While the names Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer may not immediately ring a bell for some, many of their now-iconic works would likely be immediately recognizable. Take, for example, the top of the scandal-baiting Standard Hotel. When he commissioned them, Hotelier extraordinaire Andre Balazs asked the husband-and-wife duo to design the 18th floor to “feel like the inside of a Bentley.” What they did was take inspiration from a jar of honey and spin it into a gold; one simple glass pot informed the glowing centerpiece that blooms at the center of the now-iconic Boom Boom Room.

Alesch and Standefer are the principals of a NoHo-based architecture firm Roman and Williams (named in honor of their maternal grandfathers). The diversity of their projects ranges from interiors for hotel magnates to home design for movie stars to corporate interior design for Facebook, but a common aesthetic thread runs through all of their projects: Part industrial, part elegant, their work exudes an inherent sex appeal and warmth that is partially due to the pair’s use of natural materials like wood, gold, and leather. 

They met in ’90s Hollywood as set designers, and it was a job styling the modernist bohemian-chic abode for the title character of Ben Stiller’s 2001 supermodel spoof “Zoolander” that led them into designing four of Stiller’s real-life residences. As the reputation of their cinematic touch grew, so too did their client list. They became the go-to firm for hip Manhattan hang-outs like the Standard, the Ace Hotel, and the John Dory Oyster Bar. Eschewing bright colors, synthetics, or other ephemeral trends, none of these spaces could be described as loud — instead they command attention by emanating a sumptuous warmth. They’ve also applied their craft to product design, having created vintage-looking metal handles and faucets for bath fixture manufacturer Waterworks.

Most recently, Roman and Williams constructed the mess hall of the Menlo Park Facebook campus. In stark contrast to typically lifeless office cafeterias, staffers of the social media giant now eat within what looks like a home dining room that just happens to serve 6,000 employees.

To celebrate the firm’s 10th anniversary, Alesch and Stander released “Things We Made,” a frankly titled, weighty tome that surveys the course of their career. By email, they wrote to us to discuss how far their firm had come and where it’s headed.

Happy Birthday! As you celebrate your 10th anniversary this year, can you speak to how a firm evolves over the course of a decade?

With age comes a bit of respect. We have always had to fight for what we believe in, but getting our way has become a bit easier. We are not the new kids on the block anymore so we don’t always have to explain ourselves. Clients now mostly know what to expect when they come to us. It’s nice.

Your work includes vastly ranging projects, from the set of “Zoolander” to the Boom Boom Room. How did your design processes differ between the two? (Were mood boards involved? What was on them?) How do you tailor yourself to such different clients, and is there anyone you would turn down?

We have always very intentionally tried to maintain a very wide range in the type of work we do. And, we are more interested in narrative, context and narrative than we are in a particular design brief.  Whether for Hansel’s loft in “Zoolander,” or for the Boom Boom Room, we want to evoke emotions and experience. Our work is more about an ethos, than a style. We are never looking to make a “design statement.”

In terms of clients, we embrace the brave, so we sometimes turn down those who are overly cautious. People who are too careful do not make the best clients for us.

And which, in your opinion, is the sexier setting?

Tie! That one goes into overtime. There is no way to tell. It completely depends who is in those spaces.  It is fair to say that we do not like asexual, prudish things.

Aside from a few very big projects in California, for the most part you’ve stuck to New York. Is there something about this city that resonates better with your vision than anywhere else?

We don’t only operate on one frequency – as you’ve clearly picked up from your questions – and New York, to us, is a collision of frequencies. Uptown/downtown, rich/poor – NY feels like democracy in action to us. We like how that is reflected in our work, that there are still people who have dinner at the Breslin and then go to the Boom Boom Room for drinks. There is a wonderful tension in that.

But it is also important to mention that we are starting to do a lot more work internationally – in Europe, India, South America and Asia.

Speaking of California, the Facebook cafeteria is surprisingly warm and inviting. The use of natural materials like wood and metal is so unlike what you would expect from such a tech-oriented company. How did you come to that design? What role did they play in steering its aesthetic?

The Facebook team shared our interest in all things analog. They love the Ace Hotel. We actually ran into them there, and they recognized us from some of the press. We started talking and they hired us because they were hoping to get some of that same mojo in their space.

