Achim Reichert: I’m curious about what someone does with the typefaces. The wonderful thing about type design is that you’re essentially making a drawing, you’re allowed to draw. And I say “allowed” deliberately, because afterwards it also serves a purpose. For me it was always like this: I enjoy drawing, but I didn’t want to bother anyone with the idea that this is some great drawing, there are a thousand great draughtsmen. So making type was a lovely thing, because I could draw and it had a purpose at the same time, something for communication. First for my own work, but when you hand it to someone else, they can keep working with that drawing language. And what comes out of it I never expected. When I see what someone does with it, I might think: oh God, I’d never have done it that way. But, hello, that’s exactly the point.

AR: Well, that’s also something people are shown by example. And it surely comes from the digital side too, that you have permanent access. On a shoot the client can look over your shoulder constantly; the moment it’s in the camera, they have access. Or via PDFs. That kind of permanent control is possible today. The nice part would actually be the time in between, between the making and the print, the maturation, that free time. It gets cut away. And that’s precisely where it happens, where something comes into being.

The question of the different disciplines is interesting too. On one hand everyone wants to break out of their discipline. On the other it shows a certain disrespect towards the actual craft. Graphic design is always the first to shout: okay, do whatever you want with me, you’re the client, you’re paying. It’s vulnerable from the start. With magazines there’s the added factor that they get their money from clients. We once made a magazine because we found the content interesting, because we wanted to know how people work creatively. But when it came to monetising it, it ran through buy-ins, a brand buying its way into the thing. And many magazines say of their own accord: we’re here to carry your vision. So it’s partly self-inflicted, because you’re looking for a business model. But those are just my observations; I’m no expert.

AR: Exactly; together with my partner. We were essentially doing graphic design for the art world.

AR: I would say, art wasn’t anything special here back then; there was no strong art scene. There were people doing things, of course, who have since become more successful. The magazines that shaped that period were Purple and Self Service, which helped a lot. It was definitely a time when you didn’t yet know exactly what was happening. Some people were already doing great things in the late nineties. I didn’t pick up on a lot of it because I was limited by the language, too. So you saw a lot of it wide-eyed and had no idea how established it already was, or wasn’t.

Today it’s much more professional, of course. Every gallery knows the procedures. It’s become a machine, and I don’t mean that negatively, it’s become a functioning thing. As for the underground: in Frankfurt or Offenbach there was always an environment where you made your own exhibition spaces, put your own things out. In Paris I always found that a bit lacking, that little gets made here on one’s own initiative, although of course things like Self Service or Purple also came out of that kind of underground.

AR: But what I have to say is: the magazines that came later were already squinting pretty quickly at how they could be useful to the client. They were far more service providers. They’d say: hello, we’re the young line and we’ll bring you to the youth. But that got stronger. That, though, really is just my personal perception.

On the other hand, there’s a huge amount going on right now. Among the generation of thirty- to forty-year-olds, and the younger ones, the twenty-year-olds, there are constant new magazine launches, people doing things, simply enthusiastic about the craft. Whether that yields a genuinely new kind of photography, I can’t say. Twenty years ago it was a bit more everyday, a bit more romanticising daily life, there were always styles, too. So I can’t say all that much about the change; maybe I’m not the right chronicler for it.

I find it fascinating how it has developed here. Because people don’t stay in their posts forever, new people are constantly being appointed. In the fashion houses too, new designers keep coming in, often from their own circle of friends. Something is always developing. I have the impression that there are possibilities to do something.

AR: If you’d complain to a fashion designer fifteen years ago that Helvetica is always the one being used, they wouldn’t have known what Helvetica is. Things like that happened, with people who are genuinely intelligent, but for whom typography simply wasn’t important. And that’s fine; I don’t know cutting techniques either. But that there hadn’t yet been much collaboration, that the limits weren’t being tested, what can you do with type, what with communication? I found that a shame. I always saw more potential there. That’s also why we made a magazine back then, because we wanted to connect fashion, type and creation.

