological effects does the crisis have on people, how does it change aesthetic preferences? In the interviews that I did, people repeatedly told me that they feel a greater need for security and intimacy. To this, I added proverbs, phrases from the media: 'don’t let it get to your head', 'tighten your belt'. I knitted stock prices into the fabrics and used thick strings to gather cloth, playing with the German saying 'to put one’s head into the gallows'.

Which object is dearest to you in your studio?
The kaleidoscope, which I look through when I can’t stand seeing cuts, fabrics and seams any more.  
What does a moment of inspiration feel like?  When something inspires me, a thousand ideas start rushing into my head and I’m equally convinced by all of them. It can be too much to handle for the moment.

How do you go about designing your clothes?
Most of the time, it’s a combination of patterns and draping. I often imagine two-dimensionally how a cut could work well. Then I usually rely on that, start making a first model and modify it a lot on the dress form. It all goes hand in hand.

What do you do with a finished piece?
I put it away. Onto the next one.

If you could travel through space and time, where would you like to stop?
I always played that as a child! I’d pick the 1920s: art, fashion, the suffragettes, going out in Berlin. It must have been a fantastic lifestyle – but maybe that’s only the stories that have been told afterwards.

What do you see when you look through your window?
Roofs, the tops of trees and a different sky every day.

What does Berlin mean to you?

Berlin is a melancholic city to me, it feels unfinished. I think it has the highest quality for living – I’d even be so bold to say that that statement holds international truth. ◊ - SSt

–
www.coraisabeldavid.com

Picture Credits: Nicolas Kantor für DERZEIT

2010-05-20T18:01:00.050+02:00

The abstract moment of talking to Scott Schuman
___
He is said to be the most influential fashion blogger. On his site The Sartorialist, he documents street styles from around the world. No matter how big, influential or different, he’s certainly the blogger with the largest carbon footprint. We’ve met him in Berlin.

DERZEIT: What does the Sartorialist offer to its readers that online versions of fashion magazines don’t, or can’t?

Schuman: It’s free of any advertising pressure. This is the most sincere, honest form of fashion journalism right now.

But you’re here for a campaign event.
And how would that affect my blog? If I put photographs of it on my site, I will reference the job. It’s not like in a fashion magazine. My blog is totally honest, totally sincere. I shot 100 images for Burberry and I only put about 9 on my site. I liked all 100 that I did and was proud of the work. I said very clearly that this was a project for Burberry and quoted the link. In that way it’s absolutely honest and sincere.

How do you understand your work?
I’d describe myself as a photo-journalist, but as opposed to a journalist telling facts, I’m just giving you my opinion. I don’t have the patience to sit down and get all the facts right. I feel like the master of ceremonies of like-minded people. The comments are incredibly important on the site. My question about "Would you rather be the Celine woman or the Louis Vuitton woman" got like 600 comments.

There are a lot of blogs about street photography. What makes your blog different?
My girlfriend Garrance has a blog, but we shoot in two very different ways. She shoots in a much more personal way, things that literally inspire her to buy something or something she’d like to wear or a girl whose persona inspires her. My approach is much more abstract. Sometimes there might be a photograph that I take and I don’t necessarily like the outfit, but you look at it and think: that’s a great, abstract moment. There is one I haven’t put up yet of a girl with a big, floppy purple hat and a tailored purple coat. I don’t really like the two things together, but it’s an undeniably beautiful shot. She’s just in mid-step, there are always people around her, beautiful light. If I were a designer, I would look at that and go: I love that moment, but I would change her hat this way, I would make the jacket this way. Maybe that abstract moment that the designer takes away from it is the idea of a hat that matches your coat. It’s much more abstract than to stamp in: This person is nicely dressed.
Also, there is so much more variety on my site, with so many style blogs it’s twenty-somethings shooting twenty-somethings. It’s incredibly narrow what some people shoot, whereas I shoot Cowboys, old guys, a 17-year old girl.
The thing that separates me from the other blogs is that I have a 60-40 split between men and women, so the comments come from both sides – straight men, gay men, women, lesbians, old, young, European, American, such a diverse group that’s creating such an interesting variety of comments. Many other blogs are so narrow, you really only get one opinion.

Do you think that web content needs to be printed to last? Is that something that’s important to you?
I think there is a difference between web content and photographs. I like to hold photographs, that’s why I did the book. But I think the internet is going to hold a lot longer than the photographs are.

What do you personally gain from your work?
I love the variety and I love fashion. Some people think I started this as something against fashion, to go away from it. But I love the fashion system; I just see it in a slightly different way. In the months in between the fashion shows I go to Berlin or Japan, India or Peru – to walk around all over these places. Sometimes you get something and sometimes you don’t. Seeing how people live, seeing the different cultures, the different expectations, I think it’s fascinating.

If it wasn’t fashion, what would you obsess about?
A lot of what I do in my blogging is based on what I know from the sports world. It is so far ahead of fashion, e.g. in terms of marketing, because it’s so much bigger. The fashion blog is not much different from Sports Talk Radio, where you have sportscasters who talk about what’s going on with the local soccer team and then callers call in to say their two things. A lot of my concept of how I wanted to have the blog is based on that.

Print publications always have a last page. What do you imagine the end of the Sartorialist to be like?
A worldview. Hopefully, I will have the chance to do this for 40 years and hopefully I will have a snapshot catalogue of style from around the world during that period.

My next question would have been when would it be time to move on, but you just said that you are planning on blogging for the next 40 years...

They will have to pull me out of this thing. It’s the perfect lifestyle for me. It might evolve and not always be a blog though. - SSt

(Picture credits/ Portrait: Nespresso, Street scenes: Scott Schumann für Nespresso)

W A T C H !

2010-01-26T01:22:00.004+01:00

An Archaelogy of Chinese Fashion

2010-01-23T11:00:00.001+01:00

– by Martin Cho

The ‘looks’ of China have political strings attached – a mood board filled with political agenda and personalities. The concept of fashion disappeared during the rule of Mao’s Communist government; clothes only served to reinforce a political ideology about conformity and uniformity. The Mao suit and comrade cape, symbols of Communism, are at once universally recognizable and scorned – saved exclusively for the hipster subset or Azzedine Alaïa. Plain, cotton peasant garb in drab grey, blue and beige suffused the palette and mood of the nation. The only discernable accent – red - typified by the Red Guards and their jaunty red scarves was a color about political allegiance than a playful sartorial wink. Graphics, if any, appeared in the form of propaganda slogans.
–
Deng Xiaoping’s ‘open door policy’ and economic reforms created an environment in which people were eager to make up for the ten lost years of the Cultural Revolution. Attitudes first relaxed in dress: colors, patterns and accessories emblazoned with English words like “happy” and “beautiful” replaced the old propaganda slogans. All that appeared foreign was now deemed modern and fashionable.
The 80s saw unprecedented experimentation in dress, flowering into the first wave of fashion designers. However, the effort was crude in taste and stunk of Western imitations. The birth of the first Chinese fashion magazine in Beijing in 1979 fed a population enamored with dressing and rising consumerism. However, taste level remained unsophisticated and clumsily un-chic.
–

Enter the monogram fever of the 90s, when label-dressing became a national aspiration, especially in the emerging middle class, which kowtowed indiscriminately to the prestige and status of international luxury labels. Chinese youth especially borrowed heavily from Japanese street fashion.
In response to a long legacy of repression, cult worship of foreign labels and superficial co-opting of international (sub)cultures, new independent young designers emerge with strong personal convictions to establish a distinctly homespun point of view – one which seamlessly mines history and traditions while remaining internationally relevant. Many of China’s new designers were educated outside of China and have worked internationally, bringing more diverse, cultured and sophisticated perspectives to a nascent market hungry for definition. As you will see, made-in-China doesn’t always mean an over-exuberance of colors and dragons, nor over-decorated, mother-of-the-bride Qipao permutations. Following are four Chinese designers who each strike a successful balance of East and West, both ushering Chinese fashion into the age of post-post-modernism: A look at Wang Yi Yang’s designs evokes humorous social observations of everyday Chinese life. His label, Cha Gong (named after the thermos carried around ubiquitously by the older generation), plays with traditional societal roles with street-smart flavors: a padded jacket ensemble in metallic oversized polka dots takes its inspiration from the silhouette of a hunch-back street garbage collector; mid-century drab peasant garbs are reproportioned in leather; Scottish kilts are rendered in the distinctive, red, white and blue plait of Chinese plastic shopping bags; Chinese characters function as prints on jackets and T-shirts.

–
Hailed as one of China most promising and avant-garde designers, Qiu Hao is the winner of 2008’s Australian Woolmark Prize, the same award won by luminaries like YSL and Karl Lagerfeld at their start. According to the designer, “All Chinese designs don’t have to be about bright colours and dragons… A subtle, Chinese philosophy underlies everything we do.” That translates into razor-sharp tailoring and fluid deconstruction, each collection is offset by an element of softness: a curve, a texture, a physical motion. The strict palette of six colours (white, black, beige, gold, silver and blue) brings forth his impeccable craftsmanship.

–
A conceptualist at heart, Ma Ke’s ethereal yet earthy clothes conjure to mind the sober, sculptural and post-modern aesthetic of early Yohji Yamamoto. Her designs, however, are purely Chinese: she champions traditional weaving, dying and embroidery technique indigenous to various Chinese ethnic groups for all her collections. She is also celebrated for her use of recycled materials and environmentally friendly fabrics. Her ready-to-wear label, Exception de mixmind, has won her critical acclaims in and around Asia; Wu Yong, her haute couture collection, has twice been recognized and shown during Paris Haute Couture.
–
Zhang Da’s style and colors can appear simple at first glance, but his experiment with form often creates imaginative pieces. For instance, his “flat” collection consists of pieces that can be laid flat completely on display, yet ingeniously spring to life in sculptural, geometric form when worn on the body. Sober monochrome forms gave his clothes a decidedly quiet, sculptural quality. Meanwhile his own label, ParallelWalk is gaining a cult following.
–
The prognosis for “Made in China, once an instant kiss of death for high-end fashion, is now ecstatically positive. ◊

Jessica Mitrani

2010-01-23T10:00:00.001+01:00

Jessica Mitrani’s work - video, theater, objects, installation - pushes clichés until they fry like bugs under a magnifying glass. Take, for example, the Single Shoes I went to borrow from her one day to shoot for the DERZEIT Prognosis Issue. Two feet, one shoe; maryjanes and Vivienne Westwood clompers; porno and staid at once. Mitrani, who’s originally from Colombia, has lived in New York since 1999. She collaborates with the collective Threeasfour; her videos have been exhibited at the Pompidou; she’s made theater in New York and a skywriting intervention in Miami. The T-shirts from her Six Inch Heel line will be exhibited at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich starting in February, and an upcoming multimedia study of he 19th-century insurgent journalist/industrialist Nelly Bly is slated to open this March in a new gallery in Geneva. I talked to Mitrani at her Soho studio about cartoons, Claud Cahun, and getting flagged on Craigslist. – by Emily Segal

When did you begin making films?
In 1999, I made a short film called Rita Goes to the Supermarket. In every aisle of the supermarket Rita finds these different phantoms. Did I tell you this story? It’s true: I was a housewife in Barranquilla, Colombia and I went to the supermarket and this woman stopped me in the vegetable section and offered me two breast implants (laughs). So I took them and I actually turned around to see if a camera was filming. I put them in and tried them on, thinking: this isn’t even the shampoo aisle! It’s vegetables! Do I cry? Of course at the time I was reading all this lesbian jewish feminism.

Who was this woman?
A promoter, from a South American company. Effectively, all my work has a basis in reality. I decided to make this little short film. The woman in the film walks through every aisle and finds different ghosts of femininity. There’s a scene where she buys meat and drips it everywhere. She meets all these different people: Lady Di, Frida Khalo, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a very famous nun. At the end of her life, de la Cruz signed a document saying, “I, the worst of all.”

In the film, the characters almost look like they’re in drag.
I was living in Colombia then, so I was very influenced by Almodovar, by the color, by my surroundings – not to mention a very charged hyperfeminity. When I came to New York, I did a masters at the Actors Studio – first I was a lawyer, before the theater. For me, form and content were the same. I was more inclined to take into account every part of the aesthetic, from costumes to set design, and videos to go with them. So my work was already becoming less ‘theater,’ more multimedia.

Let’s talk about how you came to the idea of the Single Shoe series, your shoe-objects that fit two feet into one shoe.
I did a piece in 2004 called Some Historic / Some Hysteric at the New Stage Theater company in New York. All the women in the space were silent and the only woman who was permitted to speak was the narrator, perched on this very, very high platform shoe, wearing a long red dress: sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy. She was basically this icon, the only one who was able to speak, and I was interested in her concomitant power and powerlessness...

And how that endowed her with the permission to speak?
Yes. The shoe was inspired by French fetish shoes, but we decided to take it out of that context and apply it to this all-powerful heroine, because it reminded me a little bit of how psychologically you can feel totally seductive, completely powerful, dominating the world, and at the same time it’s completely useless, since you’re running around in these crazy shoes with this cramp in your toe. I was trying to tame the stereotype.

I like the whole idea of being seductive while simultaneously bound.
That was the first idea, to have this bound icon that could speak for the hysterics. And then I became so obsessed with the shoes I didn’t care about the actresses. That’s what I become, the complete servant of my work (laughs). I always say if I wasn’t a feminist I’d be a misogynist. So then I became obsessed with the shoes and thought: why don’t I do more, you know, domesticize the fetish – not to try to make it sexy or appealing or anything, just bring it out of that context, put it in different scenarios. So I made maryjanes because of the typical childhood connotation. I’m always interested in cliches, in stereotypes of representation. After the maryjanes, I did a series of pumps and maribou mules – recreating very identifiable styles through history of fashion. At my show at Spade and Partners in New York I exhibited the shoes as objects, independent of the videos that document them. Before, they were sort of like props. I also did the vitrine, which was three women, wearing the nurse-style shoes, locked in the window.

The images are so chilling, in a really good way.
They stood in the vitrine for two days! The girls did rotate every two hours. My post on Craigslist got flagged twice.

Have you done any other fashion-related work recently? I just did a video for Threeasfour. In september, I collaborated on the documentation for their collection. There’s a piece of Yoko Ono’s, Cut Piece, from the late 60s / early 70s, where she’s in front of an audience, and the audience takes a pair of scissors and cuts until she’s basically naked. And it’s very of that period, with the consciousness about the audience. So I thought it would be great to have a video piece to reference the original Yoko Ono piece, which was documented by the Maysles brothers, so I took the documentation of the Threeasfour show and a documentation of the Yoko Ono and did a split screen.

A split screen is about as precise a combination of art and fashion as it gets. It’s funny, in the art world, the vanity about art as being somehow truer or more righteous than fashion. A friend of mine was recently joking about what’s more depressing, to do PR for fashion or art. There’s something lovely about how explicitly fashion is a business.
I believe in eclecticism, I believe in art, in high and low, art as commercial, commercial as art. If you’ve freed yourself from a fantasy of purity, you can navigate. It’s the articulation of Bordieu, which we all know when we go to these stupid art fairs: how blatant is that?

I mean, fashion week is also a trade show. But in a way it feels less like a car convention than the Frieze fair does. Still, there’s always something embarrassing about being obsessed with fashion.
My work has always been an intersection of the two worlds. When I first did the Hysteria show, we wanted to make some T-shirts to raise funds for the theater. Do you know the artist Claude Cahun?

The queercore Surrealist. Who did self-portraits.
Did you know she was fucking her step sister? How hot is that?! In 2003, nobody knew who the fuck Claude Cahun was. The Grey Gallery at NYU had a show of Maya Deren, Claude Cahun, and Cindy Sherman, and I got obsessed. So when we were doing the hysteria video, we had a black and white photograph as a mask with the lips cut out and the Cahun character was talking about how hysteria was amazing, how all beauty should be convulsive or should not exist at all. I ended up doing a series of T-shirts based on her iconic photograph that says “I am in training don’t kiss me.” It was such a success, I did another that said “beware of domestic objects.” And then it was very funny because everyone got so fixated on the T-shirts and wanted more, so we did a line called Six Inch Heel, with six limited edition T-shirts of different sayings. One was based on Colette: “the only thing that keeps me from crying is the mascara on my eyelashes.” We used fashion as a dialogue, as a reference to something else. And my work is always like that, a constant dialogue with all these different ideas of women.