They were not at all interested in the very slick, all-white aesthetic that we’ve come to associate with technology. They are also very “anti-design” – just like we are. They were afraid to hire a designer because they didn’t want something that felt too designed, academic or trendy. They don’t want to live in the machine – and wanted an experience that was warm and casual – a bit deconstructed, though not in the sense of the word as it is used in archi-speak. They just wanted something spontaneous.

The cover of the book is provacatively labeled “Part One.” What can we look forward to from you in the future?

MORE, MORE, MORE! More projects, more products, more of everything. We aren’t happy unless we are making things. 

“Things We Made” is available at Rizzoli. To see pages from Roman and Williams’ new book, click the slideshow. 

Buoyed by the legend of its $120-million sale to secretive financial kingpin Leon Black and its fathomless cultural cachet, I would be surprised if MoMA’s pocket-sized exhibition dedicated to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” which opened yesterday, didn’t help the big institution set some attendance records. Yet visitors who pause to reflect a moment might admit to themselves that seeing the actual thing is a bit of a let down — its physical presence is no match for the placeless, sizeless mental image that it has become. Pop culture has turned what was the quintessential image of modern alienation into a hokey cliche.

In the run-up to its record-setting Sotheby’s sale, pundits bent on buttressing this trophy’s significance for world culture stressed its universality, how the twisted image could be a symbol for anything from “fear of leaving the oven on when we leave the house, to personal tragedy.” But this kind of formulation suggests a weakness not a strength; it is a measure of how the image has lost its original power to shock. Meanwhile, the potency of “The Scream” as a vehicle for identification is umbilically linked to the concrete history that produced it — all the messy stuff that its presentation behind bulletproof glass, in a low-lit, crowded MoMA gallery can’t help but distance it from.

The emotional chemistry of Munch's masterpiece is pure European fin-de-siècle doubt and decadence, colored by the life experiences of the sickly modernist weirdo who painted it. The details of his biography are familiar, but perhaps worth rehashing, laying stress on the push-pull of forces that informs his work. This is a man born as the world was dramatically changing, when belief was yielding to doubt and traditional sexual mores were coming apart. Munch had his feet in both worlds; that’s where all the angst comes from.

On the one hand, he came from a grim and deeply religious family. His father, a military doctor, married a woman 20 years his junior, who hailed from a once well-to-do clan that had fallen on hard times. She bore five children, of which Edvard was the second, and she died early, leaving behind a tragic letter to her family saying, “We all, who God so carefully has bound together, may meet in Heaven never to part again.” Munch’s dad became morose and fanatical; he would read this letter aloud to his clan at the dinner table, regularly, and lecture his kids on the horrors of hell that awaited them if they strayed from the righteous path. This fatalistic atmosphere definitively colored Munch’s view of the world.

On the other hand, when the family later moved to the Norwegian capital, Kristiania, Edvard found himself powerfully drawn to the local anarchist scene. The Kristiania anarchists were led by a man named Hans Jaeger, who preached free love, and against monogamy, the subjugation of women, and the family. Jaeger’s rather dramatic commandments, which his followers tried to live by, included the following: “Thou shalt write thy life; thou shalt sever thy family roots; thou shalt take thy life.” It was Jaeger who encouraged Munch to paint from his soul and resist artistic conventions, spurring his artistic breakthrough. When the bohemian guru was jailed for his anti-bourgeois beliefs, Munch gifted him a painting of a semi-nude woman to entertain him in his cell. 

Which brings us back to “The Scream,” actually originally known as “The Scream of Nature.” The image is meant to illustrate a short poem fragment that Munch wrote, the text of which is also etched on the version currently on view at the MoMA: “I was walking along the road with two of my friends. The sun set — the sky became a bloody red. And I felt a touch of melancholy — I stood still, dead tired — over the blue-black fjord and city hung blood and tongues of fire. My friends walked on — I stayed behind — trembling with fright — I felt the great scream in nature.”

Notice anything about this tale? “The Scream” is often taken as an image of personal isolation or alienation. But it is significant that the scene takes place in public, not in some lonely interior (of which there are many in Munch’s work). Whatever emotion is seizing the wailing central figure, it comes upon him not when he is isolated, but when he is “walking along the road with friends,” represented by the strolling couple glimpsed in the painting behind him, apparently oblivious to the drama taking place in the foreground.