So I think it’s good that the fashion world is now more willing to experiment with type. And that there are now typefaces in play that may have originated twenty years ago, out of a very simple will to bring a particular form into the world. Because that’s really what it is: you create a formal language and you want it to live. That’s the great thing about it: if you make a drawing on paper, you have to hang it in a gallery, or these days you do it on Insta. But a typeface, you make it as a file, hand it to someone, and then it lives, then it gets printed.

And with all these branding things in particular: for a while everything went sans serif, now people are starting to bring in more traditional typefaces again. There’s this back-and-forth about what branding is, what identity is, how neutral it has to be. 

AR: Out of feeling, yes, whatever form interests me at the moment. It can also be a form that’s simply rectangular. Then I ask myself: what can I do with this? And then it collides with the requirements a typeface has. The B is composed differently from an A, but in the same formal language. And then I notice: my idea of the form doesn’t fit the T at all. So I work on it and let myself be surprised by the requirements.

That’s one side. Alongside that there are things where I think: I’m interested in this technique: If I write very small, for instance, what’s it like when I make it big? What comes out of that? Those are experimental series, nothing extraordinary: you set yourself a constraint and see what happens. What tends not to happen with me: that I see an old book or an old type catalogue and think, oh, I’ll make the new version of that. Others can do that.

AR: I don’t think it differs much. Four or five years ago when I left the studio i had as a duo I was at the point of asking myself: what do I actually want? I can’t just keep doing exactly the same thing I’d pursued for twenty years. I was sitting at my desk, luckily had a sheet of paper and a pencil, and I just started drawing. And I realised: this is exactly what I want. The only question was: how can this work so that I make money from it? That’s basically been my fundamental task for five or six years.

And at some point it started to feel like back when I was drawing letters for typefaces. I’m not thinking about letters at all, but maybe they’re in there anyway. There’s this back-and-forth: is it a drawing, is it a letter? A letter is something we’ve agreed on, something we recognise. A form isn’t a letter because it has a particular shape, but because at some point we agreed that that’s the shape for that letter. I have to keep reminding myself of that: there’s no golden rule for when something is a letter and when it isn’t. No good Lord decided it. That also gives me a freedom, really, you can use anything as a letter. Because I now have this continuous drawing practice, the process has become even clearer. I can look at it even more neutrally.

AR: This is not my first, but it’s the typeface I was really excited over. It came about when I started making type. That was the techno era, you took existing typefaces, altered them, broke them, attacked them. But I constantly had the feeling I was holding old things in my hands, tinkering with stuff from the fifties. And then I thought: I have to make this myself. Out of myself, from zero, from scratch.

At the same time there was the pronouncement from the typography professor in Offenbach: I can’t teach you this, there’s no course for it, so it can’t be done. But there were people in my circle who did it anyway and said: just do it. And then I sat in the computer room one night and simply drew all 255 characters with the mouse. Suddenly it was there. For me that was a breakthrough, for others it’s nothing special, but for the first time I could say: hey, this is a typeface, it’s digital now, and I can work with it.

AR: Exactly. Then I thought: I’ll clean it up a bit, because the basis is great, it looks harmonious, not just scrawly or handmade. By the way, those filled areas in the second style appear automatically, when you set point after point, the program always generates a surface. Two points make a line, a third makes a triangle.

That was the foundation for everything. From it I made a script style, a linear serif style. A very simple working-through on the basis of this thing, also to break open how type used to be cut. We had new media, after all; you could approach it more casually and see what happened. There were then things inspired by logos, where you work with curves, or the variant with the extremely broad band nib. The whole thing really just shows a bit of the process, and the thought that it doesn’t have to be a certain way.

Then there was the hymn-book typeface, drawn with a very fine nib, as an intermediate step towards Helvetica. And I realised: this is great, because it’s neither just a children’s typeface nor pretentious. What bothered me for a long time, you see, is this vertical order: there’s a sender and a receiver, and the receiver has to be convinced by the beauty that the sender is better than they are. That gradient. There’s nothing wrong with that, you’re allowed to dream upwards. But you can also try to communicate horizontally, at eye level, and still with quality. That you don’t take the thing so seriously. That’s why it suited me well to use these typefaces for projects.