Fashion is always deferred that way, which is what’s so appealing about it as a medium or a text.  At the same time, what’s so nice about it is that there’s something ultimately anti-intellectual about fashion.
Right: first it’s visual, but then you recognize your lover, you want to give your panties away for somebody to smell on the airplane. It’s tactile, it’s architectonic.

A fashion show is a completely visual spectacle, but I think clothing is most significantly a personal-spatial experience. There are always so many references at once, fashion is always quoting, but never directly.
It’s incessantly quoting. There’s no neutral stance. You’re always making a choice. If you’re wearing jeans-and-sneakers, that’s a choice too. It’s so foundational to your identity, I don’t understand how people can devalue it so much. Just look at the power of fashion in dictatorships, in the military –

In medicine.
The history of the world is backed up by this. Take a judge: in Spanish the word is “investidura,” to enter: when you enter the clothes, you enter the persona. It’s a kind of magic, the power of the costume. It’s beautiful in a way because it’s true; like Fidel Castro, or Lagerfeld, or Gaddafi.

I love Gaddafi!
I was talking about this with some friends – can you imagine a look book of Gadaffi?! Amazing.

Think about Balmain – I hate it, I think it’s just trash, but their spangled military schtick would look so fly on Gaddafi.
Or take cartoons, for example. Think of Olive Oyl from Popeye: her power is that you can identify her instantaneously. I remember when I was a little girl, one day – I don’t know if I invented this – but you know Wilma Flintstone?

Of course.
Well one day, I saw Wilma with long hair, and a different dress. I don’t know if it was a dream or if I really saw it.

There’s something so unnerving about that.
Yes! And exciting!

There’s a joke about that in the Simpsons sometimes, watching Marge comb her hair and having it spring immediately back up.
I want to see Gadaffi, Olive Oyl, and Claude Cahun in a row.

You’re working on a project right now about the Nelly Bly, the journalist who exposed New York’s insane asylums in 1887 and then, two years later, travelled around the world in only 72 days,  beating Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days” record.
Right now, the project consists of two “seasons” in a bag, since global warming has left us with only Spring and Winter. The Spring version is a black bag with three pieces of black silk clothing, for a woman to travel around the world, and all the pieces are versatile: the dress can serve as a negligee, the kimono can be worn for the beach or over leggings at night. Winter in a bag is a white leather bag with the same three pieces in white cashmere. Each bag also includes a manual, sunglasses by Selima, a teacup, a jar of cold cream and a leather clutch. I’m also making paper Nelly Bly monoliths, among other things. They’ll all be exhibited in Geneva in March.

I found out recently that Nelly Bly, after being this prophetic journalist, went on to be come a very successful industrialist: she manufactured steel containers. In her case, being radical didn’t have to preclude mainstream success.
She has a completely modern spirit. Since I’m also interested in hysteria, I love the fact that she had the guts to go under cover as a journalist in a mental institution. Women have always served as recipients for instability – the crazy woman, the mad woman, the witch – and in contemporary fashion you have all these references of the different things they’ve been assigned. I’m reading the biography of Jung, and whats amazing is that so many of his patients started off crazy, then got cured, and then ended up as doctors. And I think there’s a similarity with Nelly Bly, daring to enter a mental institution and blur the line between sanity and insanity. There’s a certain thing about women: they’re more permeable. They become prophets of their own time a little bit sooner than men. ◊
–
See Single Shoe in the Prognosis Issue fashion shoot

Image Fulgurator

2010-01-23T10:00:00.000+01:00

The image of Japanese tourists posing with their friends, flashing peace signs in front of national monuments, Schloss Neuschwanstein, Arc de Triomphe, the Great Pyramid, Ground Zero, etc, is a long standing cultural phenomenon, which has yet to be understood beyond the shores of the Land of the Rising Sun. More recently, since the rise of the cell phone camera, raised lighters romantically oscillating at concerts have been replaced by the blitz of hundreds of mobile devices, trying to capture the perfect memento of a live performance.

What fans end up doing with the mostly abstract blobs of light they go home with also eludes me. – by Michael Ladner

There is a new device, however, that can transform these entirely banal snapshots into politically charged documents, brand signage or slapstick realist humor: the Image Fulgurator. Berlin-based artist Julius von Bismarck has constructed a photographic device, which instead of reproducing the reality in front of the lens, hacks into surrounding peoples’ flash cameras, and inserts prescribed content (image, symbol or text) directly onto their photos. All you need to do is point the Fulgurator – fulguration is the act or process of flashing like lightning – at an object that others nearby are photographing and the data is then superimposed onto their images. This process all goes unnoticed by the innocent bystander with a point-and-shoot; it is invisible to the human eye. The element of realist humor comes into play when they look at their image display: WTF is this phantom logo? Where did this text come from? Such reactions can be viewed on Julius’ website in a YouTube instructional video.
–
Von Bismarck’s experiments with his invention include smuggling Magritte’s dove onto Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square, beaming the cell-phone service provider O2’s logo onto Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, and projecting a cross onto Obama’s podium during his celebrity appearance in Berlin in summer 2008. He also edited the text on the famous sign at Checkpoint Charlie: “YOU ARE ENTERING THE AMERICAN SECTOR”. Von Bismarck’s manipulation reads: “hundreds of people die at the boarder between Mexico and the USA”.
–
Whether heavy-handed sabotage or a just funny prank, the Fulgurator’s manipulations are always stimulating. And the idea of enhancing strangers’ pictures unbeknownst to them is just fucking cool. Hats off to Julius von Bismarck! And tourists beware, be open; you think photography insures objective reproduction, but you never know what can just show up. ◊
–
www.juliusvonbismarck.com/fulgurator

Kruse's Saturday

2010-01-23T09:00:00.002+01:00

– by Alexandra Kruse

Helping myself so greedily to the studio pharmacy the other day was probably not such a good idea after all. Especially in combination with vodka and champagne. Not good. After a night of store openings and after-show parties I generously vomited, onto Place Vendome no less. My eyes oscillated between Van Cleef and Cartier jewelry. The engagement rings were definitely too much for me to stomach. Thank God I was holding a monogram - med bag and the business card of the hotel. A merciful cabby delivered me to the lobby and I fell into a 12-hour coma. Luckily no nudie pics have been found in Purple Diary. That’s the good news.

–
The bad news is: I missed my plane to Berlin. I really wanted to see the Michalsky show, more because of Kaviar Gauche and Lala Berlin. I was promised front row! A dress in nude hues! A hairdo! It was pure blackmail, really. I mean I can dress myself, but blow-drying is not one of my virtues. Not in a 100 years. Never ever. Also I didn’t get an actual invitation (the assistant’s intern sent me a facebook message, that there was no chance of me getting in – I hope the other 1699 guests are having fun, though). But that’s a whole different story. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

–
The next flight to Berlin is about 500 Euros. Money that would be much better spent on a pair of shoes, at Sanctum, the new star in the Berlin sky of shoes, the brainchild of a true shoe fetishist, which are as annoying as any other fetishist for that matter. My first choice would be Nina Ricci or John Galliano. I’m also sad I will miss Miriam Lambert’s yoga class to launch the new label Umasan. Health style wouldn’t do me any harm. Perhaps I should fly to Thailand for a thorough detox instead of everything else. ◊

T H E - P R O G N O S I S - I S S U E

2010-01-23T06:00:00.000+01:00

The tarot will teach you how to create a soul. I have always been drawn to things I found interesting but couldn’t understand. The tarot fascinated me because it was very strange. I studied the tarot card by card. I saw its structure... I saw the suits... But I didn’t understand the tarot. Then I started mixing the cards. I saw I could put them together and realized that the 78 cards could be joined in a mandala, in just one image. You see all the tarot at once and realize that it is a unit. And then you study the different parts. Once you analyze this, you learn to see the tarot. You must not talk about the future. The future is a con. The tarot is a language that talks about the present. If you use it to see the future, you become a conman. You are just a charlatan.
(Alejandro Jodorowsky »The Tarot of Marseilles«)

Download the complete issue as a PDF here

T H E - A C C I D E N T - I S S U E

2010-01-22T18:00:00.000+01:00

Failure is not a condemnation! It’s not the same thing. Failure is failure. Failure is an accident: art has tripped on the rug. In any case you should not forget my logic of failure, my logic of the accident. In my view, the accident is positive. Why? Because it reveals something important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive. In this respect, it is a profane miracle. What is a miracle? It is a gift brought before the eyes so that one may believe, so that there could be some superior hope. Granted, the accident, in a certain way, is a miracle in reverse. It reveals something absolutely necessary to knowledge. If there were no accident, we would not even begin to imagine the industrial revolution or the revolution in transportation, etc. So please don’t confuse the term failure.
(Paul Virilio »The Accident of Art« 2005)

Download the complete issue as a PDF here

Report from the Dead Zone

2010-01-22T11:00:00.002+01:00

– by Andreas Rosenfelder

I wanted to go to the dead zone. I wanted to see if the post-apocalyptic world would look how we imagine it in our most morbid dreams. Whether the ionic fires crackles in the contaminated woods. Whether the gamma rays twinkle over the graveyards of heavy machinery. Chernobyl, it seemed, had to be more than just an ineffable place that our science teachers would reference some 20 years ago.
–
In April 1986, we were not supposed to drink fresh milk or eat salad, they explained. They gave us youth literature by Gudrun Pausewang, in which schoolgirls fled from radioactive clouds through endless fields of canola (a boring film was produced 20 years later from the material). In class we learned to fear radiation. I drew the warning signs for radiation onto my satchel, a grinning skull completed my logo.
Now I am standing on the border of the forbidden zone of Chernobyl, in front of Reactor 4, which on April 26th at 1:23 pm was blown apart by an explosion during an experiment with oxyhydrogen. About 100 meters in front of me the sarcophagus’ blue-grey walls, which entomb Reactor 4, gleam in the sunlight.
–
The display of the Geiger-meter in my hand climbs to 600-mille roentgen per hour. The casket leaks through cracks and holes, bird’s nest in its innards. Inside the sarcophagus, 185 tons of nuclear fuel, frozen into lava, continue to radiate. Inside the tomb, the body of mechanic Waleri Chodentschuk’s, the first known victim of the accident, which couldn’t be rescued, lies still.
During the three week long aftermath, hundreds of thousands of Soviet conscripts worked on the roof of neighboring Reactor 3, gathering the heavy graphite blocs with their bare hands, trying to throw them into the reactor. German precision robots had failed in attempts to clean the roof covered in radioactive matter. They ventured too close to the edge and fell into the abyss. The radiation burned through their sturdy circuits, rewiring them for suicide.
–

In 1986, Soviet soldiers had to chose between life and death: two years in Afghanistan or two minutes on the roof of aforementioned reactor. In the images taken by daredevil photographer Igor Kostin, you see the callous, almost mocking stares of the soldiers protected merely by thin Kevlar jackets from WWII. The mysterious calm of these liquidators, some say, is inherent in Eurasian culture. They accept their own fate.
The dead zone surrounding the reactor, which was drawn with compasses onto the map by the military, cast a magical spell on people, even those who met their death in the moments after the explosion. Fire brigades recalled cesium glinting in the sunshine like beautiful crystals. Farmer’s wives reported they’d plucked strontium from their beet plants as if they were rare black petals. Of course radiation itself is invisible. Only on the Super 8 footage of a wedding, shot one day later not far from the catastrophe, were peculiar white specks from the gamma rays interfering with the film distinguishable. Fishermen returned from the riverbanks with a deep tan, although summer was a long way off.
–
Myths began creeping around the zone like poison ivy only days after the incident. Wolves howled in despair, gathering on the concrete-covered mass graves for pets, which were executed by special military units in the aftermath. They must have felt the warmth of decay. Rumors spread about hedgehogs without spikes, three-headed birds and red rats, which at night gnawed drunken people to their bones. The more profound than the biological mutations was the aesthetic metamorphosis: the forbidden area instantly became a parallel world where everything looked familiar, but at the same time had mutated at the core.
A heavy blanket of snow covers the area. Our white VW bus stops at a junction overlooking oblong hills. A whole kolkhoz is buried under the hills: the houses, the machinery even the earth itself. On top of these grave-mounds the radiation comes up to 50.000 micro roentgen. “Snow swallows beta radiation,” Maxim, our guide from Interinform-Centre informs me, “but not the gamma rays.” Gamma rays eat their way through matter like little needles. If you stood on those graveyards, you would be riddled by an invisible blaze of gunfire.
–
After Chernobyl, Europe was charged with radiation phobia. Fear penetrated everything. But there is another opposing force, a peculiar kind of magnetism. Chernobyl’s remaining aesthetic radiation may be more dangerous and powerful than the actual radiation. Chernobyl projects, like no other place, a collective yearning for a parallel world, a desire only satisfied with the confines of a cinema, while watching films like Blade Runner.
–
As we pass the “Red Forest”, an evergreen wood that was colored red overnight by fallout, we reach the pinnacle of radiation, located right next to a flame cast in concrete: the logo of the power station. Outside of our car, Maxim declares proudly the radiation has now reached 3000 micro roentgens. Inside the car the dosimeter reads only 420. It seems as if we’re navigating microwaves in a spaceship. Out there, the air must burn like fire.
–
Some seared pine stems and young birches grow where the Red Forest used to be. Behind a wall of fog, I can vaguely make out the silhouette of the military camp “Chernobyl 2”: a 150m tall Radio antenna broadcasting out-of-control conspiracy theories. Rumor has it the Soviets used the antenna for mind-control tests on the reactor operators before the catastrophe and, by accident, altered their judgment.
Endless power lines slice the steppe of the death zone. A genuine eagle swoops across them. In this noble moment, Tarkowski should spring to mind. His elegiac 1979 movie Stalker is also set in a mysterious forbidden area.
–
The forbidden city Pripyat – wrapped in barbed wire and guarded by military since the incident – resonates a defining silence. The depopulated concrete desert, built in 1970 for and by young engineers and their families feels like a bizarre mix of Beirut, East-Berlin today. Anatoli Fradis, a Hollywood producer with Ukrainian roots shot the trailer to the zombie movie “Necropolis” here. And even if the film was a total disaster, it is hard to imagine a more appropriate setting for a zombie movie.
In 1986 Pripryat had 50.000 inhabitants; the average age was 26. You don’t need panels about rural exodus or studies about changing demographics to get a taste of our future. The amusement park in the center, scheduled for inauguration on May 1st 1986, is considered particularly contaminated. A helicopter crashed between the bumper carts and the ferris wheel in an attempt to put out the fire in the reactor with sand. Maxim strides through the territory with self-assured calm and finds fresh wolf traces in the snow. The plutonium isotopes will continue to radiate here for another 40.000 years.
–
I wanted to find out what radiation really is. I got a dosimeter with a digital display, nothing glittered. I felt a faint crackle in my throat and realized to my relief that I had had it in the morning when I left the hotel. Nevertheless all these ridiculous thoughts cross my mind the tales of mutations from comic books and movies. Will I turn into a green hulk? Or shrink like “Grant Williams in the 1957 movie “The Incredible Shrinking Man? Maxim leads me to a dosimeter in the information center. The machine looks like a cheap and stupid fortune-tellers apparatus on a provincial fair. When I put my hands onto the contact interface the display lights it’s green light. “This machine is very sensitive” Maxim smiles when he sees my face clouded in doubt. “It is 20 years old and works perfectly.” I was in the death zone. I am not contaminated. ◊

Motorcycle Helmets

2010-01-22T10:00:00.000+01:00

For daredevil motorcyclists the helmet is more than just a placebo sense of safety – it’s also a role-play prop with kinky connotations. Think of the oxygen mask drill in an airplane. When the masks drop, it’s green light for mouth-to-mouth with death, but the flight attendants perform their ritual anyway. It’s just like the pool of holy water in a catholic church: you wouldn’t go without it, but at the end of your life you’ll die anyways. – by Eva Munz

Safety measures are rarely sexy; helmets have always begged for design. Chanel did some, as did Louis Vuitton a couple of years back. Stunt drivers have no time for this kind of kitsch. The Bandit Helmets we used for the DERZEIT Accident Issue’s fashion shoot cater to the very needs of speed freaks on two wheels. Their heavily adorned hats are carefully cast characters that show the ›face‹ they want to put on for the ride. They’re irreplaceably personal, like the parachute that every parachutist packs himself, so when the fabric fails to unfold they have no one to blame but themselves. Every rider knows that if a helmet drops on a concrete floor from the hip, its protection may be gone forever, gripped invisibly by an evil spell.
–
The Berlin-based company customizes helmets with airbrush designs and also offers prêt-a-porter models with see-through grid textures, ornaments, dipped in flashy chrome or shaped like bizarro ghostlike masks. Helmets offer a great opportunity to identify with your tribe. Harley Davidson riders know this, as do Vespa Mods and Bangkok’s motorcycle-taxi drivers. Personally, I think men on motorcycles are always kind of lame: nothing beats a hot chick on wheels.
–
Helmets GmbH, Roentgenstr. 14a, 10587 Berlin, www.motorbike.de

Helen DeWitt

2010-01-22T09:00:00.001+01:00

Helen DeWitt published The Last Samurai in 2000, and some time later, moved to Berlin. Her new book, Your Name Here, 580 pages co-authored by DeWitt and the journalist Ilya Gridneff, is being digitally distributed: the longest PDF I’ve ever downloaded. It’s about Arabic, luck, airplanes and disappearance. And reading, always reading. Dewitt’s blog, Paperpools, is subtitled »Lies, damn lies and statistics (especially statistics)«.

