Berlin newcomers ACHTLAND held their first runway show at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin last night, and won lots of new fans with their high-end ready to wear creations. The SS 2014 collection featured a colour palette of blue gradients on frayed silk, some yellow highlights and a variety of intricate, embroidered details. Sleek met up with the duo behind ACHTLAND, Oliver Lühr and Thomas Bentz, to find out more about the brains behind the charming collection:
Sleek: The show seemed eclectic and coherent at the same time, which is also reflected in the name you gave the collection, Prinzhorn’s Finches. What inspired it? Oliver: We went to the Prinzhorn collection in Heidelberg, a private collection of outsider art from the 1920s. And to counter, or complement this source, we looked into show birds, which gave the collection its colours.
Thomas: the collection embodies the notion of freethinking, but also compulsions, obsessions and minute details. Then on the other hand, there are the birds…
How did you find out about the Prinzhorn art collection? Thomas: We encountered one artwork from the collection by chance, and started digging deeper. Then we went to Heidelberg and were allowed to research the archive.
Oliver: In the archive, you have to put on these white gloves to look at hundred-year-old books with fine drawings. It’s very different from the fashion world, where everything has such a short life span. It was a great experience.
Where exactly would one recognize influences from the outsider art collection in your clothes? Thomas: Many central figures of Impressionism and Dadaism knew the collection and were obviously influenced by it. Kirchner, Ernst… they all knew the work catalogue well. In terms of art history, it was sometimes startling to see how close some famous artworks of those movements are to pieces from the archive. But the works of the outsider artists are very diverse. It’s precisely this tension between tiny, obsessive scribbles, and large, expressive works in the archive that influenced our vision for the collection.
Oliver: This is mostly reflected in the embroideries. We made them ourselves in the studio. You also see it in the frayed silk strips that we took apart and then sewn together again to give the pieces body. And of course, in the favourite collection piece, the embroidered jacket, which opened the show. Otherwise the colours and the architectural forms of the clothes take their cue from show birds.
You moved here from London to start the label. Why didn’t you want to launch the label there? Thomas: We had a very ideal situation in London, it was our comfort zone in a way. We both felt that for launching a creative endeavour, you need some friction. Berlin is great for that, because it unites so many oppositions.
Oliver: it is very exciting to see how disparate things pull the city in many different directions and yet somehow, it all comes together. We also thought this challenge of starting a label made perfect sense in a city that, too, is in the process of forging its identity.
For such a young label, you seem to be having a good start. Where do you wish to see ACHTLAND in the future? Thomas: What I wish would happen with ACHTLAND is that we appeal to an international audience. That the client in Tokyo will get what we do just as well as the client in New York.
Oliver: Which doesn’t mean we want the label to find a universal appeal, but rather – just like the outsider art collection – that it will reflect ideas and notions that are ever relevant. That’s what fascinated us about the Prinzhorn archive, the works there speak of freedom from conventional, conformist ideas. It is of course a romantic notion, but we think that’s important, especially now where the definition of freedom is changing.
What’s your personal highlight from the collection? Thomas: The jacket that opened the show. It’s emblematic of the entire collection. All the ideas and visions we had at the start of the design process are funnelled into this jacket.
Oliver: It also came out exactly how we had imagined it. Which doesn’t happen so often… we also left it “unfinished” – it doesn’t have a zipper, you just throw it on.
Thomas: We looked at it and knew it was complete; it didn’t need anything added to it. It’s a bomber jacket, whether it has a zipper or not.