What is good or bad taste? The recurring question was pertinent in developing our fifth collection titled “Fantasia”. As John Waters said, “To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.” In 1931, Josef Frank explained “The new architecture will be born of the whole bad taste of our period.” It is important to embrace all aspects of culture - high and low, good and bad. For us, Fantasia is a dreamscape where the two are interchangeably connected and can coexist.
Incorporating images of strangely aesthetic everyday stuff like covers of tabloids, auction catalogues of celebrity estates, self-help books, trivial tv shows, or Ikea furniture points to the fantasy we wanted to create - a humorous fever dream. For that matter – the primarily black collection with bright contrasting colors and the new polka-dot tie “Twister” referring to the Milton Bradley game that “ties you up in knots“ can be seen as the recipe for our Fantasia.
In our campaign featuring the German painter Andreas Schulze, the line between reality and fantasy are blurred as he encounters an array of fantastic characters, and wonders whether he is in a dream: “Ich soll immer aufräumen.”, “I get paranoia, there‘s someone behind me”.
Schulze‘s work masterfully blurs this line between reality and fantasy, and can be seen as turning something ordinary into something fantastic or imaginary—like a normal stuffed teddy bear coming to life—the story becomes a fantasy. Andreas modeled in our first collection in 2019. He is a friend and an inspiration. For this reason we chose to celebrate Andreas for this collection. The synergy felt natural and fun. All together it makes up our new collection “Fantasia.”