AR: This series here is roughly the first four years. At some point that was enough. Maybe for some project you had to adjust something, add a few letters, change a weight. It’s called Try, for the attempt. That was the attempt.

After that it was more individual things, often solved through projects. For a musician (Cornelius Cardew), for instance, a poster series, he did a lot of community work, hence a very illustrative type. Or a painter (Nicolas Chardon) who works only with squares and surfaces, he got the complete opposite, a really scratchy typeface, not like Suprematism, not like Malevich. So there were typefaces that wanted something, and typefaces that came about in response to something.

A friend of mine, Wolfgang Breuer, noticed there’s no program that lets you say digitally: here’s a circle, here’s a line, and I want to change the size of this circle. There’s no function for that. So he had a program written and gave it to me, and out of that I made a typeface. He had this geometric, digital idea, and the question was: what do you do with it, how can you develop it further? Or here, it must have been right at the beginning here in Paris, through the graffiti and the Arabic script that was very present here at the time, a different kind of wrist movement came into it.

Then there was a project for documenta. The artistic directors didn’t want to make a documenta where great art is shown and everything else is just okay; they wanted to question every area: what is a magazine, what is a wayfinding system, what is a poster? They posed that question first, and there was an independent answer for each discipline. That’s also nice with regard to our theme from the beginning: that you give each discipline its space rather than subordinating it.

AR: Sure, harder to control, but then often great things come out of it. I think the viewer always senses whether something was made out of a kind of self-importance or because you think you have to do it that way. With that wayfinding system the idea was: we want people to be accompanied, not led by the hand from above. There are only suggestions, there’s the documenta halle, there’s the spot. For that I developed a typeface that runs at chest height, like a graffiti thing, just written down like that. That’s the kind of thing that comes out.

There are also typefaces that arose purely from a formal idea, that I wanted to combine thick surfaces with very thin ones, simply to see what comes out. A thought like plant stems, purely from feeling. You get typefaces that are almost uncontrollable, that go beyond themselves, but also ones that work for body text and are still interesting at large sizes, in display, because they have nice details.

AR: That was about the question of how many points you need. For a book about a French philosopher I once wanted to make a different roman style. Or here, those are things where you constrain yourself geometrically in order to generate a feeling.

Another was a commission from the artist Tania Bruguera. She wanted a typeface that’s legible everywhere in the world, so, 40,000 characters. I didn’t know it either, but I asked myself: what makes a typeface illegible to other people, what makes it foreign? And I thought: a typeface becomes foreign to me when it contains components of another culture, strokes and forms we never use. I took that foreignness and said: I’ll make a typeface that has no such form at all. That’s what came out.

AR: Absolutely. For me everything is constantly a dialogue anyway. And it’s a stroke of luck that there are people, like Tania, who say: I don’t need an image or a newspaper, I need a typeface for my project. Because I got stuck in the art world, working a lot with artists, I was able to do quite a bit.

But a lot also came from me. I once ran a typography workshop with illiterate people, for instance, because I wanted to know what typography actually is. Quite naively thought: I’ll just ask illiterate people, since they can’t read. And I learned that they tick in a completely different way. Out of that I made a typeface that shows a bit of it, the way someone I got to know writes very simply. I was later able to use it again for a catalogue at the Museum of Modern Art, for an architect. It fit. It’s nice when you can keep developing something like that.

AR: There were always workshops. But now, for the first time, I have a longer professorship, at the Université Paris VIII in Saint-Denis Vincennes. She was founded around 1968, those thinkers like Deleuze or Foucault worked there. De Gaulle wanted to push the ’68 movement out of Paris and set them up out there in the forest. Also to give them space. You’re welcome to check that, but that’s my understanding. It’s not a Sorbonne, a different mindset, much more horizontal. But also not an art school, it’s something else, a bit bigger, a bit tougher too.

I’m co-responsible for creation there. I see my task as getting people to make something. I don’t teach type design or graphic design from A to Z; instead I develop assignments and see what happens, in the hope that as much as possible comes out of it.

Fabian Kluth: It really began during Covid. We were all sitting at home, locked in, and at some point you just get bored. I never really had much homework from school, so by Monday I already felt like I had finished everything I was supposed to do. Then there were still six days left in the week that somehow needed to be filled. 