More importantly, as both the painting’s original title and the poem suggest, the key to the image is that its terrifying epiphany is felt to be an expression issuing through the figure from the landscape or the cosmos itself (“I felt the great scream in nature”). This is what Munch’s then-radical Expressionist styling, in which everything — sky and sea and the wailing, deformed figure itself — conveys so perfectly, depicting a universe fully animate with turbulent emotional meaning.

From a Bible-thumping background, but also drawn to the outspoken nihilism of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky (his favorite author), Munch was trained to see the universe as being filled with divine meaning, as subject to a plan — but he also could no longer fully believe in this plan. And so the universe speaks but has no voice, shrieks but makes no sound, issues forth a sense of loss that transcends any human fellowship.

It is fitting, finally, that “The Scream” takes place on a bridge, because it captures a moment of transition — the transition from a world of fixed and preordained meaning to a modern universe where man makes his own meaning, with all the attendant anxieties that go along with this fact. This sense of values held in tortured suspension, so suggestively particular to its moment in European culture, is what you have to recover if you want to unlock the painting's drama and depth, and save it from its own overbearing success. 

– Aphrodite Stirs Controversy in Texas: Two parallel controversies surrounding sexy museum ads throw the cultural differences between Europe and American into stark relief. While a museum advertisement for the Leopold Museum's exhibition "Naked Men," which features three nude soccer players, is causing a furor in Vienna, Texans are getting riled up over the San Antonio Museum of Art's ad for an exhibition about Aphrodite. The offending advertisement featured a picture of a 2,000-year-old statuette of the Greek goddess emerging from the sea. It was censored by three venues, including the San Antonio airport. (The "Aphrodite" show, however, has inspired area chefs to make goddess themed meals — see our VIDEO OF THE DAY, below.) [KVUE]

– Frieze Galleries Lack Gender Parity: A disgraceful 1.5 percent of galleries that participated in this year's Frieze Art Fair represent more women than men, according to a study from the ELF Great East London Art Audit, a collective that keeps track of gender parity in the arts. The London-based Guerrilla Girls-esque group also notes that 67 percent of galleries at Frieze represent less than a third female artists and only 3.7 percent represent an equal number of men and women. [HuffPo]

– Rotterdam Heist Linked to Coke Bust?: The seven major artworks stolen from Kunsthal Rotterdam earlier this month may have been used as substitute payment following a major drug bust in which eight tons of cocaine were seized at a Belgian port a few days earlier, museum security expert and former Rijksmuseum chief of security Ton Cremers said. "It hasn't been proven, it's just a theory," he said, but "there's a very big chance... In 20 years in the field I've been able to observe very close links between the worlds of art and drug trafficking." [AFP]

– Unseen Marilyn Photos Headed to Auction: A trove of 240 photographs by Milton Green that will hit the block at Warsaw's Dom Aukcyjny Desa Unicum auction house on November 8 includes never-before-seen images of Marilyn Monroe. The photos, which were given to the Polish state in the 1990s as part of a foreign debt settlement, all come with a low estimate of 300 zlotys ($100), are part of a larger set of 4,000 that sat in cardboard boxes in New York for years and includes Green's photos from the '50s and '60s including images of Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly, and Marlon Brando. [AFP]

– Underneath a Picasso Painting, Another Picasso: New infrared images have given researchers a detailed picture of the portrait hidden underneath Picasso's famous "Woman Ironing," which he painted when he was just 22. (Short on cash to buy new canvases, the artist would often paint over earlier works.) John Richardson, Picasso's biographer, believes the subject of the portrait is Mateu Fernandez de Soto, a sculptor and friend of the artist. (Want to make a guess of your own? Check out the Times's nifty infographic, which allows viewers to peek under the painting's surface.) [NYT]

– Shanghai Museum Opens in Record Time: From inception to inauguration, it took less than a year for the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art to be built inside a giant former power plant, where it launched last month with the Shanghai Biennale. But observers worry that such speedily assembled institutions are not built to last. "There are more opportunities than there are qualified people," says Philip Tinari of Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. "That’s a piece of the puzzle that will take a few more years." [Globe and Mail]