As a component of the DERZEIT Accident Issue, I interviewed Dewitt via email about her views on risk and gambling. – by Emily Segal

Emily Segal wrote:
>
Dear Helen DeWitt,
I’m Emily, the managing editor of DERZEIT, a newsprint magazine out of Berlin and the official publication for Mercedes-Benz Berlin Fashion Week.
I am also an enormous admirer of your writing. I’m currently wedged into the first chunk of Your Name Here (I realize I’m reading a copy pirated from my friend and should paypal you some cash). To take some unnecessary credit, I was the first of my friends at school to read The Last Samurai and proselytize madly, thus starting a little knot of you-obsessives.
I would love nothing more than to interview you for one of our next issues, coming out during this next Berlin Fashion Week, Jan. 20.–23.
Basically the idea of the magazine is to take the most commercial form possible – essentially a trade publication, funded by a huge car company – and use it as a trojan horse for whatever weirdo texts we’d like to publish, or those that could possibly be used to gloss the reading of fashion / spectacle / and / or Berlin. (We started from scratch last July as a small team, managed to get funded by Mercedes-Benz, and put out four issues over the course of four days. Here’s our site, which is pretty bare, and a write up the New York Times T Moment blog did on us.
>
Last year, the issues were centered around architecture / art / design / fashion, but this year it’s origin / structure / accident / prognosis. I’m really digging Lotteryland () and I think for the accident issue it could be cool to talk about luck, forecasts, the gambler’s fallacy, games, whatever--
or we could talk about none of these things, and that would be cool too.
I’m sure you’re super busy, but email, skype, phone or meeting in person in Berlin (any time between tuesday and january 20th) would all work for an interview.
>
Let me know!
>
Looking forward to hearing from you,
>
Emily

EMILY SEGAL: When did your interest in statistics start, and how?
HELEN DE WITT: A friend who started out as a mathematician before switching to Classics said he thought it would be interesting to see a book that showed the way mathematicians think. He gave an example of the way mathematical vagueness misleads people.
Suppose we’re told a DNA test is highly accurate: there’s only a 1 in a million chance that traces of blood left on a corpse will match the DNA of someone who was not involved. Someone is found whose DNA matches that of the test – someone for whom there is no other evidence of involvement. Can we be confident that X was the murderer? Well, no. If there are 65 million people in Britain (that may not be the correct figure), we can expect 65 people to match the sample – there’s only a 1 in 65 chance that X is the guilty one.

Where has it taken you?
I started reading around – one of the first books I read was Gerd Gigerenzer’s Reckoning with Risk, which talks about how humans are bad at working out probability if given percentages, do better when a problem is set out in terms of frequencies. The thing that’s interesting is that probability is counter-intuitive – our sense of how likely something is turns out to be highly unreliable. But fiction, after all, works partly by presenting individuals and events which the reader perceives as normal, unsurprising, or, perhaps, as exceptional, highly unusual. Since most writers of fiction have no background in probability or statistics, they tend to replicate the misconceptions of the untrained reader. I wondered whether there was a way to present statistical ways of thinking without using complicated equations, which many readers would not be able to follow. It seemed to me that one might be able to do this using the techniques in information design of Edward Tufte; one might be able to use the methods of Isotype developed by Otto Neurath beginning in the 1920s. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do.
I haven’t thought so much about deliberate deceit. It’s possible to mislead using statistics, but it’s very common for people to mislead because they themselves don’t have enough data, or have data but don’t know how to interpret what they have.

A lot of Your Name Here is in the form of an email exchange. What did you think of emails when you first started sending them? What platform did you use?
Before emails came on the scene I thought I was a bad correspondent. I would get a Christmas present, start 20 drafts of a thank-you letter, and finally write and send something 10 years later. I also have a horror of the phone, so I had virtually no contact with family and absent friends. Then I worked in an office from which emails could be sent; started writing to my ex-husband David. Wrote hundreds, thousands of emails. Fabulous. I can’t remember what platform the office used. Went on to Eudora after a while. Now I’m on Thunderbird.

One of your characters mentions reading 900 words per minute. So, speed reading, can you, how fast? I like youtube videos of people learning to speed read because of the way they touch their paper – it looks pious.
No, I can’t do that; the friend who got me interested in statistics reads that fast. He is a bad influence, probably: he read YNH at a single sitting, and it didn’t strike him as particularly long or complex, but I gather other readers have had more trouble.

Let’s talk about Lotteryland. Can you trace your writing about the lottery to any particular starting point for you or in your work?
Lotteryland was originally a self-contained book in its own right which I wrote in 1999. (It got interrupted when I got an offer of publication for The Last Samurai, so it never got finished; it seemed as though it might be better to use some of it as a book within a book in Your Name Here. I do wonder, though, whether it doesn’t just make the structure impossibly complicated.)
I started thinking about it when Britain introduced the National Lottery. Before the Lottery there was an investment scheme called Premium Bonds which gave participants the chance to win a million pounds: you had to buy a minimum of 100 Premium Bonds for Ł1 apiece, you were assigned 100 numbers, and your numbers went into the draw every week. You could get your Ł100 back at any time. You could leave them going into the draw for years. You could buy up to Ł20,000. In other words, you were gambling the interest you could otherwise have earned if you had left that Ł100 in a bank. When they brought in the Lottery, they reduced the frequency of draws in Premium Bonds to once a month. They also promoted the Lottery very heavily – it was widely advertised, tickets could be bought over the counter in newsagents, people could pick their own numbers. So it was much more entertaining, but you were almost certain, not just not to win, but to lose the money you put in. That was interesting in itself, and also seemed to be connected to other things that were going on in Britain at the time.

In terms of the lottery, aren’t you basically always guaranteed not to win?
No, you are guaranteed an extremely remote chance of winning.
You’re gambling on your perception of odds, or of an emotional distortion of odds. I was just in Vegas, where I thought a lot about the idea that the more you play, the more times you pull the lever on the slot machine, the better your chances are (ignoring that your chances are always the same).
Er, I think I would have said the more you play the more money you are likely to lose.

Would you call fashion (/costume/uniforms) a game?
I think I would see fashion as ludic, which is perhaps not quite the same thing. The types of clothing you mention involve quite different practices: dress as costume happily admits to the ludic, dress as uniform purports to mark compliance with the requirements of a task, the formalized constraints of a particular place int he social order.

You make me think of this quote from the Swiss writer Robert Walser: »We wear uniforms. Now, the wearing of uniforms simultaneously humiliates and exalts us. We look like unfree people, and that is possibly a disgrace, but we also look nice in our uniforms, and that sets us apart from the deep disgrace of those people who walk around in their very own clothes but in torn and dirty ones. To me, for instance, wearing a uniform is very pleasant because I never did know, before, what clothes to put on. But in this, too, I am a mystery to myself for the time being.«
That’s awfully nice. I used to look at those ads for Benetton and think they were playing at radicalism (and now that game is all too familiar). If you walk into a Benetton store there are these arrays of sweaters; a handful of styles, dozens of colors. Saussure says language is a system of differences; Benetton offered the differences, but no one had used them to create a language. So the signifiers are just there for the asking, and if you wanted to you could create a system of signifieds and deploy – the signified (an array of desires) is not given, you could select any range of objects of desire you liked. So you could use an array of sweaters to create a system of signals that did not exist. A company with its sweaters could devise this, or the people who walk in off the streets could appropriate. One only sees the range of possibilities if one sets out different possible systems of signifieds.

When and why did you move to Berlin?
I went in September 2004 after a bad time in New York. A London friend, the painter Ingrid Kerma, has an apartment in Kreuzberg, in Naunynstrasse; she said I could stay there a month. It was very good being there – very quiet, no people to deal with – so I thought if I found a short-term rental in Tip or Zitty I could finish a book. I found a place for 3 months in Mehringdamm; hadn’t finished my book so took a place for 5 months in Kurfurstenstrasse; found another short-term let (all this time, unfortunately, there were all kinds of business problems to deal with); sublet a place in Hornstrasse and finally took over the lease. I’ve never really mastered the art of living with Kohlheizung, though, so I think I’ll have to find something else.

What do you think about hair dye?
Hm. When I got to Berlin I would go to this or that Frisür with the idea of having some highlights, and the hairdressers would try to persuade me to include brown highlights as looking more natural. Every time I would get dragged into a discussion of the Natural. I slightly felt that the Natural could be mine without recourse to a hairdresser, by the simple expedient of leaving the hair to its own devices. My German is not really up to discussions of the Natural and the Artificial, though, let alone the Natural as understood by early 21st century German hairdressers. ◊

Kruse's Friday

2010-01-22T00:00:00.001+01:00

– by Alexandra Kruse

Today we had a photoshoot. Girls in Louboutins and fur jackets personally delivered jewelry to the studio. The treasures of the big fashion houses were packed into the largest bags. This created the most colorful picture. Even the pale models transformed within hours into bright dreams. Everyone did their best. The atmosphere got better. The photographer, whose name for reasons of personal discretion has to be withheld here, let’s call him ‘Depp’, was already picking up his lunch (sandwiches for those who still eat carbs, salad for those who don’t). I can understand how a super-sized handbag can ruin a shot, but when this bag happens to be a “Peek-A-Boo” by Fendi, then there’s no question. In the frame you go! I was beckoned to the studio telephone. It was Depp’s agent. After three solid minutes of “how are yous?” his message was short and sweet: Depp doesn’t feel the story. And he was unable to disclose this information to me in person. That’s why he asked Mr. Agent to step in. Out of line.
–
We put on Alexander Wang’s American Sportswear and fought it out. That seemed like the only sensible solution. Depp’s reaction was professional. He dialed up the boss. I played Lily Allen’s “Fuck you, fuck you very muuuuuch” and was instantly gripped by a sudden migraine. I helped myself to the sumptuously equiped studio pharmacy. Stupidly, I followed my gut feeling instead of reading the French instructions. Minutes later everything was soft and wonderful if not entirely rainbowy. That’s what assistants are for. Kristin, a blonde bony-legged girl, obsessed with submission and order, did an excellent job. I operated exclusively from the sofa. From there I grinned stupidly uttering comments like: “I hate those shoes” or “fantastic!” I couldn’t even be bothered to question my multiple spies in Berlin about details of runway, backstage and dirty gossip over in Germany. Tomorrow I’ll be back. Half asleep I receive another email. “Everybody loves the story.” There you go. ◊

Some Notes on tent cities

2010-01-21T11:00:00.001+01:00

– by Emily Segal

Twice a year, Berlin’s Bebelplatz is turned into a white nylon zone: a combination trade show and champagne room, guarded by people with headsets. In 1994 Fern Mallis, then-director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America proclaimed: We love fashion but we don’t want to die for it. After experimental venues had led to a series of messes, such as plaster crumbling into the lap of Herald Tribune editor Suzy Menkes, he moved the carnival and pitched tents in New York’s Bryant Park.

–
Even though fashion week didn’t originate in a tent, it’s an apt setting. Tents have a long history of housing temporary spectacles of frivolity: circuses, weddings, Muammar Gaddafi. In the dictionary, a tent is a portable cloth shelter, attached to the ground by cords, loops and pegs. The word comes from the Latin verb to stretch: it’s shelter stretched over the ground. A tent is also always temporary, if not in terms of material, than in site: unlike most architecture, it’s not meant to stay in one spot forever.

–
A tent city, then, is any area of soft, mobile, low-cost temporary shelters. In abstract, it’s the idea of a city ultimately absent of real infrastructure and stability. But when you connect »tent city« with the word »camp,« which has largely the same definition (»a place with temporary accommodations of huts, tents, or other structures, typically used by soldiers, refugees, prisoners, or travelers: the enemy camp, a detention camp« 1) the somber shades emerge. Tent cities are not just abstract, fluid urban plans; in the cases of tent cities built for victims of natural or political disaster, they’re zones of desperation and poverty. Occasionally, tent cities house protesters (at Kent State in 1977, in post-Katrina New Orleans), prisoners (at Maricopa County Jail in Arizona), religious pilgrims (on the Hajj to Mecca) and even more rarely, spectacles of insane grandeur (in 1971 Shah Reza Palavi pitched one in Tehran to celebrate the 2500th anniversary of Iran’s monarchy).

–
It was a horrifying coincidence, then, that the earthquake in Haiti happened during the writing of this article. With much of Port-au-Prince devastated, and millions rendered homeless, tents sprung up almost immediately. Vincent Houver, chief of mission in Haiti for the International Organization of Migration, said in a press release on January 14: »What we need is tents, tents and more tents.« UN chief Ban Ki-moon said on January 15th that the basic plan was to construct tent cities on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince »for the foreseeable future«.

–
This essay is not an attempt to equalize the fashion week tent with the space that houses survivors of the disaster in Haiti (or Katrina, or the US housing crisis, or any massive emergency, for that matter). This essay does, however, see the DERZEIT Structure Issue as an opportunity to take the tent out of fashion week and look more closely at the different forms the structure takes as temporary architecture, housing and shelter. On a spectrum that includes emergency, poverty, piety, grandeur and excess, the tent – and the tent city – emerges almost universally as politically charged and symbolically variegated structures. Tent cities are about power and money.

–
Until recently, predominant media images of the ›tent city‹ were the unauthorized, makeshift shelter zones of America’s homeless. Notoriously, a sprawling tent city in Sacramento, California, where 150 people squatted near railroad freight line, was widely interpreted in the media as representative of US economic decline. There are many notable and some undocumented ones throughout the US. In 2007, 250 homeless people in New Orleans erected a tent city on a grassy patch outside city hall, taking advantage of the striking visual of their conditions to protest the fucked up status of the housing situation post-Katrina, chanting »Hey, Ray! How about a house today!« into Ray Nagin’s office window. The tent city was both the problem and method of dissent – a bleakly packaged marriage of form and content.
–
A very different kind of tent city happens every year in Mina, a Saudi desert valley city east of Mecca, where pilgrims stop along the journey to complete the »stoning of the devil,« one of several rituals that are part of the Hajj. The process of housing the millions of pilgrims (every able-bodied Muslim is expected to make the pilgrimage at least once in his lifetime) has cost the Saudi government almost about 4.6 billion Euro. There are 40,000 peaked white tents, plus overpasses, tunnels, electricity and water networks. Images of the site show a vast field of white points stretching into the distance. The tents were fireproofed after a devastating fire in 1997 that caused a stampede, killing over 200 and injuring at least a thousand more. Which puts the word ›temporary‹ in a new light: a tent city happens to burst into flame a lot more easily than a city made of buildings.

