The design duo “Don’t Shoot the Messengers” consists of New Zealand-born fashion and costume designer Kyle Callanan and Canadian-born Jennifer Gilpin. They mostly design in black. But within each garment, there are conceptually compelling shades of grey. Originally called Garter & Asp, a name that invokes a harmless snake along with one that is lethally poisonous, the line aimed to create elegant yet subversively sexy garments. Although such juxtapositions are less explicit in their current incarnation, Gilpin and Callanan still marry tense and symbolically charged materials in their monochromatic, geometric and innovatively cut garments. When not pleating Beyonce’s crotch and styling Shakira during the MTV European Music Awards, they create sculptural, sharp and sensual designs in their Berlin-Mitte studio. We sit on their stairs recuperating from colds, sipping tea and talking while they prepare to present their A/W 2010 collection, a new denim and jersey line and a few menswear looks to be presented at .HBC’s “Designer Scouts” group catwalk show on January 21.
sleek: I was thinking of you today because I’m re-reading Bukowski’s “The Postman” and he keeps talking about how aggressive people are to their postal messengers. That can’t be the origin of your name, right?
JG: Actually, it started at a branding workshop. We were brainstorming and we kept coming up with paradoxical imagery like molten metals. Next thing, we were talking about mercury and then we got to Mercury, the Greek messenger god. So that brought us to talking about you can’t shoot Mercury. We like the metaphor of mercury, so beautiful and mysterious, but if you go to touch it, it moves away from your hand, some things are describable, unable to be defined, and when you try the thing itself changes.
KC: “Don’t Shoot the Messengers” is a Shakespeare quote that almost everyone uses at one point or another.
sleek: Are you the endangered messengers or are your wearers messengers too? Are you for or against them?
JG: You are the messengers when wearing the clothes. Messages are part of our everyday life, more and more we write to each other sending bits of information across the wires.
KC: Whenever you put on your outfit for the day, you are sending a message to society.
sleek: It just sounds like the underlying symbolic meaning of all fashion. Fashion either protects against the elements or makes a statement, or optimally both.
KC: We do both.
sleek: Speaking of doing both, are dichotomies always inherent to what you do?
JG: Pulling ourselves in two directions is how we work. Heavy and light; hard and soft.
KC: We work with surprise and curiosity. We pull together new ideas from combining two elements.
sleek: Leather seems like a signature for you. It is one of the most inherently loaded and contradictory fabrics. Any dead thing can be either very luxurious or really feral and rugged. Fur can either be Bonfire of the Vanities or a caveman’s bonfire party.
KC: And synthetics are gross. We only use natural everything. We use leathers and silks and only fabrics that come from nature. The way that we work is very organic too.
JG: We do not plan and artificially arrange things. We don’t just sit down and decide whether to draw pants or something else. We play off of each other. We oppose each other, and pull each other, generally working towards an ending we can both be satisfied with. We work on it all together until it works out. Kylie does the patterns and I do much of the sewing but we’re pretty much together, ideas wise. We’re on the same page.
www.dont-shoot-the-messengers.com
Images by Maxime Ballesteros
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