Having graduated from fashion school in Dusseldorf, Reality Studio founder Svenja Specht still wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life, so she decided to study product design. (Her thesis project was a designy tampon dispenser, which she presented to the class in the university bathroom.) In the midst of those studies — during which she also interned for Jean-Marie Massaud in Paris — she took classes in photography and graphic design, the latter of which she practiced for four years at ad agencies in Beijing after finishing school for good. “I wanted to see and learn as much as possible,” she says of that time. But having had all of those experiences, she recalls, it was New Year’s Eve of 2000-2001 when “it came to me suddenly, just like that, that I needed to go back to fashion somehow.” And so she packed up, moved to Berlin, got a job as a trend forecaster, and three years later launched a clothing line that was every bit as eclectic as her own background, if not moreso.
Reality Studio, Specht says, was and still is focused on her wide-ranging interest in traditional clothing and handcrafting techniques from across cultures. “It’s not about making exactly the same thing, just the interest and inspiration,” she says. “Early on I tried to actually integrate fabrics from other places — I ordered some from Uzbekistan and from Kenya, which never arrived and my money was gone — but now I work those influences into my clothing in other ways.” That can mean anything from a specific shoe-strap or toggle-button style she’s spotted on her travels to places like Japan or Portugal, or the more general tribal or nomadic influence that sometimes appears in her fabrics and oversized cuts. Her lookbooks often serve to underscore these influences, such as Winter 2012, in which her models wore headscarves and gypsy-like necklaces with Russian-carpet prints. For Summer 2014, she paired summery linen coats and jumpsuits with a print by French textile darlings Milleneufcentquatrevingtquatre, then invited the design studio Simple Society to shoot the line in the style of the Japanese photographer Shojiyo Ueda, with a bit of Surrealism mixed in.
That collection — plus the instantly successful shoe line she launched last year, through which we discovered her work — has resulted in a major uptick in Reality Studio’s US presence, ten years after it began. Specht’s clothing and accessories are now stocked at stores like Totokaelo and Assembly — places in which her diverse design background and global-meets-minimalist aesthetic is pretty much par for the course. She says she took the name of her studio from a concept William Borroughs invented, in which he cut up all kinds of texts and films and made them into something new. “My reality studio is basically all the material I have around me, my life and my experiences, which I take into the studio, cut up, and reassemble,” says Specht. We asked her to elaborate on those materials and experiences in the slideshow at right.
Souvenirs: “Every time we travel, my partner and I collect objects, and when we get home, we place them on the floor or table and take a picture. It’s a kind of personal travel diary. This photo is all objects from a single trip we took to Japan. I choose them sometimes for the way they’re made, or for a weird shape. Sometimes you don’t know what an object’s purpose is, because it’s from another culture, and then you try to figure it out, or you just use it for something else. We bought, for example, these small lamps that look like candles but are actually for graves — we bought them at a funeral shop. The square wooden tray is from a shinto temple, but we use it for dispay.”
Souvenirs: “This questioning of purpose, or adding a purpose that’s surprising, is how I sometimes think about my clothing.”
Souvenirs: “Since Summer 2013 we’ve also had a small shoe collection. It’s a lot of fun because of my product design background. The shoes are produced in Porto, Portugal, and we traveled there and were so inspired by it. The shoes use cork, an important Portugese material, and on the back of the shoe is also a certain cutout based on a traditional Portugese clog. The rabbit in this photo — taken from our lookbook created by the Portuguese creative studio Cölonia — is a typical ceramic object from Porto. All the photos in the lookbook feature one typical souvenir from Portugal.”
Journeys: “These are the lookbooks from our last three collections, designed by the Berlin graphics studio Simple Society. Reality Studio is about exploring and about expeditions to other places, real or unreal. Our lookbooks aim to illustrate these journeys. For Summer 2014, we were inspired by the Japanese photographer Shojiyo Ueda, and tried to illustrate the journey of discovering his pictures. Each picture tells a story, sometimes in relation to an object. For Winter 2014, the inspiration came from a photographer named Seydou Keita, who took portraits in Africa in the ’60s and ’70s. With the Simple Society, it’s the first time we tried an art direction where it’s not just nice clothes, but there’s a story behind it.”
Journeys: “This is a picture, from our trip to Morocco, of a tent made from thick rugs. I’m very much inspired by the improvisations of everyday life. This photo is also about a limitation — you don’t have a windbreaker material to attach this tent, but you make something from what you have. It doesn’t have to be the top fabrics or the top accessories. It’s inspiring.”
Journeys: “As a fashion designer, if you don’t have the possibility to get this or that fabric, or can’t use this or that technique, it’s a limitation, but you have to make something good out of it. Good ideas can grow from that.”
Journeys: “Music takes me to other places, too. Luckily my partner is a very good music curator for me. Here are our top selections from the last two months: Adama Coulibaly, ‘Baba,’ 2007; Nicolas Jaar, ‘Other People,’ 2013; Ryuichi Sakamoto, ‘Three,’ 2012; Moodog, ‘Elpmas,’ 1991.”
Collection diary: “Every season our team makes a patchwork blanket out of the left-over fabrics. These blankets are our collection diaries. Once we held an exhibition with the blankets and some of the visitors recognized the fabrics in the blankets: ‘Oh this was my blouse,’ ‘Oh this is the fabric from my jacket.’ It was fun to hear and see. This photo shows the blanket from our Winter 2012 collection.” Photo: Trevor GoodInspiration wall: “On the wall of our studio is my collection of traditional items mainly from China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Morocco, and Japan, where my partner is from. There’s a lot of superstition in a lot of traditional clothing; for example you have this Chinese mask with insects on its tongue and snakes representing bad spirits. The masks are meant to protect children from these bad spirits. I’m also a bit superstitious — I try my best to maintain a good atmosphere in the studio, which I believe goes into my clothing. But the difference is that I believe in the positive side, so not protecting against evil but that we get stronger if we have positive vibes.”
