MRS. MO VELD

Ever since I started scanning fashion magazines I have this little fantasy, or neurosis, which in short comes down to: my house burnt down and I get to start over from scratch and some fashion fairy grants me to pick a brand new, although absolutely bare minimum, all-I-need designer wardrobe for the coming season. (Diane Vreeland said it: “Elegance is refusal.”) I guess this little game forces me to think about what is essential for that particular fashion season, or at least for me. So when the KLAVERS VAN ENGELEN spring summer 2010 lookbook landed in my mail, I couldn’t help but indulge.
It wasn’t hard to pick my five KLAVERS VAN ENGELEN looks that I would then have to spend the whole summer in, although I admit I would probably need something of a sweater or coat, living in Northern Europe and all, and at some point an old T-shirt or so. I know I’m being silly but it’s hard to keep up the ‘objective journalist act’ when two of your favourite designers drop one collection after another simply oozing with ‘the new you’.

So what is essential about the collections Niels Klavers and Astrid van Engelen have been putting out ever since the re-launch of their label in the winter of 2007-2008? Like I said they rank among my favourites and I’ve kept a keen eye on them for over a decade so this is not my fad of the week. With their label’s second coming, it’s preview gracefully sweeping up the 2007 Mercedes Benz Dutch Fashion Award, KLAVERS VAN ENGELEN successfully matured on a commercial level without loosing their inimitable artistic approach. In short, what looks like some simple rich and delicate fabrics thrown on these women by a divine breeze, is the result of many years of hard work, processing their conceptual inspirations into unavoidable garments. We all know that ‘effortless elegance’ is hardly ever effortless - it just looks that way – but Niels Klavers and Astrid van Engelen do possess a highly contemporary fashion aesthetic without using any obvious force. Elegant and tough, poetic and straight forward, vulnerable and aggressive, a women in KLAVERS VAN ENGELEN looks all that and more, because even though these clothes actually deserve to be labelled ‘design’, somehow they do not wish to overrule the individual wearing them, which I think is pretty essential, now as much as ever.

Hosted by The White Club in Milan for three seasons in a row KLAVERS VAN ENGELEN managed to rebuilt confidence with former clients who by now sound more than pleased in spite the global recession. The SS10-shows at The White Club however got cancelled last minute for lack of funds, which made KLAVERS VAN ENGELEN redirect to Paris. Also the collection in preparation, fall winter 2011, will be shown in Paris this March, with a private showroom presentation only. Unfortunately maybe, but as Niels and Astrid explain: “We could invest all our revenue from this collection in showing the next– a catwalk show is by far the most ideal way to present a collection - but after all those years of putting ourselves out there like that we’ve come to see it is not realistic for the moment. We’ve finally learned to act and think like a business and for now we just want to focus on steadily growing our client base and keeping them happy. They sell through very well at the moment and orders keep growing steadily. Hopefully with our new sales agent we’ll break some new grounds like the US and we’re interested to intensify our web presence. It’s great how you can trace who visited your site and a lot of that comes from the US, via blogs mostly. We do some interesting art and theatre projects as well, like this modern Orlando play by the Dutch Oostpool Company. These collaborations are very informing and energizing but they’re about all the showbiz we can deal with on the side.”

Oh, and fairy dear, since the open-toe boots are customised showpieces only (what a shame!) do throw in a pair of those nude leather, hand made, one off KLAVERS VAN ENGELEN for Orlando-pumps, will you?

I send in this rare little ‘film bite’ to Fantastic Man Daily some time ago but my fantastic friends didn’t mention the fact that the yummy Snowman scarf modeled so elegantly by Mr. David Bowie in this short movie intro is actually for sale here (limited edition 2oo cm adult version, all sustainable alpaca and with a label signed by Raymond Briggs.) If this doesn’t mean anything to you - after all, it’s not your every day fashion info - see the Oscar winning animation of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman first.