–
In contrast, perhaps the most lavish display of frivolity of the last century (and possibly one of the most lavish events period) also took place in a tent city: a weeklong luxury camp built by Shah Reza Pahlevi in 1971 next to the desert ruins of Persepolis to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of Iran’s monarchy. The whole shebang was ›inspired by‹ the Field of the Cloth of Gold meeting in France between Henry VIII and Francis I in 1520. Each power attempted to out-dazzle the other’s with clothes, feasts, tents and jousts. Pahlevi’s tent city, in turn, covered 160 acres: three massive royal tents with 59 smaller ones surrounding them in the shape of a star. Guests ate roasted peacock breast off Limoges china and drank from Baccarat crystal. The contrast of the festival with the surrounding poverty was staggering; university students in Iran protested; many say that the event ultimately cost Pahlevi his throne. The event reads as an encyclopedia of excess: it was the most blinged tent city of modern history, making Pahlevi’s delusions of grandeur concrete.

–
Almost as visually striking is the tent city annex at Maricopia County Jail in Arizona, the fourth largest jail system in the world. Many people jailed there work in chain gangs and wear silent-movie-style black-and-white striped uniforms. The place is famous for its pink handcuffs and underwear, which the prisoners are allowed to strip down to when the inside-tent temperatures rocket up to 150°F during hot Arizona summers. Joe Arpaio, the county’s sheriff, responsible for all this, said 2003 AP story: saying, »it’s 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn’t commit any crimes.«
–
Here, the second dictionary definition of »camp« comes in handy: »the supporters of a particular party or doctrine regarded collectively.« Tents are as much about doctrine as shelter: it’s where politics meet place.
Even in the case of Berlin Fashion Week, a struggle over the implications of temporary buildings is at play. Bebelplatz, home of the fashion week tent, is also the site where the S.A. and Nazi youth groups burned 20,000 books in 1933, and the glassed-over subterranean monument that commemorates it. A petition by the Berufsverbandes Bildender Künstler Berlin protests the presence of fashion week, arguing that holding an event like this on the spot is politically and historically unconscionable. (Oblivious) global nomads camped out in their (fashion week) tent – it’s both a lame pun and a quintessential Berlin drama, where a site of historical atrocity meets contemporary levity, and chafes. ◊

Bruce LaBruce

2010-01-21T09:00:00.048+01:00

The queer-core filmmaker Bruce LaBruce is never not in your face.
His movies are the titillating synthesis of the political art film and straight up pornography. Whether it’s gay zombies or faggot revolutionaries, Bruce always succeeds in shooting a political, punk message into the mouths of his delicious amateur actors. While bouncing around Europe – DJing in Berlin, interviewing Karl Lagerfeld in Paris, then opening a show at Peres Projects
– Bruce was able to take a sec to have a talk to me over Skype. Our char was pretty G rated–this time. - by Michael Ladner

MICHAEL LADNER: Hey Bruce
Hello

BRUCE LABRUCE: How are you?
Fine.

Where are you?
I’m in Berlin

How was DJing at Schwutz on Friday?
It was great. It was packed. I did it back in December as well, so we were working off of that energy.

What do you like about DJing?
Well I’m just a celebrity DJ, or a quasi-celebrity DJ, or a celebrity-quasi DJ, you know. So I just do it when I’m asked, for fun basically, and I do like it. It’s fun to show off your iTunes collection. That’s one part of modern technology that I think is so amazing. My music collection is so exponentially greater than it used to be. I have friends that just dump all their stuff on my iPod and I don’t even know where half of it comes from.

…A big dump!
Yeah, they just dump it right in there. Anyways it’s just sharing; it’s all about sharing.

So that’s one of the things you like about technology; what don’t you like about technology?
Well I do think it’s turning people into zombies basically. It’s funny because I always refer to my iPod as my Walkman, which totally dates me. So it’s always been around, but not everyone was doing it; it was much smaller. Now everyone does it. It’s indicative of the solipsistic reality that people are devolving into. It’s like that stupid movie Wall-E, where everyone lives in their own entertainment/ consumerist world. I think this does have deadening effect on people, and on social interaction. I guess that’s a square way of looking at it because you could argue that it’s just the new form of social interaction or social reality. But I do think it can have an alienating effect on people.

I missed Wall-E. I think I gave up on Pixar after A Toy Story.
Oh I never liked Pixar; I hate Pixar. I hate the style–can’t stand it! And if you look at the early Disney stuff like Pinocchio, it’s brilliant. As creepy and dark as those movies are, they’re stylistically really cool. And I just find Pixar unwatchable. I hate Up, I think Up is disgusting.

Is Otto; or Up with Dead People about technology turning people into zombies? Cause they were gay zombies. Are these related?
Well I think Otto was a whole host of things, but technology was one of them. Marcuse talks a lot about technology, the deadening of things, the military, fetishism, commodity fetishism. It’s really just textbook advanced capitalism, where it’s about planned obsolescence, people fixating on new technology in order to distract them from the more human, or more authentic human needs. It’s a way of keeping people good consumers cause everything becomes obsolete and you have to upgrade systems all the time, you have to upgrade hardware all the time, it never ends.

It’s funny that you associate zombies with advanced capitalism cause historically in film they were used as a metaphor for the communist takeover.
Well I don’t think zombies were ever just about the communist takeover. That was more Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which depicted an early form of zombie, but they’re more communist. The alien invasion movies of the fifties were all about the communist invasion. But zombies, as pioneered by George Romero, are really much more an obvious and pointed critique of advanced capitalism. Zombies are the ultimate consumers, they become indistinguishable from each other, they all congregate at the same places, in Dawn of the Dead they all go back to the place they were most comfortable when they were alive, which was the shopping mall. So I think it’s more about capitalism and consumerism.

I downloaded a pirated version of Raspberry Reich the other night and watched it for the first time. Considering the message in the film, what’s your stance on personal property/internet piracy?
Oh, I do that myself; so I can’t really complain when people do that to me. I think it was Abbie Hoffman who wrote Steal This Book, so I guess I could have called it Steal This Movie. But of course you know that there’s a far bigger irony about that movie, which is that we were sued by the estate of Kordo, who shot the famous iconic image of Che Guavara that’s on T-shirts and shit. He died in 2001, but his estate, which is controlled by his daughter and a bunch of lawyers, sued us for one million Canadian dollars. Kordo, when he was alive, said the image could be used without copyright, as long as A, it wasn’t being used to sell corporate products and B, that it didn’t degrade the image of Che. So obviously they sued us for the latter. Anyways, it’s ironic because the movie was much more sympathetic to the cause than lets say a vodka company, which they also sued once.

What made you want to make a movie based on the RAF?
Well the movie is partly about radical chic and the way the Baader-Meinhof image his been glamorized and fetishized. Also Che Guevara, the fact that that image has become a symbol of capitalist exploitation. It’s how fashion and pop culture empty these signifiers of their revolutionary significance and turn them into commodities. Also Gundrun Ensslin. She made a kind of porn movie before she joined Baader-Meinhof. It wasn’t really a porn movie, but she performed sexually in a film because she believed in sexual liberation. I met her brother Gottfried, who’s gay. He published a book of letters that she wrote him while she was in Stammheim Prison. And she actually really encouraged him to be a gay revolutionary. She was very much into the idea of homosexual revolution. So it was partly based on her views, but also, she was the glamorous militant female. She was blonde and had that glamour, that feminine militancy.

You were integral in starting the queercore movement – a meaningful signifier – in the 80s, especially through your zine J.D.s. Do you see any analogous movements in contemporary gay culture?
Well the whole point of that movement was that it operated totally outside corporate control; it was completely independent. It’s really hard to believe now, but people weren’t that concerned with becoming celebrities. Everything was self-published, everything was done independently, there was much more of a spirit of camaraderie. I mean it’s not like there wasn’t a little star system, but it wasn’t toxic in the way that modern celebrity is. It was quite cute actually. I don’t think there is a youth movement that has emerged since then that has been cohesive and political and anti-establishment that tries to operate in more of a guerilla style.

Would you say then that the revolution has failed?
Yes. It’s dead. It died with Kurt Cobain.

I saw on your Twitter feed that you watched Lagerfeld Confidential last night.
Yes. I have to go to Paris tomorrow to interview him for Vice Magazine.

That should be fun!
Definitely. I mean, I was quite surprised, not knowing too much about him and then watching the documentary. I really agree with a lot of what he’s saying. He has quite of a punk ethos actually. And I love that he’s into porn and that he supports prostitution and that he’s anti-materialistic. I know that’s hard to believe with his private jets and all, but he doesn’t really seem attached to anything. He’s not a nationalist, he doesn’t call anywhere home; he doesn’t believe in marriage, he doesn’t believe in gay marriage. I find him very simpatico.

Have you met him before?
No, but they vetted me and he knows my work and is excited.

And then you come back to Berlin next week for your exhibition at Peres Projects?
Yeah, it’s based on L.A. Zombie, my new film. It’s nine photographic images of François Sagat that I’ve taken from the movie.

Is L.A. Zombie a squeal to Otto?
It’s not a sequel but it’s kind of a companion piece. It’s about a homeless schizophrenic, who thinks he’s an alien zombie. I’m making a softcore version but there’s definitely a full-on hardcore porn version as well.

Javier Peres told me that you always make a hardcore version and a softcore version for production purposes. Where do you draw the line formally between porn and your art, or is it all the same?
It’s really only about marketing. You just market them differently. I mean they have different content. But penetration is always the demarcation.
But your approach behind the camera is the same when shooting porn scenes as non-porn scenes?
No, if you’re making industry porn, you generally shoot it in a specific way. It’s very conventional. You cover it from predictable angles. It emphasizes the sexual act. That’s why I’m not that interested in shooting industry porn; it’s really hard to shoot it in an artistic or unorthodox way. For me, what makes it interesting is the content and the style that unifies the whole project: the narrative, the political content, the music, the dialogue. But the whole thrust of modern porn is to dispose of narrative all together and to have these endless permutations of indistinguishable sex scenes made up of interchangeable faces and body parts. The modern trend is to only concentrate on the sexual acts and also to ramp it up in terms of extremes: more people, gang bangs, more perversions. You know extreme sports, it’s extreme porn.

How did the queercore zine J.D.s materialize?
Well I was finishing up my Masters Degree and I was disillusioned with academia so I started hanging out in the punk scene. And when you were in the punk scene, you had a fanzine. Like today how everyone has a blog. It was just what kids did. It was definitely a different experience on a lot of levels. It was also all done by the mail and there was something much more romantic about that. But part of the romance was the longing and waiting, sending something off in the mail and having to wait for it to come back, the anticipation of it.

I thought you meant male, as in non-female.
No, no no. M-A-I-L. We were very political about mixing fags and dykes.

Was the zine how you got involved with General Idea?
I used to correspond with Felix Partz through J.D.s. They had their magazine FILE at the same time we had J.D.s. But I didn’t meet AA Bronson until later, after both of the other two had died of AIDS. He was pioneering a lot of the stuff that I was doing too. The difference is that they did it more within the art world and we were more in the punk scene and also the stuff I was doing was much more sexually explicit. We had shared a lot of the same strategies in terms of spectacle.
Why did you use explicit sex to create a spectacle?
Part of it was just about gay identity and just being very militantly homosexual. In the punk scene we ran into a lot of resistance, a lot of homophobia. Especially as the movement got into hardcore, it became very macho. So we kind of tried to be oppositional to that in terms of male effeminacy and female masculinity. We wanted to be very in-your-face about it. For us it was a militant, political mentality to use pornographic imagery and extremely explicit homosexual imagery to kind of push it in people’s faces and to be bold and unapologetic about it.

How did that go over with the macho punks?
Well of course I was beaten up several times. But the cool ones got it and realized that punk was about abhorrent sexual behavior.

Do you have an idea for a movie that you would like to make in the future?
I’ve always wanted to make a movie about the photographer Wilhelm on Gloeden. I haven’t been able to raise the money to make it. He was a German photographer who lived in Sicily at the end of the 19th century. He was famous for shooting photographs of young Sicilian boys naked. He also kind of invented sex tourism.

What’s your favorite sex tourism destination?
I don’t go on holidays. Like Lagerfeld says, holidays are bourgeois, they’re for people who work 9-to-5s and need consolation. But I do travel a lot with my work and I do play on the side. Brazil has definitely by far been the best in terms of its bordellos.

But Schöneberg isn’t too bad?
Uhg! Only on a dare, only on a dare.

T H E - S T R U C T U R E - I S S U E

2010-01-21T06:00:00.000+01:00

Two kinds of skill are diametrically opposed: the cosmonaut’s skill and the juggler’s skill. Both form effective feed-back systems. However, whereas the former achieves efficiency by an absolute neutralization of factors that could interfere with the system, the latter exploits these factors to strengthen the system. The juggler’s skill (as well as the skill of acrobats, drummers, billiard players, tight-rope artists for example) cannot be explained by talent and practice. Everything seems to indicate that skill is likewise influenced by a ritual presentation of skill. In other words, the ritual movement of the virtuoso is an important part of the virtuosity. Show and theater are not involved as much as is frequently assumed.
(Tomas Maldonado and Gui Bonsiepe, »Wissenschaft und Gestaltung,« 1964)

Download the complete issue as a PDF here

Spandex

2010-01-21T00:00:00.004+01:00

Spandex is immortal. I know it. I speak from a place of wisdom, from the Planet of the Unitarded. (For earthlings unfamiliar with this futuristic state of mind, think of the tortuous medieval costume once known as a pee-prohibitor.) With that image in mind, let us argue the contrary to prove the point. – by April Lamm

If spandex were mortal, it would be in mounds at those musty depositories of the unwanted: Humana, Salvation Army, Goodwill. But contrary to what you might imagine, spandex is conspicuously missing from most of these shops. Of late, in order to cope with the discrepancy between my personal addiction to more and the world’s crisis of less, I began to do what I did so often in the 80s: thrift. After much field research, I’ve come to the conclusion that every lycra-legged lady out there is hogging their old spandex. Give ‘em up, I say, I want some hand-me-down spandex! Vintage!
–
Sure, it’s chemical, artificial, made mostly of polyurethane, which is something you put on floors to make them shiny. It wraps the hard-bodied bottoms of superheroes galore, but its also highly flammable. Let’s face it. Shopping for pants is a form of mental torture. The bottom is an elastic that expands with the increasingly eroded resistance to every cookie that crosses your path. Our nether regions are non-heroic.
Historically, the original era of spandex culminated with the original era of disco, that is, the era when we used to dance … a lot. In the 70s, Patricia Fields claims to have invented the modern day legging as we know and love it today. And while it might have been Jane Fonda who transformed the verb »workout« into a noun in 1982, contrary to my memory, Fonda was not wearing the shiny spandex, but rather a dull striped cottony variation. The disco roller rink muse Olivia Newton John wore it as part of her bad girl gear in the culminating scene of Grease back in 1978. In her black shiny spandex, she morphed from a conservative Pink Lady into a slinky one dipped in ink. That’s how she got her guy.
–
There’s just something irresistible about a material that is simultaneously historic and of the hereafter. And it is one of the few items where you can reliably order a generic subjective S-M-L-XL. Spandex is, or so I learned, a material that stretches 500 times its »relaxed state.«
–
My personal spandex collection was once reserved for my annual dance recital. In my jazz flats, leggings and matching spandex silver sequined bandeau, I performed on a stage for a crowd of 50 mothers, and came as close as I’ll ever come to Madonna. Earth, Wind, and Fire and … spandex, immortal. Since the discovery of sugar, no better material has ever been found. ◊

