Vice: Hi, Anne and Christian, thanks for the coffee! Let's start with an easy question: Why did you become fashion designers?
Anne: Oh, good question… [Giggles nervously].
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Certainly the diversity, variety of expression. Doing something different every season.Anne: Sometimes the changes of collections and seasons are too fast; you always have to come up with new things in such a short time.Christian: But we really try to do something new every time.
Sometimes we focus on a certain aspect we found by coincidence. For example, our current summer collection is called Pottery. We went to an exhibition where we saw strange old-fashioned vases. We just had this idea--let's make something based on this aspect. For the winter collection, Directives, we started making paper sculptures, folding them in different ways. While we were making these, we noticed it was difficult to finish the sculpture. Because you have to wrap in a certain direction, you see. Than we transferred these sculptures on patterns of clothes, so this was the main idea for that collection.I see. Details are very important in your collections, right?
Yes, we like to work with little errors, imperfect things.Anne: The colors are very important as well; we love it when colors get blurry and "flimmery" in detail.What is your favorite spot in the atelier?
Christian: Hard to say, maybe the table where I'm standing all the time! Making the patterns. And yours, Anne? Your little printing room?
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Berlin not as much, actually. We used to, but it's not that important. Everyone is coming to Paris so there's no need to do Berlin, and it's so early every year, too. I mean, it's nice to show something here, but it's a lot of work and sometimes it's just not worth it.How do you like Tokyo?
There are so many rules there! And people are more addicted to style and fashion than they are here. They're not so free in combining things. And the whole scene is very young.Any funny stories about young crazy Japanese people?
We had a shop party at Wood and all the costumers were dressed in Anntian from our previous collections, like totally Anntian! So, I mean, that's nice, but it's also like "Ooh, you don't need to do this for us!"Christian: And they want signatures on everything!So you were like heroes, or rock stars?
Yeah, a little bit, that's something we would never get to experience here in Europe.Anne: But there was a funny thing here in Berlin as well. In Best Shop, they told us an old lady bought one of our shirts and she was really focused on it. Like she particularly looked for an Anntian top. We just heard about this and now we're curious what she looks like.Christian: So, old lady in your Anntian shirt, please send us a picture of yourself.NINA BYTTEBIER