Little James and his very special scarf

Deluxe feelgood interior designer Stef Bakker invited me to add some word magic to new place in town BO CINQ. I haven’t had such fun writing in quite a while. Here’s a preview of the place, courtesy of photographer Mandy Pieper (more ‘text art’ pictures coming up!) The “LA JOUISSANCE DE SOI-MEME” title you’ll find above the brasserie entrance on Lange Leidsedwarsstraat 53-59 deserves a little footnote: it being the title of the very first Libertine manifest dated 1759, written by a Marquis Caraccioli who lived in Paris at the time. His erudite pledge for accepting life’s pleasures free of sin were not quite as much appreciated in his day.

The smoker's lounge offers plenty of space for changing dialoques like this curious snibbit from Waiting for Godot

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The Band of Outsiders article I wrote for the September issue of Blend magazine was in Dutch, so what I can share with the global attick is the original Q&A we did in early August this year. Enjoy.

A selection from the accompanying shoot in Blend magazine by Thomas Whiteside

We spoke last year around the same time. You just won the CFDA award and were about to present your new collection. You were planning to expand Boy & men’s accessories. And mentioned some ‘retail projects that won’t seem much like retail’ starting in Tokyo? So how did all that go?

It’s been a pretty great year. Boy. is now produced in Italy with a really fantastic production facility, so most of my time has been spent going back and forth and working with this amazing team, getting to know each other, developing two collections. And the men’s is continuing its story organically, finding great customers along the way. Sadly the retail project in Japan is still stalled. It’s a long story, but I’m trying to take a very old piece of machinery from the U.S. and re-wire and re-work it to do something entirely different, in a different country where the electrical, err, stuff is different.

Your homepage features a series of Polaroids of LA homes. What’s the relation to Band of Outsiders? They look like crime scenes to me. Or at least invoking fantasies about who lives there, how they live and so on.

Ooh, I like the idea of them being crime scenes, although that wasn’t the point.  I decided we needed a home page, and the most logical subject for the Polaroids on a home page seemed to be homes.  There are some pretty great ones around Los Angeles, so that worked out nicely.  Speaking of, I need to get out and shoot some more - freshen things up.  In terms of what it says about the brand, I would throw that back to you.  For me, all of the imagery and ideas we’re putting out under the Band of Outsiders brand don’t necessarily have to be of clothing or directly related to fashion.  It’s all about a feeling, an approach, and a way of looking at things.

What is essentially Band of Outsiders? (you called it ‘fetishized American Sportswear’ on Style.com) Overstating the understatement? If something matters, everything matters?

That’s a big question.  And there’s two directions from which to answer - the clothes, and the brand around them. Let’s stick with the clothes for now.  The men’s clothes are about looking at the classics and making them feel new, fresh, and completely covetable; the women’s are about that too, but a little more conceptual in their approach, with a heavy anchor in menswear.  Boy is also a bit about playing off of trends, re-working them into our language.  Both have a strong focus on tailored clothing and offering something new and fresh in that category.

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Here’s the uncut version of my interview with Paul Gorman for the September issue of Code magazine. The best part of my job is getting to talk to the most inspired fashion drivers in the world. The worst part is that there’s never enough text space in magazines.

Cover of The Look, an absolute must-read if you love your all time favorite rocker's styles and want to know all about it. There was never a more complete account...

British journalist and author Paul Gorman wrote the most exhaustive celebration of rock and pop fashion spanning five monumental post war decades. First published in 2001, followed by an update in 2006 and another one in progress, The Look, Adventures in Rock and Pop Fashion is not just another must read style bible to top your night table stack. With his The Look-blog, a London club night and fashion label The Look Presents, all born in the wake of his applauded book, Paul Gorman is on a mission to safeguard the holy grail of flamboyance. “When great music meets great style, that’s when things really start to pop.”