Kruse's Thursday

2010-01-21T00:00:00.002+01:00

– by Alexandra Kruse

Mon Dieu! I love Paris so much! To say it with a Kitsune T-shirt: Paris je t’aime!!! It feels like spring, perhaps that’s because parisiennes never wear tights, always wear too little, would rather drink than eat, always smoke and always look oh so so chic. You can get Givenchy in literally every department store and, oh well, let’s just leave it at that. Much more importantly: today is – according to facebook – international sweatpants day. Really. My days of fear of sweatpants are long gone (thank you Nike) and I spent most of January in them. Thanks to my sartorialist-friend and style-icon (yes, she is French) Garance Dore now even girls are officially allowed to wear sweatpants (not just Japanese tourists, who wear them with neon trainers and furry Hello Kitty accessories). To get a hold of her manifesto I bought the high-end version by Isabel Marant. Instead of getting drunk at Joop! or watch »topmodel« Barbara Meir stumble, I spent the day, pigging out on eclairs at Fouchon and going on a shopping raid in Rue du Temple. Bless temporarily moved into the new store by »Surface2Air« for the next couple of days. From April first onwards those in need of extending their stay can move into the Blessguesthouse.
–
In the evening I went to Colette and discussed the mythology of the American West and other things with Adam Kimmel. We looked at pictures by cowboy photographer Jim Krantz. Very Marlboro, very men! Smokers were my keyword of the night. I smoked in front of the door. And there he was, the antidote to all these androgynous mythical creatures (Dear Bill Kaulitz, I remember very well when we skimmed fashion magazines and Diesel refused to send us pants, damn!!!), fallen from the sky, healthy complexion, chiseled and with gleaming white teeth. His name is Gabriel. We didn’t talk for long. I only realized how lucky I really was when he put on sweatpants the next morning. I went to the Eglise Saint-Roch, in which the memorial ceremonies for Yves Saint Laurent took place, washed myself clean from sin with holy water and lit a candle for all the fallen angels. Long live the city of love! ◊

The Character of Characters

2010-01-20T23:00:00.000+01:00

To walk into the Buchstabenmuseum Schauplatz on Leipzigerstrasse is to enter open storage, the most gratifying kind of cramped space. Just inside the door is a neon T, twelve feet high, from an old DTV sign, just one piece of retired information in a mass of rust, paint and chrome. It‘s a grammar of factories, facades and commerce – disassembled, discharged from their origins and not exactly repurposed. – by Emily Segal

The Museum for Letters, Characters and Typefaces is really only these 200 square meters, packed with signage and vernacular type from public spaces in Berlin and surrounding areas. It feels like a walk inside an erector set or typesetting kit, with the kind of pleasurable violation of aura, scale and proximity also found in cargo holds, Costco and Vegas.
–
Curators Barbara Dechant, a type designer, and Anja Schulze, a press agent for the Stadtmuseum Berlin, started the project in 2005 based on Dechant‘s private type collection, and moved into the Schauplatz in 2008 when their cellars were full. The goal was to set up an archive and ‚recycling center‘ for three-dimensional lettering (not print) – a space for reading letters not just as text but as physical objects. The museum, which houses more than 300 pieces, is currently open only every second Saturday of the month.
Negotiating the chaos – which is dotted by official museum wall tags explaining the fonts‘ history – the curators point out their oldest example, a white handmade script that spells Schuhe, 50 or 60 years old. Then there‘s an M, one of 8 or 10 Ms left over from the big DDR Markthalle complex, next to a big white A from Kultur Kaufhaus Dussmann. The thin bright blue „Rundfunk“ in the corner was scored „unofficially“ last year from the former Deutscher Demokratischer Rundfunk media center.
–
Usually the acquisition process is classic urban rummage: Dechant and Schulze hear about a building about to be demolished, rent a half-ton truck and go rescue the letters themselves. But in the case of a set of big yellow letters that used to label a building in Lichtenberg, it was actually in the contract for demolition that the letters should be taken down neatly and delivered to the Buchstabenmuseum, which suggests the possible future of the museum as an official repository for landmarked type. The curators plan to move into a (much) larger space, where the letters could be spread out and the viewer could „see their patina.“ The imagined Buchstabenmuseum would have a permanent exhibition on the history of type with room for experimental shows and artists‘ projects.
The sole exception to the museum‘s three-dimensional-letters-only rule is an original menu from the „legendary“ Cafe Adler at Checkpoint Charlie. And not everything has a rich historical patina – there‘s a bright white neon sign from a 2009 H&M ad. Dechant finds the LED lights and attenuated R of a contemporary, chrome Daimler-Chrysler sign so „delicious“ she‘s painted full scale replicates of the letters on her bedroom walls.
–
There isn‘t much room to walk among the piles. Hopping through, it‘s easy to take a turn and catch a view of the letters that isn‘t legible at all. All of a sudden, it‘s just stuff, junk, architectural detritus. When all textual, commercial and mnemonic qualities are lost, these materials could be as much cornice as phrase. This moment – when a letter‘s physical dimensions stand in the way of its interpretation as text – is the principle of the Buchstabenmuseum. For one, the curators see it as a semiotic challenge for exhibitions: „When we see an A or a B we know what that means, but when we look at the lettering of another culture we don‘t know the semantic content,“ remarks Schulze. „It would be an interesting approach for an exhibit, how signs of different cultures function as documents.“ This extends to other ideas Schulze outlines for the future: exhibitions about special characters, ligatures, the &-sign and the @-sign, plus the relations between letters and food, music, and cars.
It‘s underwear in the case of the Palmer‘s Unterwäsche P, books in the case of the DTV T that dominates the space: the letters wouldn‘t exist without the commercial production that the signs hawked in the first place. The Buchstabenmuseum‘s ‚method‘ of piling up letters as three-dimensional objects only emphasizes how the these big neon signs and rust angles are, first, artifacts of the world of manufactured things and second, things themselves.
–
The museum‘s mission statement mentions „the increasing homogenization of the urban landscape“ and the „rise of the Corporate Logo“ as reasons why traditional signage must be rescued. One excellent example, the entire phrase ‚Rathaus Passagen‘ in acrylic, was recovered after the old sign was retooled in Plexiglas three years ago. But this kind of corporate rebranding and urban turnover is both scourge and source. Regarding a set of landmarked signage from the Karl Marx Buchhandlung in Friedrichshein, Schulze explained: „We‘re obviously happy that those letters have been preserved as a monument – they‘ll stay on the facade regardless of what business comes next in that space – though of course we had the hope that we‘d be able to take them in. On one hand it‘s a shame that these traditional companies close and are torn down, but at the same time we have an opportunity here to further explain the histories of these places. We‘re ambivalent.“
–
Despite the museum‘s purported mission to present „the letter as a content-free sign,“ every letter in the room is not only an alphabetic sign but also a trace of what‘s left behind: either a building that‘s been torn down, or the new sign in its place. Every letter is a trophy of its origins. The Buchstabenmuseum can‘t help being about urban development; it is as much a typography museum as an archive of branding, logos, and corporate identities stamped on urban space. In light of this, it seems fitting that the store room is financed as a kind of public service by Tobias Wilmerhold, who‘s building a Motel 1 across the way in the clearing on Leipzigerstrasse – the museum‘s own space is predicated upon this kind of regeneration and displacement.
–
Dechant points out that the font on the wall labels is the standard font used on all German highway signs: unobtrusive, easily read, commanding. „It‘s like a system font on your computer,“ she says, „a font that‘s nothing.“ In any case, the Buchstabenmuseum itself proves that when it comes to letters, there‘s no such thing. ◊

Momus

2010-01-20T12:00:00.000+01:00

The musician-slash-writer-slash-blogger-slash-theorist Nick Currie aka Momus is hard to miss for his trademark eye patch and the group of oriental girls that are usually found in his wake. I’ll always think of this arrangement as Momus’ take on Muammar Gaddafi’s Amazonian guard. Last year he published two books, the novel The Book of Jokes (Dalkey Archives) a campy take on Arabian Nights, and The Book of Scotlands (Sternberg Press), which offers bizarre solutions for the nation-island. His literature is as provocative as his canny lyrics, dealing with subjects from incest and violence to futurism and the British government – though his soft voice always made it all sound like photo captions read from Vogue Bambini. I’ve interviewed the time-traveler via email: Momus in Osaka, me in New York. – by Eva Munz

You’re kind of an ethnological mystery to me: you were born in Paisley, Scotland, lived in London, Paris, Tokyo and New York. Why on earth did you choose Berlin?
I was living in New York, but two disasters befell it: Bush and 9/11 (I watched the second plane hitting the south tower from my roof in Chinatown). Everything changed; suddenly New York was full of flags, paranoia, and rubble. So I went to Japan, but I had visa and language issues, and my relationship with my girlfriend began to fizzle. So, in early 2003, I needed to choose a place within the Eurozone to live in. At first I went back to Paris, but I’d lived there before and found the city a bit aggressive and intense this time. A trip to Berlin in February 2003 convinced me that it was a much better city for me. I’d been visiting the city for years, and had had good experiences. There was a post-protestant deadness I liked in Berlin, a sobriety, as well as a liberalism (also post-protestant). There was also a sense that the city was unfinished, and welcomed input from visitors – particularly artists – on the existential question of what it could become. You don’t get that impression in Paris or London. Berlin’s attractive fluidity, and the excess capacity in its infrastructure (its empty buildings and trains, cheap rentals, and so on), was really attractive to me. I moved to the city and began to both buy into and sell (via my journalism and interviews) the myth of Berlin as a paradise for »creatives.« I don’t think it’s so much of a myth, actually. Berlin really is a paradise for creatives. It contains, preserved in aspic, every subculture which has ever existed. But it’s a laboratory as well as a museum; the cheap prices and lack of opportunities to sell out really do encourage experimentation. If you’re able to structure your time and impose self-discipline, Berlin is a great place to get things done.

Do you have a next dream destination where you’d want to live?
I’m in Osaka right now, and I’m thinking seriously about moving here next. In a way Osaka is the Berlin of Japan; it’s possible to live here very cheaply. Apart from the bread, beer and asparagus (better in Berlin), the food in Osaka is vastly superior and the city has a density, intensity and commercial dynamism Berlin couldn’t even dream of. Weird underground music (Oorutaichi, Doddodo) thrives here. It never gets too cold. And there’s some gorgeous scenery very close by; the ancient cities of Nara and Kyoto, the mountains and forests of Shikoku.

Where have you been in the last year? Which places did you travel to?
I spent a month in New York doing an art show, a month and a half in Osaka and Tokyo researching contemporary art – I’m curating a Japanese art exhibition in the UK in 2012. I traveled to Athens and the Greek Islands, and performed in Boston, Philadelphia, London, Utrecht, Eindhoven, Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid and Warsaw.

Does the rudeness of Berliners ever bring tears to your eyes - especially after living in Tokyo? (I lived in Asia for 8 years and upon my return I was traumatized.)
I think Japanese people are rude in their own, more subtle, way. For instance, if you’re a foreigner in the company of a Japanese person, they ignore you completely. And you’re constantly asked whether you know how to use chopsticks! I like the absolutely fanatical devotion Japanese bring to their service industries, the complete lack of ego, the sidelining of personality and mood. But I also like the complete opposite: a waiter who’s openly grumpy if he’s having a bad day, for instance. That strikes me as very human, and not a bad thing. The British and the Germans are like that. Grumpy, human. There’s something a little scary about the Japanese way, as well as inspiring and sweet.

Do you speak German?
If not: is that kind of liberating?
I speak a kind of pidgin German which gets me by. But yes, I do find it liberating not to read the newspapers in Germany, for instance. I devour other countries’ newspapers, which gives me the impression that the bad things newspapers tend to report only happen elsewhere, and that Berlin is the still eye at the centre of a global storm; a place where nothing happens, and you can just get on with your daily domestic life.

You’ve been wearing an eye patch over you right eye since you rinsed your contacts in contaminated Greek tap water in the late 1990s. What’s wrong with the Greek?
To be fair to Greece, it was actually cabin water from a ferry between Italy and Greece, so it might have been Italian! Anyway, the amoebas which infested my contact lens are very common, they’re called Acanthamoeba. What’s not so common is to get them living on the surface of your eye, and to lose the use of the eye because of them.

Are you aware of the loss of vision?
Do you remember the difference a second eye made?
I’m a little bit in denial about it. I keep the eye shut when the eye patch isn’t on, so that I don’t notice the black void on the right side. It frightens me, that void. Apart from allowing me to avoid people on the right of me in crowded railway stations, the missing eye also gave me depth perception, which was very nice when looking, for instance, at a naked woman’s body. Now breasts seem flatter to me, and essentially the same as photographs of breasts.

You have a very distinctive style in dressing. Kind of a salvation-army dandy chic. Japanese wabi-sabi with a Scottish quilt thrown in. How would you describe your sartorial choices?
I deliberately try to challenge a style of dressing I’d call »global monocultural,« which really means American. So I never wear jeans or hi-tech running shoes, and rarely T-shirts. I haunt uniform shops, especially those which combine traditional workwear with a certain secular sacredness (so Berufskleidung stores in Berlin, or Japanese workwear shops). I’m particularly attracted to clothes which encode otherness and inhibition. So, old people’s clothes, clothes from obscure professions and traditional cultures (as long as they aren’t too New Age looking), priestly clothes, peasant clothes, women’s clothes, clothes for fishermen and golfers, clothes donated to secondhand stores by the relatives of the recently-deceased. I mix these garments up, breaking their grammar in the manner of those childrens’ flip-card games where you can give someone a Scotsman’s beret, a Flemish peasant’s breasts, a miniskirt and some riding breeches. I’d recommend Tibor Kalman’s book (Un)fashion.

How would you dress if you were for some reason really, really fat?
Like Leigh Bowery.

The Madrid based design group created a Momus doll from red fabric with eye-patch. Do you think they did a good job in appropriating you?
Yes, I think they did. We should all aim to be reducible to affectionate stereotypes.

I listened to a ton of Momus albums in the late 90s. The only thing that ever came close to your brittle voice, smooth pop arrangements and canny, provocative lyrics was Pulp’s »Different Class.« Do you ever have the feeling that you were not rewarded with the stardom/money you deserved?
Yes. It’s an international conspiracy – the Japanese were the only ones who didn’t get the memo.

What does money mean to you?
It’s a kind of thermostat which regulates our body’s input-output systems. And by »our body« I really mean our need to exist physically in the world.

You were an early blogger and have written about design and art for the longest time, last year you published your two first books. Does that mark the end of your music, or is it just a gentle shift of balance from one leg to the other?
I actually would like to end my music career and be known entirely as a writer from now on. Working on music actually gives me a kind of nausea now, because it triggers low-level tinnitus. So I get hot and uncomfortable around music, like Alex from A Clockwork Orange listening to Beethoven after he’s been given Ludovico’s Treatment.

You go by your nom de plume Momus as a musician and as a writer. What’s the difference between Momus and Nick Currie? What do your friends call you?
Nick Currie is the creation of my parents, my school, and society. Momus is my own creation, or rather an elective affinity with a character from mythology, a minor (and »failed«) Greek god exiled from Mount Olympus for simply doing his job, which was to criticize. My friends call me Nick, but I like it when they call me Momus.

Your music is basically poetry. What do you read? Which authors and books do you find influential?
I’m attracted to the classics: Lucian, Juvenal, Martial, Horace, Virgil, Aesop, Propertius. I’m also drawn to figures like Pope, Swift, Sterne, Leopardi, Gogol, Kierkegaard. Then, from the 20th century, people like Kafka and Brecht, Calvino and Pirandello, Ronald Firbank, Marcel Schwob, Bruno Schulz, Ivor Cutler and Viv Stanshall.

At a book reading for Solutions you showed an incredible talent for accents. I have a fetish for accents. Which accents do you like in particular? Which ones are you good at? Are there any you despise?
My sister is much better at accents than I am (she’s an actress). I tend to do Cockney, Scottish and American, and that’s it. I dislike Australian accents, perhaps. When I was young I disliked the Scottish accent intensely and tried to lose mine. I called the Glasgow accent »the Glasgow accident«!