So I started getting into all kinds of things. I was reading a lot – Goethe, philosophy, mathematics, physics – and I started asking myself: what do I actually want to do after this pandemic?

At some point school announced that we all had to do internships. So I randomly applied to an architecture office in Cologne. I realized very quickly that I would never become an architect because I was catastrophically bad at the artistic side of it. But I became fascinated by the question of what drives people creatively. And once you start dealing with architecture, you automatically end up dealing with fashion and art too. It’s all connected somehow.

FK: I could never produce art myself. I’m completely incapable of that. I got terrible grades in art at school too. But I love to own my own pieces.

FK:I discovered artists on social media, especially in Leipzig. One of them was Rosa Loy, the wife of Neo Rauch. I became obsessed with her work. So I tagged her on Instagram and emailed her asking for previews. Everything was far too expensive for me, obviously, but eventually I found one piece hidden at the very end of a PDF that somehow seemed possible.

I realized that if I worked gastronomy jobs all summer long, I could maybe afford it. So at the end of summer vacation, in 35-degree heat, I took a bus to Leipzig with a huge tote bag and picked up my first artwork.

FK:Things that create friction. That’s still true today. It’s much more about themes.

And I don’t only collect paintings either. The exhibitions are very broad in terms of medium.

FK: The exhibitions are always about creating a reflection of our time. I think art should function as a mirror. It should confront us with ourselves.

I’m very interested in gender issues, environmental topics, consumer culture. Harry Nuriev, for example, is incredible. He did this exhibition with Dietrich & Schlechtriem where he created soaps with Balenciaga labels trapped inside them. I think that kind of critique of consumerism is brilliant.

Most of the artists in the collection are born in the 1990s or later. Some of them literally just graduated from art school or are still studying. I simply found them online, visited their studios and bought works directly.

FK:Not at all. Nothing is for sale.

At the exhibitions a lot of people immediately wanted to buy works. Which was actually great for the artists. One artist sold several pieces directly from his studio that evening because of the exposure.

But I don’t take commissions and I don’t want to. That’s not the point.

FK: Absolutely not. But art isn’t necessarily as expensive as people think.

And honestly, Covid helped in that way too. I started learning about stocks and crypto – this was before the big AI boom. I invested in NVIDIA, Apple, Microsoft, Meta. It all developed relatively quickly. Today I make a lot of money through stocks and crypto.

FK:I actually hate the term collector. That’s why my project is called Platform and Vision and not “collection.” 

Of course the stereotypes exist. But I’m not interested in profiling myself through art. I don’t need a Gerhard Richter hanging in my hallway just so visitors understand I can afford one.

FK: In the beginning nobody took me seriously. They imagined some rich kid in Louboutins with daddy’s money. 

But that was never me. I wear the same thing every day. Black shirt, same trousers, different shoes depending on the season. That’s it.

FK: Exactly. Like Steve Jobs with his Issey Miyake sweaters. I don’t want to stand in front of my closet every morning thinking about clothes. I want my energy elsewhere.

FK: Especially now with social media, yes. But honestly, I also want the project to exist independently of me eventually. The interesting thing isn’t Fabian Kluth as a person. The interesting thing is the discussion around the work.

FK: I don’t really care about conventions or norms. I do my own thing.

And honestly, criticism interests me more than praise. I need friction. I need tension.

FK: If I want something, I go after it relentlessly.

There’s an artist I wanted work from for over a year. I called every Monday asking if there was something available. Every single Monday. At a certain point, he agreed. It’s persistence.

FK: That’s difficult to answer.

My parents never pressured me. Quite the opposite actually – very laissez-faire. But for me it feels natural. If I do something, I want it to work properly.

FK: Of course there are things you have to do. But generally I try to only do things I genuinely care about.

Look at today for example. I came to Berlin last night, didn’t sleep at all, tomorrow I’ll drive back at four in the morning, then I have appointments again immediately. But I just do it because I love it. Doing nothing stresses me more. I can’t lie on a couch for two hours. Impossible.