The Look had been on my professional literature wish list ever since raving reviews of the 2006 re-release started popping up in all my fashion feeds. Code’s gutsy timed Rock Star theme literally made me jump to the occasion of digging into this beefy, juicy and bloody fabulous chunk of fashion history, starting in the spring of 1952 with a seventeen year old Elvis pressing his pretty face against the Lansky Bros menswear store window on 126, Beale Street in Memphis, and closing with Hedi -“I was born with a David Bowie album in my hand”- Slimane’s triumph at Dior Homme, crediting rock and roll buddies ranging from Pete Doherty to Mick Jagger. The Look’s threefold foreword, by Paul Gorman, Paul Smith and Malcolm McLaren, had cast a bit of a blues-y ‘those were the good old days’-shadow ahead, but this is the first thing the rock-and-fashion-jive-talking author wishes to set straight in our interview. “The collective conclusion is that the potency that occurs when fashion and music combust has been all but lost as celebrity culture goes into overdrive and big business dictates like never before in this Starbucked age.” states Gorman’s introduction while Paul Smith concludes his with the observation that today “everything is over-considered”, in contrast to the ‘blank sheet’ his generation started out with after the war. Malcolm Mc Laren, who unchained quite the fashion movement together with Vivienne Westwood at the dawn of the 70’s, is most grim about the loss, noting that fashion no longer drives subcultures but has become an industry merely producing product to supply our global mall-culture.

Paul Gorman: “I think it’s just become very fragmented. It’s still out there, but in different ways, like the rest of culture.” ‘It’ referring to that certain X-rated good stuff that The Look is all about; unpredictable, sexy, dangerous style, fearlessly served up by likewise musical talents and their tailors. “There was always boring and predictable stuff around. You gotta keep your eyes open and I guess that’s what we always did, didn’t we?”

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From September 5 through October 10, 2009, Amsterdam gallery RONMANDOS presents a duo art show on the theme of masculinity, male beauty and self-perception, combining a selection of photographs from the series World Without Women by Ruud van der Peijl with the unsettling doll sculptures ‘Les Plus Beaux’ by artist Silia B.

Read my press release here, and see you there!

The press release I wrote for this project is in Dutch so translated in short: Holland’s one and only star-catwalk photographer Peter Stigter started Peter Stigter aan de Muur, a foundation through which he will sell a selection of his free and unpublished work: unique catwalk and fashion week images captured by the master’s eye. From mid-november 2009 these limited edition king size prints, courtesy of Canon, are sold via www.peterstigteraandemuur.nl
All profit will be donated to local organisations helping the blind and partially sighted.

For the third time in a row I was proud to collaborate on communication for Arnhem Fashion Biënnale. This time around a beautiful magazine was created around this edition’s theme SHAPE, for which I got to interview Raf Simons for Jil Sander, G+N, Cosmic Wonder Light Source, Klavers van Engelen and Saskia van Drimmelen for Painted Series along with labouring some 30 highly condensed biographies (someone’s got to do it ;-). As a prelude to the Arnhem Fashion Biënnale (June 6 - July 6, 2009) get the magazine for only 5 euros at www.elsevier.nl/AMB

In any case don’t miss the solo exhibition Holy House by Carmen Freudenthal and Elle Verhagen at MMKArnhem (June 6 - August 23, 2009)

Mr. Jop van Bennekom, the celebrated art director behind infamous titles RE-, Butt & Fantastic Man basically owed me a little favour and designed this lovely foxy logo for Mrs. Mo Veld (together with all the stationary going with it, naturally). Now all I have to figure out is how to incorporate it into my header. Tips welcome ;-)

I’m not about to start a full fledged fashion blog. This is in fact meant to become my online portfolio. But since the blog roll is there I’ll try and entertain you from time to time while digitalizing archives, figuring out categories and how to incorporate different media for you to source.

So here’s a golden oldie I encountered, something fun I did back in the late nineties together with Viktor & Rolf, involving something called the Infinite Dress from TellSell, for Blvd. magazine. [Just don't tell V&R that I posted this!]

Viktor & Rolf's original faux perfume model and celebrated photographer Vivianne Sassen modelling The Infinite Dress, styling by Viktor & Rolf