You seem so incredibly productive and document a lot of the things you do, see in your blog. Do you ever hang around, loiter, do nothing for no particular reason?
I think I might often seem, from the outside, to be rather passive and dreamy, but my mind is always racing. I totally understand what Kafka wrote in his diary about »this tremendous world I have inside my head.« The anxiety is that your time will run out, and you won’t have been able to share even a tiny fraction of those dreams, visions, insights and ideas, and you’ll die and that world will vanish.

You’ll turn 50 in February. How does it feel?
It’s perfectly horrible! ◊

Donna Daytona

2010-01-20T10:00:00.000+01:00

A few months ago, I had the honor of standing in a crowded room next to Donatella Versace. As I meticulously studied her appearance, I noticed the watch on her feeble little wrist: a Rolex, Daytona model, a men’s watch from the most ubiquitous luxury label in the world. It looks like a child‘s definition of the word „expensive“. There are buttons and an extra dial, with which Donnatella can mark the time waiting for her driver to navigate the Milan’s shopping district. And it’s all in bright, yellow gold. – by Marco Rechenberg

A Rolex Daytona is actually supposed to be worn in stainless steel, because in any case it’ll be rare and totally overpriced. In white gold it breaks the bank, and looks exactly like the stainless steel one, so unless you have the microscopic vision of the members of new York’s Diamond’s Dealer’s club, only the beholder will know its real value. Clearly Donatella Versace is not interested in such nuances. She opts for the shock value of the garish yellow gold variation. It dangles thick and heavy around her wrist, making even the lifting of a cigarette look like a workout.
–
In contrast, the other signoras in the room mostly do without watches. And if one was to be seen, it was no doubt some soulless, diamond-encrusted ice, a present from their personal Berlusconi-wannabe. Understandably, people in fashion aren’t always interested in watches. The watch-making industry still holds on to unbearably slow, tedious and conservative collections. Nevertheless it was a watch – Donatella‘s gold monster – that managed to enhance the afternoon. It gave it an air of Plein Soleil, Alain Delon, sort of. Even if the reasons for this were never too clear to me, I instantly felt sympathy for Ms. Versace wash over me. Perhaps it was about her brother’s sad demise or the stoicism with which she‘s led the fashion house for more than ten years now. Plus her unique looks, her body, the hair. Then there are the concerns about her daughter, the spindly poor little rich girl. That very afternoon I saw what made me so enthusiastic for Donatella Versace: the bar of gold on her wrist, worn with the same insouciance with which she sends her garish turquoise down the catwalk.
–
It didn‘t take long before I felt the desire to own that watch. On a man’s wrist, I imagine, it could develop its full potential. It‘s a watch that‘s charged so heavily with sexual motives, I’m surprised that I’ve never heard of a gay man with a watch fetish. And yet, there are some conceptual problems in this aesthetic equation: someone has to pay for it. A Daytona costs about as much a liver transplant. Also, as was warned, many people perceive such a heavy golden watch as aggressive. I believe this is a simple misunderstanding: such openly displayed splendor is just a gracefully extended invitation, to a different kind of time. ◊

T H E - O R I G I N - I S S U E

2010-01-20T06:00:00.000+01:00

If the egg is not necessarily of any specific type, then it could be said that the egg came first, because other animals had been laying eggs long before chickens existed, such as the dinosaurs. If only an egg that will hatch into a chicken can be considered a chicken egg: then a reconsideration of the original question suggests some animal other than a chicken laid the first chicken egg which contained the first chicken. In this case the chicken egg came before the chicken. If only an egg laid by a chicken can be considered a chicken egg: then a re-consider- ation of the original question suggests the first chicken (which hatched from a non-chicken egg) laid the first chicken egg. In this case the chicken came before the chicken egg. Again, this would not necessarily be a straightforward event.
(Wikipedia, »The Chicken or the Egg« )

Download the complete issue as a PDF here

Kruse's Wednesday

2010-01-20T00:00:00.001+01:00

– by Alexandra Kruse

Fashion Week doesn’t even make sense when it’s snowy and icy. In Siberian weather, what does one wear? Fashion Week without heels? New Years Eve already ended with me stealing a pair of snow boots – it just had to happen. Uggs at Bebelplatz? Watching the shows from inside a sleeping bag, filled with the highest quality goose down? Unthinkable. My dream look would be something between between Bernhard Wilhelm’s dinosaurs and the hardcore ski outfits he showed on giant swings. But, if I had my way, I would also grow a beard, and then take a shower in glitter.
–
Should I take seriously the fact that Berlin’s fashionistas are trying turn the city’s most renowned museums (Neue Nationalgalerie and Hamburger Bahnhof) into runways? What about those spray-painted cardboard boxes that will inevitably strut down the runway, to be sold for a million Euro as special editions? Will I end up gawking like the bloggers sitting in the front row? Will Vogue be looking for a new cover girl on the internet? Can Hugo Boss find one on Facebook?
It’s all Tavi’s fault, who, after gracing the cover of Pop magazine, surpassed everyone, summiting Olympus with her lesbian hairdo and random combinations of Comme des Garcons and Rodarte. Maybe I should just grab a cotton candy wig a la Louis Vuitton made of Indian peasants’ hair and wear it with a garbage bag a la Courtney Love, in order to make sure that I show up on all the street fashion blogs, whose prints hang mostly in dentist offices in New Jersey.
–
No, no I decided to flee the city and to entertain myself in Paris. Shit, the Ritz is fully booked! Maybe I’ll just sleep in a tunnel like Diana. Besides, Men’s Fashion Week sounds totally tempting: seduction in the form of plaid shirts and tight pants. Bloody young hotties with full lips – they can thaw my frosted hands immediately. With a side of macarons and other specialties (fois gras in Derriere?). Plus-size models are totally in now anyways. Whatever I eat will be washed down with Champagne. That’s for sure. Boys, I’ll be looking for you in Le Baron. And you know I get what I want! ◊

Kruse's Saturday

2009-07-04T18:00:00.005+02:00

– by Alexandra Kruse

My last memory is of golden tinsel cascading from the ceiling of Bar Tausend. We woke up in cocktail gowns. Sarah was lying next to me and we spiked little cocktail stirrers decorated with sea horses and swans into our hair. After that, we listened to Jennifer Rush and nibbled on little berries. It is a well-known industry fact, that a fashion show that starts before noon is not a fashion show, it‘s a no-go. Anyways, some blogs revealed that Marcel Ostertag received high heel standing ovations. Too bad I had also missed the show of Lena Hoschek, a designer who finally makes fashion for people with just one defined gender. When I finally reached Bebelplatz and I saw HER! Christiane Arp. In person. Hair discreetly balled up in the most elegant petit chignon. This was no surprise, but the tattoo underneath! I couldn’t really make out what it was, because I got distracted by the random contents of the dazzling golden goody-bag by BREE: hair something, volume something, green tea, a mascara which I took for a pen (it was a mascara and a pen), a lint roller (seriously) and a votive candle holder.
–
I was still trying to decode the inner logic of these items when I bumped into my favorite photographer and his fabulous wife and we strolled to Café Einstein. Einstein serves the most incredible club sandwiches; even Mary Kate Olsen would skip her low-carb diet for a bite (but she’s in Dubai for the gaudy inauguration of The Palm). While some people were watching homeless people strut it for Patrick Mohr’s collection, we browsed shops and galleries around happy Mulackstrasse. At Kiosk we saw hand-picked vintage gowns in rainbow colors by Margiela and Chanel and an endearing little art show named “From Black Q Tip to Sashiko Embroidery - 51 Things to buy at little Nippon. Firma had these genious Gropius bags (for the Bauhaus anniversary) and free Champagne, the first of the day. I hopped over to The Corner to stare at the glistening shoes from The Wizard of OZ Ruby Slipper Collection. As the sky changed to psychedelic hues it was time once again to slip into a cocktail dress. ◊

One Job at a Time Would Burn Me Out

2009-07-04T06:00:00.024+02:00

Adriano Sack talks to Alexander Wiederin

What‘s the first thing you ask of a magazine?
Whether the content’s what the title promises. Are there interviews in Interview? Do you see people‘s features in The Face? The name is also usually the only thing I can not change, when I work for a magazine.

Do you have to read all the texts in a publication, in order to be able tojudge the layout?
Yeah. I even have the texts translated at Italian Elle. Everyone tells me, I‘m the only one who reads everything before I start designing, but I find that hard to believe.

Why do an exhibition now, and why in Berlin?
I don’t see myself as an artist. My work should stay where it belongs: in a publication. That’s why I wanted to show more than magazine pages. I made extraordinarily small editions of typography posters; they’re each only one piece. And I created a soup dish, 1,80 Meters in diameter and filled it with ca. 2300 rubber letters. It reminds me of the Alphabet Soup of my childhood, except I designed the fonts of all the letters myself. The timing made sense. I just became a father; its a good moment to look back.

Is our world more designed today than in the past?
Of course. Anyone can but a computer and download fonts and images from the internet. That is the reason I develop an original font for every publication I work for.

What’s erotic about typography?
Erotic? The most beautiful thing there is, is the power of words. The font has a supporting function. The sex is in the words themselves.

Please explain one of your fonts to me.
The font Moonwriter was actually developed for a magazine, that was supposed to be called Moon. I wanted it to be a typewriter font, cause for me the romance of old typewriters and the dream of traveling to the moon are connected. Typewriter fonts are strange hybrids. They have serifs, but very bold ones. They were originally developed to keep the line straight, cause old typewriters were mono-spaced, which means the distance between the letters was always the same. With the thick serifs and equally bold strokes, I wanted to coin a new look and create a font that functioned on a modern computer.

You are always working on multiple projects at the same time. Why is that?
If I didn’t I wouldn’t function. I’d get bored. My creations have a lot to do with reactions. Something that happens while working on one project will help me on another. I would burn out if I only had one job.

Is there an Alex Wiederin look?
No look, but hopefully a presence, a similar approach. If you have a recognizable style, you can sell yourself easier. On the other hand my clients always get something that was actually created for them.

You told me that 80 percent of your work consists of telling other people what kind of pictures they should take.
I don’t only do graphic design, I also work quite closely with photographers. I help them to see their images in a different way or to discover something new in them. Magazines communicate mostly through images these days. I’m afraid they have become more important than words.

How do you stop yourself from taking these pictures yourself?
It‘s easy. I never pick up a camera. And for the few private pictures I take I use my iPhone. The magic of photography does not lie in the technology or the equipment it’s the chemistry, that the photographer can create with his subject. I would not be as good at that as the photographers who I work with are.

Does fashion today need to be charged by art?
Of course (laughs). I find it much more interesting to name sources and inspiration, than to leave the creation to play in a dream world. There’s nothing new and there’s nothing unique. So you can just show where something comes from.

Where do you come from?
I’m from a small village in Vorarlberg called Frastanz, surrounded by big mountains. As a child I had a strange habit that people thought would be a huge developmental problem. My notebooks looked totally different in each subject because I always copied the teacher‘s handwriting from the blackboard. That made me quite popular because I was the best at forging signatures for excuses. Later I studied at Ortweinschule in Graz. My professor didn‘t really like me, because I worked on the side and won a few competitions he was in.

Who were your most important teachers?
In terms of photography the different Vogues and other fashion magazines, in terms of storytelling and layout Tempo. I learned from Neville Brody that you can do anything and everything. From Lo Breier I learned that sometimes you have to leave things in a publication that you don’t like yourself.

Which photographers opened your eyes?
As a student I was fascinated by the Old Masters like Blossfeldt, BillBrand, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton. Later I worked with what you could roughly describe as my generation of photographers: Norbert Schoerner, Mario Sorrenti, Ines van Lamsweerde, Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tilmans. They have been essential to me and they changed fashion photography and the way we see the world.

What was it like to work for Helmut Newton later?
Listening to his stories was fascinating and hysterical. The work was as
expected. For me it’s always the case that I’m more intrigued by people
before I meet them.

How has the job of the designer changed in the last few years?
There are more images than ever and they’re all at-hand. The question about a photo is, what makes you take a second look? Today there’s hardly enough time for a second look. Watch a classic film from the 30s! There are scenes when you know exactly what will happen, even if you haven’t seen the film before. What took two hours to tell back then we can sum up in twenty minutes. We’ve become a lot faster. That is the reason why we live in the most exciting time that I can imagine. The language of images is radically changing right now. You overload each picture with information and at the same time the techniques are becoming less important.

What are your criteria for a good photo?
Beauty, composition, light. Or the right idea or story. We did an issue of the magazine Big with Lauren Hutton. The picture of her that was most essential to me, we didn’t end up using, because I was the only one who saw something particular in it. It was a picture of the tiny prosthetic that she used to have to wear to conceal the gap between her two front teeth. At some point she was famous enough that the defect became a trademark. Also, context has become more important today than ever before. When you combine photos by Martin Parr and others from FlickR, nobody can see the difference. Probably not even Martin Parr himself.

How have you failed as an art director?
With Tempo. Back then I wanted to realize myself. We packed in too much. In terms of design, it’s incredibly important to set priorities. At that time I was still battling windmills. In hindsight it’s charming, the same way Don Quixote is charming, but it’s also totally crazy.

What makes you a good art director?
Doubt.

In the press relewase for your exhibition Alles Liebe you are described as someone who achieves his tasks with the help of logic.How can logic and love exist together?
I am active in communication and see myself as a problem solver. I offer a service, not artwork. I approach a new job rationally and strive for finding a systematic. Once that is done I use my gut feeling and my emotions. For me logic and love aren’t contradictory. One cannot exist without the other. ◊

Patrick Mohr Sunglasses

2009-07-04T06:00:00.022+02:00

– by Emily Segal These Patrick Mohr sunglasses look like a slide rule or a piece of motherboard. They’re just a rectangle of black plastic with two legs that hook over the eyes. Layered on top is a grid of eight red discs, like traffic lights muted mid-warning; be alarmed, they seem to say, but don‘t look. Or go ahead, stare: the kind of ambiguous challenge that typifies Patrick Mohr’s design strategy. Take Mohr’s famous clothes-hanger dresses that suspended outfits from the necks of the models walking down the catwalk – geometric armatures that acted out the idea of fashion while preventing it from actually touching the body. In contrast, these sunglasses are like snug armor for your forehead. And how does one see through the techno-mask? Through two sets of rough pin-prick holes that look like they were made by a garlic press. The whole experience feels like looking through the peephole of a camera obscura. But like Mohr’s clothes-hanger dresses, the sunglasses play a game with you: they look so enticingly ominous, you can‘t wait to put them on, but then you need to take them off again, to relieve the blindness and behold your toy anew. ◊

Rethinking Speed

2009-07-04T06:00:00.020+02:00

– by Matthew Evans Designer Martin Meier recently resurrected the ghosts of the Lamborghini Countach with a series of furniture objects inspired by the revolutionary 1974 Italian sports car. The series is epithetly titled „In Loving Memory,” drawing our attention to the car’s indispensable influence while emphasizing the appropriate tones of mourning. The Countach was a symbol of the potency and senseless vigor of design. I’m thinking of when Farrah Fawcett (R.I.P) hightails it in a black Countach in the 1981 film The Cannonball Run. She stops the car, playfully steps out in a bright red jumper and heels, and spray paints an „X” over the 55 m.p.h. speed limit sign. As she speeds off laughing, you realize just how much the car, with its Stealth Bomber look, could whip up pure sensationalism.
_
Today, however, that effect is scant. Lamborghini was once the most emblematic car for boundlessness with its design that seemed to come from nowhere but promised to take you everywhere: first appearing in 1963, it had no historical precedent to follow like its competitors Ferrari and Porsche, and it used that leverage to create a product that radiated possibility. But beneath Lamborghini’s matchless and robust confidence, there lies a long and hustled story of corporate mergers and acquisitions that includes bankruptcy and four different companies, each struggling to cope with the financial impracticalities of the machine. Earlier this year, a prominent American Lamborghini dealer had to part with a brand new Murcielago LP640 for a mere $60,000 (43,000 Euro). It’s normal market value? $387,000 (276,500 Euro). Somehow that lucky new owner could never muscle the playful gamesmanship of Fawcett – reduced-rate sensationalism for all parties. But if there’s any way to hang onto the exhilarations of Lamborghini, and particularly the Countach, it might very well be through Meier’s designs. He’s fabricated several chairs that recall the car’s extreme aesthetic without seeming gawdy. One takes its cue from the Countach’s notorious trapezoidal panels, while the cantilevered forms in several of the chairs appear updated instead of outdated with their winking reference to the car’s trademark „scissor” doors.
_
When I spoke with Meier about the work, which is currently on view at Berlin’s Appel Gallery, he ruminated over a toy model of the Countach he had as a child: „When I played with it, it never seemed practical or convenient. It was just simply culture.” Now, years after that „culture” has dwindled, we may finally be able to rediscover traces of its extravagance in Meier’s designs, which, ironically enough, are very practical and convenient. ◊

T H E - D E S I G N - I S S U E

2009-07-04T02:16:00.002+02:00

We are very proud to bring you the latest and last issue of DERZEIT, the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week newspaper of Berlin. We made the impossible possible and this couldn't have happened without a lot of people in the background. Thank you very much for believing in my dream, for making it to yours too and for working so hard to prove that Berlin is just at the beginning of its rise to a fashion capital!

Manuel Schibli
founder, editor in chief & Art director of DERZEIT

Thank you: Alice Kuhn (art direction & production), Emily Segal & Michael Ladner (managing editors,), Sebastiano Ragusa (fashion director), Sebastian Warschow (organisation, Haberlein & Mauerer), Miranda Siegel, Eva Munz, Matthew Evans, (editorial office), Adriano Sack, Alexandra Kruse, Marco Rechenberg (contributors), Stefan Milev, Nicolas Kantor (photographers), Daniel Aubke (IMG), Tobias Müller (Mercedes-Benz), Georg Roske, Lhaga Koondhor & Grace Hollaender (backstage photographers), Berliner Zeitungsdruck, all our models & background people who helped to make this happen!

The Design Issue featuring Alexander Wiederin, Martin Meier's Lamborghini and a colorful and fresh shoot by Nicolas Kantor, styled as always by our Fashion Director Sebastiano Ragusa. Please enjoy and see you next year!

download the DESIGN ISSUE here

Kruse's Friday

2009-07-03T18:00:00.000+02:00

– by Alexandra Kruse

Kids are the new handbag. It has become a totally commonplace to see them adorning the laps of front row guests, or taking bows on the catwalk like Leyla Pieyadesh‘s daughter, baby Lou. Her mom‘s show was so good that I immediately wanted to buy the entire collection. The final jacket, a Berlin realization of Michael Jackson, was particularly covetable. From this I suffered a medium hormonal rush that could only be quelled by immediate intoxication. –
The mother-son act at Wunderkind was soaked in Pimm’s. I’m not ready for the responsibility required for wearing Wunderkind’s caliber of art – the probability of me spilling a drink on the fine silk or tripping into a pile of glass shards is just too big. Luckily glasses are never empty during fashion weeks. At worst they end up shattered or placed on the curb Münzstrasse – another indicator that a lot is going on. You even have to wait on line to get into American Apparel – you can either take a number or change into your Berlin-Mitte uniform. I can‘t see another pair of leggings, except for my own, which happen to cost about ten times more than Lurex. For that money they dont shine. They‘re made up of chafed black tears. The effect is somewhere between Catwoman and a ninja. This outfit, plus a 20-pound handbag filled with press info, plus ninety degree weather makes for a Bikram sweat experience. You feel the flab melting away. The last thing I could remember eating were three strawberries, so I was delighted when I was served Currywurst in the Mercedes-Benz Sponsors Lounge. Suzy Menkes enjoyed one as well. I got hungrier and the events got more stressful, but I managed to employ my last bit of energy to look at a wonderful pair of Kostas Murkudis shoes for Flip Flop. Then I made it across the street to Mädchenitaliener. My savior. I sat there all lined up with my friends like pearls on a necklace– each one cuter than the last. We were talking about having babies when it began raining outside. The trigger: a bunch of toddlers jumping in the gathering puddles. They were ignorant of fashion, wearing folded newspaper hats. ◊

T H E - A R T - I S S U E

2009-07-03T08:17:00.004+02:00

We are back with our third issue and there is only one more to go. How the days fly by. We met the promising american art duo AIDS3d and chatted with Lala Berlin. For the jewelry shoot Alice Kuhn climbed up the Bismark monument, one of the most beautiful statues around Berlin. Helmut Newtons book Sumo celebrated its comeback and there is aswell the Catwalk review Page.

download the ART ISSUE here

Aids 3D

2009-07-03T06:00:00.095+02:00

Michael Ladner talks to AIDS 3D

How did you meet?
I (Daniel) was born very close to the Summer equinox and he (Nik) was born very close to the Winter equinox. This professor was like, you should collaborate. This was before we had anything in common. We had opposite strategies for getting problems solved. it was really eerie.

Do you believe in fate, considering your birthdays fall on opposite equinoxes?
We believe in The Secret and self-actualization. The Secret posits, that if you believe something, it will come true. You visualize what you want to have happen and it becomes reality. For example, we were like, we have to get a show at the New Museum, and one day we were talking about it a bunch and then this email came and said we were in.

What do you think is more important for technological advancement, space exploration or deep sea exploration?
Space travel! But we don‘t think thats the right axis, its should be either inner-space or outer-space. Before we can even explore space we have to achieve ultimate computing, which means reaching the smallest possible matter, like nano-technology. Once that happens, it will sort of turn everything in the world into a computer. And then once you run out of space by doing that, there’s a necessity to go to other planets.

How does the planet become one big computer?
It starts by the internet becoming self-aware. Then we have to give up our bodies. and then everything gets smaller and smaller and denser and denser. And then you have the computronium.

Computronium?
Thats the term for the ultimate computing substrate at the densest physical level. Zero time to send a bit. It‘s similar to Platonic idea of god. Its kinda inconceivable.

Whats the ideology of AIDS-3D?
That technological advancement is supremely important. Its a sacrifice for individuals; its kinda fascist. It’s like there is one goal and the goal is to create artificial life. Its actually not that fascist, but it isn’t socialist. It’s technocratic.

Is that the goal of your art, to publicize the positive aspects of technological development?
Not so dogmatically. I think we just want it to be discussed a little more neutrally than it is in The Terminator.

How would you use AI?
It‘s a good art tool.

What kind of technological developments do you think will influence fashion?
Wearable video screens. Increasing trends for smart everything: a flower vase will have to have a duel function as a computer. I think with clothes it will also have duel functions, like recycling electricity. Also integrating machines. Like sunglasses that have a heads up display. A laptop thats right on your skin. Do implants count as fashion?
How are you constrained by money?
We wanted to make some anamatronic stuff, like a Grace Jones robotic head. But that was gonna cost 50K.

Can you talk a bit about why you moved to Berlin?
We were doing this laser scanning job in Chicago. Which is really cool. It creates 3D models of building interiors. You can calculate to the nano-inch how much paint you neet etc. So anyway we were doing that and thought we were gonna go on a laser scanning journey. But it fell through. We were like fuck that, and we had already applied to an exchange programs in Europe, so we decided to do that.

Where?
We were deciding between London and Berlin. We decided Berlin cause we like Germans; we like their reputation.

Can you clarify that?
I don’t know, they’re just so intense. They‘ve gotten so many things done for good and evil.

How did you end up at Städl?
Some friend of ours recommended it and we were like, we need to stay in Germany. We heard the reputation and then Mark Leckey actually chose us. So that was a nice feeling cause hes a cool artist. He just won the Turner Prize. But we didnt really spend that much time together.

Art has expanded extensively into the internet. What kind of possibilities will the internet provide for fashion?
Selling shit, distribution. For us thats the best thing the internet has done to art. Yes it’s a new venue, but the best thing about it is that its a linked network that allows you to connect. That created a presence for us that was not at all related to our success. All the sudden we had a destination and people were going there. You can externalize your ego and make it into this beacon. So designers could do the same.

Would you like to work with designers making clothing?
Sure, yeah. We’d like to do that. I mean technology, and the tools of design are so smooth now and so easy that you dont need to become a master of something to express yourself. In basically every medium, you just collaborate with someone who has a little bit of expertise and you delegate and then all of the sudden: poof! It appears. We think it’s a responsibility that artists have these days because it’s so easy to collaborate. Artists should work in as many media as possible and spread their ideas.

Can you tell me about your current work?
We have an idea for a public sculpture. There’s this thing called distributed computing. It’s a screen saver where you download information from a big server and it networks a bunch of computers around the world together into this super computer. So SETI uses this to process radio telescope data to look for alien life. Other programs do simulations for AIDS drugs. We want to make a public monument sort of like Stonehenge. Megalithic servers which are actively solving these problems. AIDS is one example; it could be cancer or Parkinsons. All the topics that distributed computing works on are termed „grand challenge computing.“ Like really big social problems that we need to solve.

Utilitarian art?
I think that’s a trend that we’re exploring in our work: an earnestness. The compromise that computers still take up physical space, art maybe doesn’t. But then, if you combine the two, there‘s a compromise: a sculpture that is a computer.

But you were talking earlier about the fascist nature of technological advancement, how do you reconcile this with the trend of social awareness in your art?
Well it‘s just socially positive. Does the sculpture do anything? Yes. You can calculate the amount of megabytes of good that it has done. You can have a website where you see how much data this sculpture has calculated. It quantifies a positive thing. We could make art about our personal experiences but there are also these greater issues like starvation, war. Most art is really impotent. This may sound heavy handed, but this art is actually socially positive.

Tell me about your upcoming exhibition at Montgomery.
Its our first solo show in Berlin. There’s this piece that we made, where we ordered a meteorite with a specific weight from a website called catchafallingstar.com. The meteorite weighs exactly 50.907 Grams on the digital scale. When you reverse the scale it spells out the word logos. The word logos means to derive things, but it can also mean the divine organizing force. The organizing force known as logos, is a paradoxical side effect of entropy, but not its opposite. While energy is spent, matter is simultaneously organized into more efficient and dense forms. Sort of like a spiritual DNA. So its a lot about looking to space for these cosmic meanings and looking for symbols that aren’t really there. Like, all of the sudden a meteorite falls from the sky and because we don‘t have total understanding of what it means we take it as an omen. But it’s basically the same thing as a calculator that spells out boobies when you turn it upside-down. It’s the same effect but with a smart word. ◊

Kruse's Thursday

2009-07-02T18:00:00.005+02:00

– by Alexandra Kruse

Staying at home is the new luxury. While everyone else amuses themselves at the Vice Party, stands on line for hours in front of Bar 25 or ruins their high heels at the Boss Orange barbecue, we‘re at home on our green couch smoking joints and telling secrets. I‘ve seen it all these last days: dwarfs in wrestling masks stripping at a second-class sneaker presentation, displaying their dwarfed weenies. That ended up being just the right event to go to with my host family in Berlin. We slept in the next day anyhow. Unfortunately I didn‘t make it to Michael Sontag–the boy‘s got talent! Also didn‘t make it to Penkov. But, after an exclusive backstage viewing of the dresses, I can definitively say, that this a great look: grown up elves of beauty and mind. If I happen to get married next season, it‘s gotta be in Penkov. Hats off to Bernadette!

–
What happened next was anything but delightful. I was hustled into a front row seat at Kilian Kerner, who can appropriately be called a young designer. He actually admits he‘s a fan of the Kelly Family. I was luckily seated next to the actor getting the most media attention, and was blinded by the paparazzi flash storm. So I could only partially see the show. Everyone else was hacking at their Blackberrys looking serious. The whole thing made absolutely no sense. The models wore silk stockings with cheap peeptoes! You cannot over-emphasize the importance of a good stylist. And the right shoes. No man is an island. I was so proud of my friend Sarah, who styled the Peek & Cloppenburg show Designer for Tomorrow, that I almost burst. I officially decree that the winner, Sam, will have a golden career. We celebrated his victory on the roof terrace of the Hotel de Rome (don‘t tell anyone, but in addition to the breath-taking view, it has the most pristine woman‘s bathroom in the city). We left immediately after the last drop of champagne had been poured. After a quick change of clothes, and finishing up my work, life will become post-fashion week, as it was pre-fashion week. Paul, you can pick me and my suitcase up at Panorama Bar on Sunday afternoon. Don‘t forget the limo! ◊

Remembrance of Things Past

2009-07-02T18:00:00.003+02:00

– by Michael Ladner When you die, you will most likely be either buried or cremated.
Then you get a headstone, or you simply blow away. These institutions of remembering the dead reinforce the gloom and solitude attached to our established fear of death. This fear is what most people try to battle by achieving fame. Anything to be remembered.
The Swiss company Algodanza offers a twenty-first century novelty for memorialization: flashy, high-end diamonds, forged from the carbon remains of your loved one. But doesn‘t the mystifying allure of a diamond lie not in its „beauty,“ but rather in the frigidity of crystallization? Even here, the Todesangst is reflected by an attempt at imitating individual immortality.
The German writer/artist/theorist Ingo Niermann has conceived of a tomb for all people, a collective, democratic place of rest. The Great Pyramid Monument is constructed from personal gravestones containing the remains or whatever the person wishes to be remembered by. Each stone is the same size. Inherent in this ancient architectural form is its ability to steadily expand without degrading the shape. So sky is the limit in terms of size.
The idea is analogous to Rem Koolhaas‘s proposal for a European flag as a barcode made up of individual countries‘ flags. New members of the Union can always be added onto the whole, while retaining individual identity, rather than being signified by an anonymous star in a alienating sea of blue. No wonder Koolhaas is the president of the jury board of Friends of the Great Pyramid Monument.
But more intriguing than the magnitude of the project is its innovative take on memorialization. Rather than compartimentalizing the deceased into plots or receptacles, which have classically been further divided by cultural hegemony or religious belief, the Great Pyramid Monument brings our remains together, regardless of creed. Death is no longer confined to the blackness of a coffin; rather, it radiates the plurality of the human race while providing a spectacle in public space for the living to enjoy.  – Michael Ladner

T H E – A R C H I T E C T U R E – I S S U E

2009-07-02T08:05:00.004+02:00

It's 8 o'clock in the morning and the last file is on it's way to the printer. We've got a lot of positive feedback on the first day and we promise you, this was only the beginning. Issue no. 2 / Architecture brings you a experimental yet beautiful editorial featuring clothes from Marcel Ostertag to Arkadius Giesek, shot by the talented Nicolas Kantor. Don't miss the interview of Young Berlin Architects nOffice at page nr. 6!
From now on, as the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin is running, you will find a catwalk review including pictures with all the highlights of yesterday regularly on page nr. 7. Lhaga Khondoor, our nightlife and streetstyle expert arrived yesterday just to hit the street just a few minutes after landing in the capital.
Enjoy the beautiful day & catch some Berlin sun. Please feel free to get in touch with us, let us know what u like about DERZEIT or what you might do differently.

download the ARCHITECTURE ISSUE here

Give me Dirt - More Than This

2009-07-02T06:00:00.081+02:00

Eva Munz talks to nOffice

The name of your office suggests on the one hand that it doesn’t exist and on the other that it is just like any other office. What was the true intention?
Truth does not exist. After spending far too much time wondering about a name, we decided to outsource the decision-making process. The Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist then decided we should be nOffice.

You are located in Berlin, but it seems that the location is really random.
True. Apart from two small projects we aren’t currently working on any building projects here. In 2008, we decided that after living in London, we needed a location in which the office could grow. Architecture is a hara-kiri business: You work like crazy and produce only marginal economies. In Berlin at least there‘s flexibility in regards to an economy, in which you can live more comfortably. The decision to leave London did not change the way we work on international projects. Quite the contrary: We tend to waste less time in Berlin than we used to do in London.

You work with Ralf Pflugfelder and Magnus Nilsson. How do you split your work?
nOffice is what I would call a complementary practice: Each individual within the office has qualities that the others don’t have. However, there is no hierarchy in terms of decision-making at all. Each conceptual design is the result of a collaborative process. We tend to get our architectural commissions through this stream of parallel investigation.