– Nazi Meteorite Buddha Could Be Fake: A sculpture of Buddha emblazoned with a swastika said to have been carved from a meteorite 1,000 years ago and stolen by a Nazi ethnologist may not be so ancient after all. Two experts who've examined the sculpture say it was likely made in the 20th century, and was likely not looted by Nazis, though it is made from space rock. "Up to date, no acknowledged authority in the field of Tibetan or Mongolian art has publicly deemed the statue authentic," said Seoul-based Buddhism expert Achim Bayer. University of Stuttgart geologist Elmar Buchner maintains: "If we are right that it was made in the Bon culture in the 11th century, it is absolutely priceless and absolutely unique worldwide." [Guardian]

– Indonesian Art Takes Center Stage at Singapore Fair: Under director Lorenzo Rudolf — who helped shift attention towards Latin American art at Art Basel Miami Beach — next year's Art Stage Singapore art fair will feature an area reserved for Indonesian galleries as well as a group exhibition of some 30 artists from Indonesia, two-thirds of whom the fair will represent itself. "We only want to show the best, but many Indonesian artists [don't work] with galleries," Rudolf said. "We have a situation where the infrastructure is not there." [WSJ]

– Can Art Help Refugees?: Artist Ahmet Ögüt is banking on it. Next month, he's launching the Silent University, an initiative hosted by the Tate Modern that is part-school, part-group therapy session, and part-performance center for asylum seekers and migrants who can no longer gainfully practice their profession. The project, which was conceived during Ögüt's Tate residency in partnership with the Delfina Foundation last year, kicks off at the museum with a performance and discussion on November 26. [Press Release]

– Dan Colen's Book Party Was Star-Studded, Weird: Artist Dan Colen hosted a party for his new artist book, "A Real Bronx Cheer," and "Work of Art" judge and gallerist Bill Powers was on hand to chronicle the whole madcap affair. Apparently, supermodel Stephanie Seymour read God jokes the artist found on the Internet while the magician David Blaine held his breath in a plastic bag onstage next to her. Isn't that what everyone does at book parties? [T Magazine]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

San Antonio chefs pay homage to a local musuem's controversial "Aphrodite" show

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Whether you are a shoeaholic or a self-proclaimed bag lady, having the perfect accessory to polish of an outfit is the modus operandi of most fashion lovers. This season, refresh your wardrobe with standout accessories that put the icing on the proverbial cake.

Click on the slideshow to see the biggest trends of the season. 

NEW YORK — The Metropolitan Club’s ornate, gilded 19th-century interiors were a bit too much for Klaus Biesenbach last night. “I really like empty white spaces, now what have I done to deserve this?” he joked. The MoMA PS1 director and MoMA chief curator at large was at the American Federation of Arts Fall Gala to present artist Sarah Sze with the organization’s annual Cultural Leadership Award. The curator, who has commissioned Sze for several projects over the years, also poked fun at their relationship. “Whenever I see Sarah, I think she is running because she thinks, ‘Oh my god [he has] another idea.’”

“He has this huge fear of non-white spaces, and I tend to destroy those spaces,” quipped Sze at Biesenbach after she accepted the honor. Sze touched upon her connection to the AFA’s mission of bringing fine art to smaller museums. “This is important me because I became an artist in museums and in travelling shows,” she said in her speech.

Sze also described her 2013 Venice Biennale installation to ARTINFO. “I’m really focused on playing off the neoclassical symmetry of the building, so it’s going to be much more about a totally immersive experience where things wax and wane in terms of the transitions.” As for her timeline, the artist only has two more months to prepare in the United States. “I’m going to be there [in Venice] for three months, so that pushes us back to packing and shipping in January,” said Sze.

Click on the slideshow to see guests at the American Federation of Arts Fall Gala.

International installation artist Tatzu Nishi talked recently with ARTINFO about the process of building a fully conceived high-rise apartment into a public sculpture for his Public Art Fund commission, "Discovering Columbus," on view at Columbus Circle in New York through November 18. Among other things, Nishi touches on just how he went about incorporating important aspects of American culture and history into the work, such as hot dogs, McDonalds, and Mickey Mouse: 

It's time for our weekly wine chat, and one of our experts has just returned from South Africa, where he sampled some of that country's best wines. From sparkling wines to dessert wines and everything in between, we'll discuss some of South Africa's best...

A few weeks ago, I overheard a colleague raving about the lobster rolls...