Inspiration wall: “In the pieces on my inspiration wall it’s especially the handcrafting that I love. Not that I can do that in my clothing — I’m not doing haute couture, so I have to do it in a different way. I’ll use it for prints, for example. But I really love and respect this work, these skills.” Above: A collaboration with textile designers Milleneufcentquatrevingtquatre
Vietnamese hats: “We bought these two hats in the mountains in the north of Vietnam. They’re from two different tribes, and the design expresses which tribe the wearer is in. It’s like someone who wears only black and is a goth — it shows what this person likes or is attached to. What I find interesting is that these shapes are really free and abstract, so far away from what we think is wearable.”
Vietnamese hats: “I try to mix that mentality into my own work. I try shapes which are more free and new, though not quite as much as someone like Comme Des Garcons. It’s daily wear, but it doesn’t necessarily always have to be functional. The function can be about expressing something, like the hats do.”
Books: “These are books which have always been important to me, but some actually influence my collections in concrete ways, like Balik Mela. He photographed portraits of people standing in front of an improvised background, and we used that idea in a lookbook. He just used what he had.” From top: The Cotu in Vietnam, Treasures of Imperial Japan, a book of costumes from Namibia, portraits from Bamako by Seydou Keita, portraits from India by Balik Mela, Jungle Fever by Jean Paul Goude with Grace Jones, and Hilma af Klint.
Books: “When I was a child I found this book at my grandparents’ house. It’s about a little native Indian boy who lives in the rainforest. It was my favorite book. I’ve always imagined I’m this little kid who lives with his family in harmony with nature. And I looked a bit similar when I was young so I was totally convinced it was me.”
Books: “This book I find especially inspiring because it shows all kinds of amazing traditional Japanese packaging skills made within the limits of available materials. It’s called How to Wrap 5 Eggs.”
Albert Watson: “I love these photographs by Albert Watson. He took them for the organization Cotton Made in Africa, which aims to promote the cultivation of sustainably produced cotton to improve the living conditions of small farmers. It’s really nice that it doesnt have to be a contradiction to do beautiful pictures that have fashion aesthetics but that can also have a purpose. I think these women were dressed for a festival. I really like this twist where you can see the contemporary influence in the photographs, but still there’s something very traditional about them. It shows that even the young people there are still connected to tradition, and to the beauty of it.”
Hayao Miyazaki: “His films touch me deeply. I like that his movies focus on themes of environmentalism, pacifism, and feminism. But I think what’s most touching to me is how he observed people, their daily behavior, and also how he shows people in relation to nature or the struggle with it. That you have to sometimes fight for it, or go back one step and let go of some things in order to gain others. His movies also really communicated well this idea that there’s a spirit in everything.”
Hayao Miyazaki: “I believe that too, that we have to respect not only living things, but objects. It’s so nice when you can say thank you to a nice object which is beautiful and makes you happy.”
When we interviewed Brooklyn artist and fashion designer Shabd for our Paper View book a year and a half ago, it was all about the fine art practice she sidelined in order to start her tie-dyed clothing and accessories business. But with this post, everything comes full circle — now that Shabd has a book out of her own, filled with tutorials on her dyeing techniques, we're finally taking the chance to hear more about what she actually does on a daily basis, by way of an interview recently posted on the Martha Stewart Living blog.
Don't get your hopes up — you won't find Karin Johansson's necklaces in the Sight Unseen shop anytime soon, or at any other shop for that matter. Johansson isn't a fashion designer, after all, but a Sweden-based jewelry artist who's spent nearly two decades learning and refining her metalworking techniques, and her pieces are only available through high-end galleries like Barcelona's Klimt02. That's where we spotted the New Places collection, a colorfully graphic amalgam of handmade elements in enamel, plastic, and precious metals, plus crushed and "reconstructed" stone; Johansson based each necklace on a different photograph she'd taken while traveling inside her own city and beyond. "The inspiration and the starting point for New Places were photos I'd collected for a few years of different views, landscapes, and cities," Johansson explains. "Simply by drawing a line in the picture and connecting the ends, then picking up the colors, I discovered a necklace giving hints of houses, streets, trees, water, sky, lines, and directions."
Designers around the world owe Johanna Agerman Ross a drink, or perhaps even a hug: Her new project, the biannual magazine Disegno, is devoted to letting their work breathe. “I always found it frustrating working for a monthly, because I couldn’t give a subject enough time or space to make it worthwhile,” says the former Icon editor. “For a project that took 10 or 15 years to make, it felt bizarre to represent it in one image, or four pages.” Founded by her and produced with the help of creative director Daren Ellis, Disegno takes some of the visual tropes of fashion magazines — long pictorial features, single-photo spreads, conceptual photography — and marries them with the format of a textbook* and the investigative-reporting ambitions of The New Yorker. The story about Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec which we’ve excerpted here, for example, fills 22 pages of the new issue and runs to nearly 3,000 words; it’s accompanied by images captured over two full days the photographer spent with the brothers, one in their studio and one at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where they were installing their latest retrospective, “Bivouac.” And articles on Martin Szekely, Azzedine Alaïa, and Issey Miyake’s Yoshiyuki Miyamae are set either over lunch, or in the subject’s living room. The focus, says Agerman Ross, is on proper storytelling. “The people behind the project, the process of making something, even the process of the writer finding out about the story — that’s all part of it,” she says. “It’s the new journalism.” Obviously, we couldn’t agree more.
