Meet the Masters Part III

Origin: Austria
Age: 29
Collection: Rock Me Amadeus (men’s)

We’re intrigued by the fact that your collection references ‘Rock Me Amadeus’, because it’s one of the best video clips ever.
That’s music to my ears. I’m from Vienna so I grew up with the singer, Falco, everywhere. We were crazy about him. I like rock and roll music, that’s my passion, therefore it seemed obvious to me. 

Is it Falco’s craziness that appeals to you?
More his music…He’s very distinguished, very blasé, when he sings in German. It’s his way of delivering German with a French attitude. And the fact that within his song he sings about Mozart as a rock and roll star. It’s reworking the fact that there’s this person within my culture who created outstanding music in the Baroque period. In Vienna we like tradition and I think with this song Falco was able to appreciate its cultural heritage by creating new music.

How does it relate to the collection’s theme?
For the collection I really wanted to work with music and include this rock and roll spirit that I love in fashion as well. I was writing an essay about Zazou, this youth culture movement in ‘40s Paris, and I thought wow, there are these young kids with this lifestyle drinking beers in bars, putting on their music and dancing as a protest. Super. I build up my research around rebellion.

Origin: Latvia
Age: 30
Collection: +371 (women’s)

What’s the back-story of your collection?
Its title is +371, which is the international calling code before Latvian phone numbers. It’s a personal visualisation arising from the search for identity through the eyes of Generation Y – my generation – because I grew up without social media, without the internet, in the middle of a forest. Last year I had a year away from school and was in New York working in a big company when I started having these sentimental feelings about the times I had when I was kid, when I was 3 years old and I was helping my mum to knit on a knitting machine. It’s more about the feelings and the fragments of my memory, and I want to show the ethnic costumes, the details and the knits I remember from then. 

How did you go about ordering these memories?
Maybe the way I work is more spontaneous than planned, and in the beginning quite chaotic. It’s like creating a painting: you start with something and I like the idea that I don’t know how it’s going to end. But all the details and everything I work with – I work with knit, crochet, embroideries and baskets rolled together with metal – it was about trying to see how I could take these materials from the ethnic costumes of my childhood and make them work nowadays. 

It’s a very personal collection…
It’s really personal and it’s interesting that when I was a kid I was always looking to go outside because we didn’t have the internet or even a phone. And when I was in this big city I was looking back on how nice it was actually to be connected with nature. For Latvians it’s all about nature, we know every leaf, how to make tea, water and juice from the trees. We relax in the sauna. It’s nice. I had so many great memories. I wasn’t bored and it was the opposite of following fast fashion in a way – life was about being present. 

Origin: South Korea
Age: 27
Collection: MA’s cooler (women’s)

Tell us about your collection…
It actually comes from a realistic expression of the phrase ‘it’s cool, I’m just chilling’. I interpreted this phrase in two ways, theses interpretations are distantly related and present clear imagery. They are intertwined and create a poetic collection. For three years in this school I really couldn’t enjoy myself. Something to do with my work and processing things somehow didn’t fit. So for this year my mind set was ‘let’s enjoy all the work, be cool and chill about it, and enjoy myself away from the pressure and stress’, almost like a holistic theme. It actually hasn’t really worked out, but it started like that!

How does that play into the collection?
The overall atmosphere of the collection is coldness and the images of a chilly winter that we often imagine, such as winter hiking, and scenes of ice and snow. It’s largely based on winter hiking clothes –outdoor looks. Also the coldness can describe my loneliness and longing for my family and friends in Korea as an international student studying in a foreign country. The ‘chill’ factor on the other hand relates to something I do when I am home alone – there’s this focus on the sofa in my collection, because that’s where I chill most of the time. I was thinking about what I’m doing when I have some spare time, just sitting on the sofa and watching TV, reading comic books or home training. A sofa in my flat always instantly makes me feel relaxed. But it also changes its form over time, like I do. So I’ve combined all these things but focused on the coldness.