MOSCOW — Last Wednesday, Red October Gallery opened a show by famed conceptual artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov that symbolizes the civilization and culture of the now-collapsed USSR, where both artists were born and raised. First displayed in 1999 in Palermo, Italy, and running here through December 2, the vast “Monument to a Lost Civilization” includes 37 installations, consisting of 140 individual pieces, collages and artists’ texts and documents. They all feature personal representations of the artists’ experiences within a country that has now ceased to exist.

The pair had originally explored the idea of creating the show in a basement. Instead, at Red October gallery, they display it within a closed hall with no windows. This location is symbolic of the USSR, from today’s perspective — the audience is submerged into a cave-like atmosphere. “I was looking to create an image of the former Soviet Union,” Ilya Kabakov explained. “It is not an objective reality. This is the way I experienced it, so it is a truly subjective image. My desire to make this felt imperative when this civilization, planned to last for centuries, collapsed and vanished so suddenly and unexpectedly for its residents.”

The show at the Red October Gallery is just one event in a series marking the return visit of the now U.S.-based Kabakovs to the homeland of Moscow conceptualism. The artists are working on a Moscow edition of their long-running project The Ship of Tolerance, which features a constructed replica of an ancient Egyptian ship (20 by 7 meters with a girder height of 13 meters), decorated by stitched-together sails made by schoolchildren of varying social backgrounds. It will be opened to the public later this spring. Meanwhile, the Moscow Multimedia Art Museum is preparing for the exhibition “Lissitzky – Kabakov,” loaned from Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, and the duo is also in discussions with the State Tretyakov Gallery for the opportunity to create a new installation in one of its halls.

Ilya Kabakov (born on September 30, 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, the former Soviet Union), is considered the most notable artist from the Moscow Conceptual school. In 2008, he and his wife Emilia were awarded the Praemium Imperiale award (an art prize created in 1989 on behalf of the Japan Art Association to recognize areas of achievement not covered by the Nobel prizes).

The Red October Gallery, a joint non-commercial project launched by the GUTA Group and the gallerist Vladimir Ovcharenko, stands out within Moscow’s local art scene in its work to promote contemporary art in collaboration with leading Russian artists, curators, and institutions. It received support for the current exhibition from the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Hermitage, the State Russian Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (which includes works of Ilya Kabakov in museum collections).

To see images from “Monument to a Lost Civilization” at Red October Gallery, click on the slideshow.

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Art runs throughout Kyle DeWoody’s family. Her mother is art collector Beth DeWoody, and her father, Jim DeWoody, and older brother, James “Carlton” DeWoody, are artists. So it’s no surprise that Kyle co-founded the art-meets-design space Grey Area with her business partner, Manish Vora.

Filled with a mix of quirky art, fashion, and design objects like her brother’s Best Friends Board and the ubiquitous Shelter Serra platinum silicone fake Rolex, the Soho loft space that houses Grey Area also carries a bit of art-world history –artists Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons once used it as a studio. The business has been keeping DeWoody busy. It recently announced a holiday gift collaboration with Helmut Lang that features work by a few artists who work with Grey Area.

As a member of the Whitney Contemporaries Executives Committee, DeWoody was put with the task of conceptualizing a project for the museum’s annual Studio Party next week. “I wanted to do something accessible and relevant to photography as it is in today’s culture,” she told ARTINFO. She commissioned artists like Dustin Yellin and Daniel Arsham to create Instagram images. “It’s been interesting just seeing artists engaging with Instagram, whether they’re using it to make work, or create images that are in mind with their practice, or just documentation,” said DeWoody. “Some of artists have never used Instagram and didn’t know what it was is.” The museum has been posting the photos without the artists’ identities on their Instagram stream, but on Tuesday their names will be revealed and partygoers can purchase the 4 x 4 images for $100 each.

DeWoody’s style earned her a spot on ARTINFO’s best-dressed list earlier this year, and her artful, playful taste landed her a spread in Vogue. For the latest installment of our Tastemaker series, DeWoody told us about her beauty secrets — cocoa butter lotion and apple cider vinegar — and the white leather slip-on Keds she adores.

Click on the slideshow to see Kyle DeWoody’s Tastemaker picks.

