16 February, 2010
Wolfgang Joop is one of Germany’s most famous fashion designers. His company Joop! was altogether successful in the 1980s/90s, but despite that he left it. Since 2003 has been sending out powerful signals from Potsdam with the couture label Wunderkind.
Joachim Schirrmacher: Mr. Joop, what does the Wunderkind project you initiated in Potsdam in 2003 mean to you?
Wolfgang Joop: Wunderkind is the fulfilment of my dreams. I wanted to create an avant-garde luxury brand that was clearly distinguishable from other brands. We don’t want to create trends, but rather surprises, something magical, that has a certain sustainability. We want to provoke the familiar, illustrate social mind-sets and thus awaken longings.
Fashion, a provocation?
Yes, otherwise no one needs us or our products. The German clothing industry always relies on the run of the mill, an appealing product. Be it Joop!, Boss or Escada. But that’s a thing of the past. Fashion and art have united. We are focused on identity and irritating the familiar. With media like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube we have a much more perceptive and direct access to these moods and can evaluate them ourselves. Gal leries, art connoisseurs, art historians stand, just like fashion critics, for a pro fessional assessment, but meantime people express their feelings, their perceptions themselves.
You say: “People only believe what they twitter to themselves” …
Most people haven’t even realized that yet, although it’s about much more than just the moods communicated by a product. The daring Wunderkind enterprise is such that it gets me out of bed in the mornings and makes me forget headaches and all my other worries and mental states. I wanted to know if the impossible can still happen, if we can project an attitude to life with a dress. And I actually succeeded. One year ago, Style.com called me “Paris’s resident eccentric”.
A lot of knowledge flows into your collection. In addition to your own designs, you found out what women really pay attention to through conversations with readers of the Neue Mode magazine. As an illustrator in Paris you internalized hundreds of collections each season in 13,000 sketches and then dissected them in articles for the news magazine “Der Spiegel”.
What I have always said is that we formulate an essence, for example, “hurt and heel” for this summer. In the fashion world you are forever young, always full of energy, carefree. Then suddenly comes the injury, the scar, the experience, the pain. Only those who have experienced pain can recognize joy. And when pain goes away then you know you have been pardoned. For me these are socially relevant themes, especially in the current economic, cultural and personal circumstances.
Anxiety, injury and pain – these are themes that recur in your 2009 book “Wunderkind“.
My vision, what I feel, is often impossible to formulate. You jump into the water because you have to, and you don’t know if you will make it across the dark lake to the other side.
Because you work in the very small niche between prêt-à-porter de luxe and haute couture and have no second line as an economic basis?
I have always been interested in breaking rules. I’m not part of a generation who wants to get everything right. I’m interested in my own path, in experimenting with freedom. So what I make also looks free. People buy Wunderkind because they want to be like that, not because they want to go somewhere.
Who recognizes what you are doing with Wunderkind?
I certainly can’t complain about a lack of recognition these days. Wunderkind is perceived as prêt-à-porter fashion using couture techniques. Anyone who wears Wunderkind sees this great art of tailoring, the incredible craftsmanship. It’s different to the Joop! of former years. At that time, the image was always to look as if you had just woken up from the After Show Party with a bad hangover, as if you had never worked.
We have spoken about fashion that is taken seriously as a social need, now we are talking about the media’s addiction to glamour. How much did you serve that need? There were reasons why the media called you the “German Yves Saint Laurent”. At the same time, on behalf of the Joop! clients, you led a life that they would never have dared to lead.
I served that need all too often. Normal people who no longer suffer hunger and who now seek the superfluous luxury product like the cherry on the cake, want to allow themselves a bit of a risk, something that does not occur in their life.
But you also said once that someone who was afraid often sought refuge in frivolity.
Oh yes, just look at Mr. Lagerfeld.
Or Mr. Joop.
From the insecure and also cowardly young boy I once was, I have become someone who has learnt to overcome fear. This is a process I test again every season.
What was it that helped you overcome your fear?
One year ago, when the financial crisis broke out with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, I knew that times had changed. I had to opt either for my pleasant life or my child. I decided in favour of the child I call Wunderkind. By analogy, I had to take leave of the remainder of my youth. I left the safe path because I know that happiness is not there. And that gives me an incredible force. In this way I’m not like many Germans I know.
Your book Wunderkind is like the story of a liberation.
Yes, my ex-wife even divorced me a second time because she did not approve of what was in it.
While reading it I realized that the Germans’ path to fashion could be traced in your life: the search for identity ab road, turning away from being German, the emergent delight in lifestyle. For a few years now, fashion in Germany has been forging its own path, just as you began all over again with Wunderkind in 2003.
Fashion is motion, impulse, the way we live. I’m in fashion because I want to get things going. By contrast, the German clothing industry has always tended towards perfection: the perfect delivery, the perfect fit, and everything nicely tailored to turnover and profit, with no sense for aesthetics.
You and your wife were once an “it couple”. Karl Lagerfeld invited you to his unfinished castle in Paris, Yves Saint Laurent took you from the street into his show because you fitted perfectly into the 1970s scene. Things couldn’t have been all that bad with German style and fashion then. Today Germans are working in almost all the international fashion houses, some of them as department heads. Nevertheless, the German aspect has been, and still is denied.
Let’s not forget that before National Socialism Germany had a functioning fashion industry. Then everything was destroyed, talented, creative people driven away – there used to be a lot of Jews in that clothing industry. It was a long time before fashion came back to Germany. Of course we Germans can design great fashion. Look at Mr. Lagerfeld!
You once said of the German clothing industry that it was wary of what it designed itself. To this day, the power is not in the hands of the designer but of the people in sales and production. Why?
The managers don’t trust the fashion designer per se. I have been involved with many different companies. Be it Bruno Pieters at Hugo – Hugo Boss or Dirk Schönberger at Joop! – they never have power, and now they have been thrown out. Limits are set out before you even start. First comes Controlling, then Sales. And should anything be left of the design, then come the technicians. It is a source of endless frustration! The only path is the one I have taken: sit down and start on your own. There is no other way!
Which is what many Berlin designers do.
Leafing through the fashion book of Berlin’s Zitty magazine I thought, wow, there really are great designers in Germany! But what do you find in some German magazines? Anyone who places an ad in the front section of the fashion magazines turns up at the back in the editorial section.
The Italian, French and American brands have the biggest advertising budgets. Is that one reason why German fashion scarcely has a chance of being noticed?
But a publisher should still show what is relevant. That was the task of Vogue – always. After the war, budgets were not sizeable, and yet the magazines were a source of consolation, hope, vision! That was what a print medium was there for. Sybille in the GDR was there for that. A piece of our identity is being betrayed in Germany.
What are your personal wishes and objectives for the next five years?
My brain is not shrinking, it’s working to full capacity, and my figure also hasn’t changed. And yet I notice the strain of life: as an artist, an entrepreneur, a grandfather and a lover (laughs). In any case, my objective would be to reduce to the essence, that’s Wunderkind. At the same time I have also discovered a great new desire to work on another product that makes its way into everyday life and changes it.
You mean your plans to get involved with the bankrupt underwear manufacturer Schiesser?
Exactly.
It sounds as if you see Schiesser producing not just underwear, but also basics like good chinos, shirts and pullovers?
I’d really like to do that. Constantly thinking at eccentric levels is also strenuous. You can always eat dry bread with a glass of water.
Published/Released
Deutschland Magazin, 1/2010, “Wolfgang Joop“, page 36 – 39