What are you working on at the moment?
We are currently working on a series of archive and library projects–one in northeast Brazil and one in Switzerland–and we are about to embark on a long–term spatial project regarding archival practice in Berlin. For the last four years, we have been increasingly interested how knowledge can be accumulated, both physically and virtually. At the crossroads of those two domains, we are developing an archive and cultural center with Hans Ulrich Obrist.
We are also working on a pavilion for New York’s Performa Biennial, an exhibition of architecture for the Shenzhen Biennial (China) and a penthouse in Cologne. More interesting than the individual projects may be our obsession with the way in which knowledge production can influence spatial practice.
The Renaissance Man has been rendered passé, but the varied nature of projects, opportunities, and collaborations that arise through Edward Said’s notion of ‘the ideal intellectual who works from the margin’ allows for an architecture understood as a space that is constructed among political realities, social networks and physical structures. The demand to go beyond a certain field of knowledge inevitably makes the architectural practitioner a polymath by necessity.

Is it frustrating as an architect as opposed to a fashion designer that the product of your profession has this inevitable permanence? That you cannot change a house every season? Put it somewhere else?
Architecture is a practice of continuous delay. Quite often projects take so long that, by the end, you cannot remember how they started. Architecture is certainly, as you mention, a profession of frustration. Projects often die and before you know it, you are looking at a mass grave of unfinished projects, or ‚unrealized projects‘ as Hans Ulrich Obrist would call them. On a more positive note, let’s talk about your point regarding permanence: not every architectural project necessarily has a conscious permanence. I would argue that the more interesting ones actually don’t, or at least they embody the potential for change over time and in terms of utility.

Are there strategies to avoid that stasis? Advantages?
Cedric Price was a master to circumvent stasis. However, I would never rule out either way. Practitioners tend to become very dogmatic. Their world turns into black and white, good and bad, aesthetically pleasing and goddamn ugly. Within this paradigm, the other’s position is always a priori ruled out. We don’t like to close doors. Every project is different. Every situation requires dissimilar approaches. We would get super-bored if every project were physical, had permanence, and an easy brief.

You are constantly travelling the globe, teaching, consulting, writing. Is theory a way–your way–out of this dilemma?
Theory should never be a way out, but maybe and hopefully a different way back in. Teaching tends to be a good testing ground for ideas that in reality would simply not work or that nobody would pay for. I am curious. If I am interested in something, I pursue it. My way out of a dilemma is precisely not to understand it as a dilemma but as an opportunity. We are working with the most interesting people in the arts, architecture, and cultural production globally. Beyond that, I don’t think I could live in Berlin if I had to be fully based here, it is too provincial.

When was the last time you were really excited about a piece of architecture?
There is a private residence, a house in Zürich, which was built in the sixties by the now 82-year old Swiss brutalist Hans Demarmels. In terms of a residential spatial experience this was truly one of the most interesting ones, as it takes the idea of open plan and flips it into the vertical. It is also intriguing, as it by now has been tarnished by a patina of more than 40 years of inhabitation. There was a great film produced about OMA’s Bordeaux House for last year’s Venice Architecture Biennial in which the cameraman follows the cleaning lady through the house, while she is commenting on the insufficiencies and lack of performance of the architecture. It is an utterly superb film. Everyone who is interested in design should watch it. I also loved the Palast der Republik before they disassembled it. There was something totally beautiful about the fact that the building wasn’t knocked down, but almost taken apart, like you would disassemble a tent. To be honest, I am more interested in urban experiences than in individual architectures. The most amazing ones for me so far have been Sao Paulo and Cairo.

When was the last time you were profoundly shocked?
When my doctor cut a cancerous growth out of my left arm last year.

What does the house you grew up in mean to you? Does the room in which you played as a kid still exist?
A lot. It has become a safe haven and retreat. It is home. My room still exists. And my parents are doing a good job making it more pleasurable every year. The most interesting moment was the time when my parents got a post-kids-leaving dog. It totally changed the architecture and spatial use of the entire house and garden.

Listen to „In Every Dream Home a Heartache“ by Roxy Music and tell me what you think.
There is something odd in the belief of newness. Last night when I walked my panther down Tottenham Court Road, I was wondering why the wheel needs to be reinvented over and over again. It reminds me that I cannot do architecture for architecture’s sake. It incredibly bores me when thinking of physical matter in space. Give me dirt. More Than This. Come with me in my Alfa Romeo Iguana. ◊
_
More about the various Projects of nOffice:
www.nOffice.eu
www.studiomiessen.com

R E A D I N G - D E R Z E I T

2009-07-02T03:08:00.004+02:00

Kruse's Wednesday

2009-07-01T18:00:00.011+02:00

– by Alexandra Kruse

As always, everything began harmlessly. Drank a coffee on the street in a pink nightie. It was gonna get hot. Then the phone started ringing and it didn‘t stop. Where should the seating tickets be sent? Was I on the list, if so, the right ones? Lots of little girls who had been honored with the job of checking the lists by phone, in hope of one day becoming the bigger, nastier girls, who get to make the lists themselves. „We look forward to seeing you,“ they lied, „we‘ll try our best.“ I believed them, and then I started losing my shit. I still had to get on AB 8211, which was leaving the Zurich airport in exactly one hour, heading for the Fernsehturm, with or without me. I needed a driver ready to risk our lives for my flight. I rewarded him with an apricot tart; the right driver means everything.
–
We made it, of course. My punishment was airport security. I was pulled out of the line by a 250 pound woman who discovered cause of the whole mess with her equally oversized metal detector: the soles of my Bottega Veneta sandals. She let me go. I doused myself with a bit of Eau de Sisley 2 to freshen up, and was overcome by the anticipation of everything to come. Happy landing. As if it couldn‘t get better, my driver, Paul, was already waiting for me at Tegel, sign bearing my name in hand. Paul greeted me with a brand new E-Class Benz Coupé, the gentleman of limousines. Seated comfortably in the back seat, I started sorting the 240 invitations by like, dislike, drinks, designers, sneakers, line-up and catering. The result was a merciless schedule. We stopped at Aldi to pick up a case of Champagne, just in case, and drove on to Torstrasse. Then Paul carried my 50 pound suitcase up to the fifth floor without pausing. I was ready to go. Drykorn was nice enough to invite Mando Diau and me to the Columbiahalle. Finally when „Dance with Somebody“ came on, we could throw our hands in the air and take off our T-shirts. Then the sky went black and it began to storm. I went to bed early; most likely for the last time this week. Suzy Menkes is finally in the city. And at last Fashion Week is a big deal. ◊

T H E – F A S H I O N – I S S U E

2009-07-01T09:06:00.004+02:00

We are very proud to bring you the first issue of DERZEIT (wednesday 1.7.09), the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Daily Newspaper:
Featuring emerging photographer talent Stefan Milev, an exclusive interview with Kai Kühne, the fabulous Ayzit Bostan and and and. Please note that you will also find all the information you need and as a first issue special a complete map of all the different hotspots of the upcoming 4 days. So grab you personal issue at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week tent at Bebelsplatz and various Locations all over Berlin.

download the FASHION ISSUE here

Kai Kühne

2009-07-01T06:00:00.006+02:00

Adriano Sack talks to Kai Kühne

Kai Kühne: Here is a picture of the Ennis House that Frank Lloyd Wright built in Los Angeles. I’m shooting my campaign there tomorrow. The location was used in „Blade Runner.“ When you go to Falling Water it’s so classical-modernist, but in Ennis House you realize that this guy knew about the early landing points of extraterrestial intelligence. But Im not supposed to talk about this, because I’m not ...what’s his name: Pierre Cardin?

Paco Rabbane.
We met in Milan and had a wonderful conversation...

About Frank Lloyd Wright?
He had a retrospective exhibition six years ago with DIY dresses at Corso Como. I don’t think he’s more crazy than other designers, just that they‘re more tightly controlled by their PR people.

I watched the Marc Jacobs documentary last night and it was so depressing. Especially after seeing the Valentino movie.
That was such a personal movie. Well edited, but the emotions shine through in every minute. Like me being obsessed with my dog. I was just in Vienna for the Life Ball. Since I did not take my dog I would talk to all the dogs on the street. And all these teutonic owners would call me off: „Das ist mein Hund!“ We stayed at the Imperial, where Bill Clinton was staying as well.

What did he wear for the Life Ball?
I think just a tuxedo. But the next day I saw him in the most intense light lime green suit with a peach shirt. He looked like he was on his way to a very fun event in Palm Springs. I complimented him on his outfit in the lobby. He seemed pleased. I really enjoyed the architecture, the details, the ornaments in Vienna. After the life ball I just walked the streets. The next morning I attended a service in the Dom.

Are you catholic?
No. But I do believe in God.

What’s your favourite church to hang out in?
I enjoyed the Berliner Dom the day after the tsunami: We had a great show. And I actually really like the Michel in Hamburg. There is something special about this nordic, German baroque: symmetrical, clean, crisp. I like oxymorons. Intricate simplicity is what I like to say about my own work.

So how did you find the Ennis House?
I knew about it for a long time. When I came to New York, after modelling, I studied design, art history and interior design. Frank Lloyd Wright was one of my assignments. I think the whole design of the city in „Blade Runner“ is based on this house.

Why does it fit to your aesthetic?
And this season? Again: intricate simplicity.

Don’t ride it to death!
Well, I have to put my stamp on it (laughs). Originally I wanted to shoot at Rockefeller Center. The inspiration for this season came from the movie „Metropolis.“ Women shot from below. The urban nightmare of concrete but in a very modernist, organized way. The Ennis House embodies the same architectural grandness and both refer to very ancient, vaguely Egyptian forms. Classic modernism was the last time in history when the world moved with the advancements of technology in perfect accordance: art, architecture, science, fashion. This fascinates me and influences my work. I want to take the traditional craft of clothes-making and transform it into something futuristic.

Last season one of your offical muses was the artist Rita Ackermann. Is she the women you have in mind when you design or just a person that inspires you?
I don’t have one specific woman in mind but some sort of an Überwoman. It’s myself plus...

Tits?
Plus whatever I admire in women. Some comes from my mother. I’ve been in Manhattan long enough and am Woody-Allen-ish enough to admit that my mother is a major influence.

We met 17 years ago at a club called Front in Hamburg. How have you changed since then?
I changed my perfume. I used to wear „Patchouli Reminiscence“ for a long time. Now I wear a mix from Comme des Garcons No. 2 and something called Escentric Molecules, an English brand. You don’t really smell it, but it makes you attractive to people. I also scent my shows with it. That’s why the reviews have been so good lately. It works like ecstasy.

What is German in your work?
I don’t want to limit German to certain qualities or cliches. My clothes are very punctual, always on time. Or a little too early. There is a certain strictness. Organization. Concentration.

Explain one of the key pieces you are showing in Berlin.
Take this dress. It is based on an image by the Italian architect firm Superstudio. A gigantic construction imposed on downtown New York - the white attack on Manhattan. I used to laugh about art as a reference for fashion. But now I think it is a question of how intelligently you do it. The dress interprets the Superstudio image in a very different way. Not copying it but applying the same underlying idea.

The image looks like an attack on Wall Street. Are you responding to your own fantasies or to what’s going on in the world?
I am referential but not literal. I am not making any direct comment on or translation of the financial market meltdown but I guess I react to it in a more subtle way. Or I anticipate it. Now it gets a little freaky: Long before we learned about the economic disaster we’ve found ourselves in right now, I was working on some sort of postapocalyptic look. The chic lady after the breakdown. The glamourous survivor with burnt down hair. In Berlin the styling will be much lighter and colorful. Heavily influenced by that old documentary about Issac Mizrahi: „Unzipped“ - the girls are happy, healthy, smiling, bouncing around. Look at this (pulls out the pistil of a white lily): this green will be the nails, and the lips will be in this orange-y curry.

Who owns Kai Kuehne?
Me. 100 %.

How are you doing on the German market?
We‘re in a couple of key stores but definitely potential of growth. That’s why I‘m coming to Berlin.

What music are you going to play at your show?
We‘re still working on it. I want to use house from that period when it became pretty acid-y shortly before it fell apart into very deep house and into tragic techno. It was very white house. I suffered through that period because I felt that something was dying.

Old things have to die, right?
But there is nothing wrong with a tear. Don’t give me a pill, let me enjoy my Melancholie. ◊

Overall Valley - Lala Berlin

2009-07-01T06:00:00.003+02:00

– Eva Munz Leyla Piedayesh has single-handedly answered all my unspoken prayers with the creation of this jumpsuit. The overalls fit right into the script of my science-fiction art/porn movie: Chandigarh-69. The main character is an alpha-worker in the fictional corporate federation DubaiDusseldorf.
Exactly – She's designing a replica of the Twin Towers, albeit bigger and better. The genetically enhanced underling-laborers she supervises worship her like a Goddess. Why? Because she looks amazing in the dark, silky-snug one-piece by Lala Berlin aptly entitled "Overall Valley" (a subtle play on the underrated women’s lib novel, "Valley of the Dolls," and the Freudian notion of the polymorphic perverse: valley everywhere). She also outsmarts all the Federati Nomenclatura with her light-speed cognition, and also stars in deft sexual stimulation programs, which are broadcast directly into their laborers' hives.
But that’s besides the point. It is the aesthetics of “Overall Valley,” the subtle folds around the shoulders, the neckline that plunges to the navel, the black that’s never black because of its reflective luminescence. This one piece is a Russian doll of subconscious projections: There’s only one layer you need to take off to be naked (assuming that you chose to forego undies), you can fly a plane in it (and thus be close to God), you can fix a car in it (and impress the dykes on bikes if you don’t care about ruining the silk), or you can just be a lethargic fashion idiosyncratic (where you radically buy three pairs of the one item you require each season). APC did one for summer, it was made of cotton and it was blue. It just didn’t cut it. Lala does.

A Stalker Tale

2009-07-01T06:00:00.001+02:00

– by Emily Segal „Sandra D“ is my all-time favorite celebrity stalker.
Over the course of five years she repeatedly threatened to kill Jil Sander (and Sander’s wife, Dickie Mommsen), in writing and over the phone, convinced as she was that they were destined to be together. In 2006, Sandra D was sentenced to 6 months in prison, despite the fact that no German anti-stalking laws existed at the time. It’s simple to understand. First comes the crass, easy part: Jil Sander is a babe. She’s hot and gay and industrial-strength. Then there‘s my sympathy for any chemical imbalance masterly enough to generate headlines like the Times UK’s May 2006 „Gay Stalker Threatened to Kill Queen of Fashion.“
But Sandra D is stationed firmly in my pantheon in part because of the subtlety of choosing Sander as a stalkee, and in part because of a connection I’ve installed myself: between the act of stalking, of seeing without being seen, and Jil Sander’s own menacing aesthetic. Though it might not seem menacing at first, there’s something scary in Sander‘s revolt against ornament: the extreme modesty of all those cashmere zwiebel-layers, nipped close to the wrist and neck. It’s the figure of a business woman with the core of a bondage-y nun; look, but you won’t really see. Sander’s austerity is the kind that goes a hair too far. The moment where extreme modesty, in a dialectic flick, becomes an uncanny kind of sexy, motors Sander‘s (feminine) power – the same power she imparted famously to Angela Merkel and which lives on in the current Sander franchise.
I guess Sandra D must be back on the streets, standing near the counter at a Jil Sander store, fingering the fringe of Raf Simons’s new leather bags. As for Sander, she chills in Wilmersdorf or Hamburg, somewhere on the recluse spectrum between Pynchon and Lauryn Hill. I hear she really loves to garden. ◊

DERZEIT #1 ARRIVES TOMORROW

2009-06-30T22:02:00.001+02:00

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin begins tomorrow, 1 July, and so does DERZEIT! Look for it at the Mercedes-Benz tent at Bebelplatz, the PREMIUM showrooms, and many other locations.

N I G H T S H I F T

2009-06-30T22:00:00.001+02:00

DERZEIT office, 5am