Our most-talked-about stories in Visual Art, Design & Architecture, Fashion & Style, and Performing Arts, October 22- 26, 2012:

London-based designer Mary Katrantzou goes to bed at 5 a.m. everyday. No, she’s not out enjoying London’s underground fashion-centric party scene (although, we highly recommend it). She’s working. Hard. The most complicated of her spring 2013 dresses, which features printed Swarovski and metal mesh bonded to silk brocade, took two weeks to make. So as you can imagine, the 29-year-old doesn’t have a lot of free time. But her relentless work has paid off.

Since debuting her collection in 2008, the Greek-born designer has blossomed before our eyes. Upon her graduation from Central Saint Martins’s esteemed MA Fashion program in 2008, Katrantzou turned out simple shift dresses covered in brilliant tromp l’oeil digital images. Thanks to her signature skill of translating vivid pictures of everything from Faberge eggs and Ming vases to jewels and blown glass onto luxe fabrics, she has become known as London’s “Princess of Prints.” And one might think it easy to peg Katrantzou as a print designer, or to lump her in with the Technicolor cluster of young London talent. But in the last five seasons, Katrantzou has explored new materials (crystals, pencils, and metal among them), created sculptural silhouettes, and developed impeccable techniques (one dress from fall 2012 used 40 meters of fluttering chiffon), proving that she’s about much more than novelty imagery.

Having studied architecture before fashion, Katrantzou places a great deal of importance on super-constructed shapes, which are dictated by both the form and concept of her prints (for example, her spring 2011 collection stemmed from Helmut Newton’s photographs of interiors, so she designed structured lampshade-shaped skirts to showcase digital images of retro ’70s hotel rooms). Last season, she collaborated with French couture atelier Lesage to create extravagant Elizabethan-style looks. Structured bodices, bustles, and pleats followed the lines of her kitschy-made-covetable prints of typewriters, bubbles, and rotary phones.

After viewing her spring collection of strict lines and crisp but feminine silhouettes during London fashion week in September, it was clear that Katrantzou had progressed yet again. The designer pulled her spring inspiration from cultural exchange and printed her crisp designs with outdated bank notes from around the globe (like the drachma and a discontinued British pound), as well as stamps. She pushed her fabrics forward, too. Katrantzou worked with a French mill to develop a means of printing atop the abovementioned Swarovski chainmail. She found brilliant ways of draping silk jersey. And, for the first time, she worked with denim, an experiment that grew out of a new collaboration with Current Elliot, which will hit stores mid-February. ARTINFO caught up with Katrantzou during her recent trip to New York to discuss the pleasures and pains of working with prints, her design evolution, and what went into crafting her on-the-money spring looks.

Why were you drawn to stamps and currency this season?

It all started with the stamps. I thought it was really nice that they’re a means of cultural exchange. They’re essentially just pieces of paper, but they have so many symbols from different countries and I think there’s something really nostalgic about the fact that people collected them from far flung places in the world. But then I thought maybe “stamps” wasn’t enough of a statement, so I considered other cultural means of exchange and came to bank notes. If you zoom in on the patterns, they’re beautiful. And I only looked at obsolete bank notes. My work has been really image led and I wanted to work with something that’s more of a pattern. So it was about translating that and being able to play with silhouette more. Not necessarily going as theatrical as last season, but taking the graphicness and the flatness of the bank note and doing shapes that are a lot freer and more modern. Also, with the money, I thought it was interesting because it’s such a printed entity. And to weave those motifs and be able to blow them up and work them on the body in a really interesting way was exciting.

Given the financial crisis, and particularly the crisis in Greece, your collection could be interpreted as a political or economic statement. Was that your intention?

I wasn’t trying to make a political statement at all! I think because the drachma was one of the bank notes that I was referring to, everyone thought, “Oh, she’s referring to the drachma being in return or suggesting they’re going back to it.” But no! Not at all. It was more what the bank notes meant symbolically. You have all the political figures or flowers from that country or just things that have been really symbolic of the growth of all these countries, and I think there’s something interesting in bringing those cultures together and creating something new. That’s why I picked obsolete bank notes. Even the pound that was there, it was an old pound — a discontinued design. In the end, it’s just about a dress that’s desirable. But I always like picking themes with depth so there’s room to explore something that’s out of context or a bit more subversive than the actual inspiration.

You worked with a lot of new fabrics this season, particularly the brocades. Can you speak about your fabric choices?