FK: I have a horse. Laughs. Once a week I go there, clean the stable, put on rubber boots and walk around for two hours. That’s probably the calmest part of my week.

FK: I’ve always loved misfits.

I felt like all the existing art podcasts always invited the exact same people. I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted people with friction. Naturally I already had close contact to many artists because I collect their work.

FK: In a club I’d probably sit at the bar watching people instead of dancing.

But eventually I’d still walk over and talk to them.

FK: Definitely not repeating the same exhibition format for the next forty years. The vision is much bigger than that. I want to bring people together. That’s really the core idea behind everything.

And honestly, if tomorrow I wake up and decide I want to make a magazine instead, or open a clothing store, then I’ll do that.

FK: Exactly. Whenever I get excited about something, I start immediately. Perfectionism is basically fear in disguise. I don’t really care about perfection at first. I’ll just ask ChatGPT how to solve things.

FK: Honestly? You just have to fall on your face again and again. Fail repeatedly. Get up again. Continue.

You just have to analyze what you’re doing and how you can improve it. Not everything has to be radically disruptive immediately. Sometimes it’s enough to question existing systems and optimize them differently.

Germany especially has this fear of failure. But life is too short to spend it doing things you don’t care about. I don’t want to wake up every morning working on topics I feel nothing for. That’s the real nightmare to me.

LEVIN LIAM: In my opinion, it has become more mature musically. It’s a coherent journey, both in terms of what’s being said and the sound. And even though there are a lot of darker-themed tracks on it, I’d say it’s also a little more playful and fun.

LL:Very hard to say. It always changes. As of now, I’d say “weißt schon.”

LL:“Pech” is a very unique German word. There is no direct translation in English. You’d use something like “bad luck” or “the opposite of luck.” Plus, you can interpret the word in two different ways, and both fit the meaning the album has to me.

LL: No, not really. I think in some ways I’ve always been both very unlucky and very lucky at the same time, which also fits what I meant with the two meanings of the word “Pech.” I’m not a spiritual person, but I feel like life has a pretty good way of balancing things out. You win some, you lose some. You get disappointed by people, and you disappoint others. I got really lucky in a lot of ways in life, but I’ve also been through some very painful challenges over the last couple of years, and I try to have that balance in my music as well.

LL: I was able to learn a lot from my previous tours, so I’m really looking forward to this one. We already played some of the album at the Elbphilharmonie, and it’s an exciting one to play and hear live.

LL: I love both for very different reasons. Hamburg feels more like home to me. Calming and familiar, smaller and more manageable. I can get shit done here, see family, be productive. Berlin, on the other hand, often feels very chaotic, big, exciting, and so on.

LL: If things calm down politically one day, I could see myself living in New York for some time. New York has been one of the most inspiring places I’ve been to, so that’s kind of a dream.

NEROMUN: Yeah, it’s funny, I never really use the word „home“ for here, I don’t have a connection to the term in general. It is definitely the place where I grew up, went to school and spent most of my life, even though it’s getting a bit tight. Mainz is very special, also because Wiesbaden and Frankfurt are so closely connected. There used to be many army bases here, which brought a lot of Black culture into the region. There were many Black clubs in the area, also in Mainz, but mostly Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. Techno too – this club „Dorian Gray“ in Frankfurt started techno in Germany first, but actually it was a funk and disco club, so also a Black space. But they were open to it, and that’s how the first raves started.
All that has definitely influenced me. I grew up with very good music, not only from my upbringing but also from the streets and my surroundings.
Also my old crew, „Sichtexot“ or Eloquent, who now lives in Wiesbaden, they were all here and we hung out and influenced and inspired each other.

N: I do read quite a bit, even though I don’t even enjoy it that much. I don’t do it for fun or to kill time, but to access art. I read books that aim to go in interesting directions with language itself.
To me, rap creators, but also musicians in general, are nowadays poets. They create poetry that people can actually access, much more maybe than contemporary poetry. I don’t even know many contemporary poets like that.

N: I actually do. I always carry a poetry book with me. I am not wearing my jacket, otherwise I could show you now.

N: Right now I have Georg Heym’s poetry with me, and Rilke is always in my bag. