As part of a Cooperation between Wolfang Joop’s fashion brand Wunderkind and the eco-label hessnatur was invited to a press conference on Wednesday. The overarching theme: A bit of advertising for the launch of the Wunderkind x hessnatur “Capsule Collection”.
Because the reporting was not to be left to chance, the sub-topics were also set and professionally moderated: On a mini-podium, cultural scientist Ingeborg Harms introduced hessnatur CEO Andrea Hohman and the “star designer”, who, according to Harms, is also an author, restorer, Illustrator, painter, lecturer, actor and cult figure, some questions about sustainability, longevity and style.
The collection that mainly consists of simple, mostly white and light blue blouses, shirts and shirts, but also a few summer dresses with floral patterns is relatively unspectacular and should be particularly popular with hessnatur customers and Joop fans. May 11th will show whether the latter will expand the customer base of the Hessian mail order company “sustainably”, because from then on the clothes will be available to buy. In any case, Hessnatur is optimistic and has already planned further collections with Joop.
Sustainability yes, recycling reluctantly
In terms of content, too, not much new came to light, the eloquent Joop was repeatedly slowed down in his philosophical explanations about this and that. Regrettably, because every now and then he would tell relatively interesting things, mostly incoherently.
For example, that the topic of sustainability was new to him. And that he still doesn’t think much of recycling: After the recycling process, the materials are simply not that “innocent” anymore. They lack tension, elasticity. However, working with sustainable materials had shown him that he made “luxury”. For him, luxury doesn’t mean that something is expensive, but how you wear it. Luxury is the attitude to life of wanting something that does not yet exist. The fact that the big nothing usually has its price is probably a bit subtle.
The word innocence, which he is looking for in new materials, also seems to concern Joop in other ways: he said that he recently had a Shitstorm had to put up with because he spoke in a “Spiegel” interview that “a little sin in fashion is quite nice”. He still stands by that today, because he was misunderstood and actually only wanted to say that fashion lives on unreasonableness. He doesn’t know exactly how that goes together with sustainability, or rather you get the feeling that the topic of sustainability isn’t really of that much interest to Joop.
That doesn’t have to be so bad, because hessnatur and its fairly produced materials are responsible for that, or sustainability can also mean that the designs are so simple that they don’t go “out of fashion”, simply because they don’t are fashionable.
It’s refreshing that Joop doesn’t care about trends, but his theories about what women, and especially his “bulky girlfriends”, want to wear, are not. At some point, during the hour-long panel discussion, he reveals that he designs oversized children’s dresses for adult women because children don’t have waists “and women who wear dresses like that make them look young”. So much for innocence.