We started the collection wanting to limit the color palette. There was a lot of black and white. We also worked with denim this season, which we hadn’t worked with before, so there was more of an ease. Actually, when we started this collection, I was in the midst of designing a capsule collection for Current Elliot, which was based on visa stamps, instead of postal stamps, so it was a version of the same idea. But at the same time we did pieces in our collection in denim like a skinny pant with a bank note print.

What was it like working with denim for the first time?

It was a challenge. There’s so much detail in the washes. We did a lot of potassium bleach and laser etching and different techniques just to kind of get to grips with what you could do with denim. But it was really interesting because I’ve used so much silk and last season we were collaborating with Ecole Lesage and it was all about couture, so it was nice to work with the polar opposite and use an everyday fabric.

Speaking of the couture elements you had last season, this season the silhouettes seemed much simpler and cleaner. What was the thinking behind that transition?

I did want it to be a lot simpler just because last season, it was very restrictive. It was all about Elizabethan corsets and bustles so you felt that I had to go the opposite direction this season and create something that was a lot more free on the body. The silhouette should be relevant to what you’re doing every season. So I think with the bank notes and the postage stamps, because of their shape and what they create graphically on the body, you can take it there. It was important for me for the attention to be on the brocade. We also printed on metal mesh and Swarovski crystal mesh. That was a completely new technique that’s never been done before. It was about exploring different fabrics. For the postage stamps, we did cotton dresses and raffia tunics and denim pleated dresses and a lot more easy fabrics, more day fabrics. Then for the bank notes, it was pretty much all brocade. There wasn’t anything printed.

What are some of the biggest challenges you find working with prints? What role do they play in your design process and do you ever feel constrained by them?

Working with print is a way for me to play with the visual language. It’s recognizable and it’s become my signature. But at the same time, I don’t think I’m just about prints. There’s a lot of work that gets done in the architectural shape and the construction of the pieces and [the prints and construction] kind of play to each other’s strengths. It’s very much about balancing the two, so one will kind of inform the other. Now, I feel it’s more important for me to showcase in a more evident way that my work isn’t just prints, and that’s why I started with the brocade this season. I think the visual image and the attention to craftsmanship, the fabric, the colors, and the textures will always be there, but print doesn’t need to be the defining element of the collection.

Where do you find yourself going for inspiration and how important are art and architecture in your process?

I think architecture has become more and more important. When I first started, I didn’t see how it could be relevant but it is and the way you see a 3-D form around the woman you almost dress her in a second skin. But my skins usually are not just a skin; they have 10 dimensions. So it’s nice to be able to showcase your vision in many different ways and have seasons where you do go more sculptural. I’m sure the fact that I studied architecture has a certain role to play in how I see a silhouette. But at same time, there are other seasons that it should just be about the fabric that you’re using or the visuals that you’re using.

On the technical side, how much work and detail went into this collection?

Technically, there’s a lot of work going into the shape and the print and it takes us about three months to engineer everything. The biggest difficulty in this collection was that we were trying some things that we’ve never tried before, with printing on the Swarovski mesh. And Swarovski supplied me with little squares of this mesh and we needed to open each link by hand and then close it back up with a tweezer to make the fabric. We did so many tests to find out how to print on the mesh and we found somebody who prints on glass, so they did it for us. When you actually print on it, the print gets set with a UV light and then you take it back and hand make it again into the garment. Every single one of those dresses took about two weeks to make. Working with denim was a story of its own because of all the different washes and the shrinkage, but it does work like one of the more sculptural fabrics. Then, in the nylon dresses, those are made with about 40 meters of nylon and you don’t even see it exists. And there’s print engineered in all those 40 meters. Also, it was a different language for me because there was nothing fitted and the season before was super fitted, so it was just a different silhouette completely.

What do you hope people take away after seeing this season’s collection?

I think it was a move forward for me. I want them to look at the different shapes and the different fabrics that we used because I think that’s a transition for us. Also, I’d hope they’d appreciate the theme. I think it’s important that there’s something very signature in everything I do, and that the clothes are done in a way that people want to wear them. Some people have a crazy idea and put it on a dress and they selfishly want you to love it just because it’s novelty, but I think there needs to be more than that. You need to wear the dress and think, “OK, I do feel unique but I actually feel pretty and I feel interesting and I feel confident.” So hopefully, a lot of confident women will be wearing stamps and bank notes. 

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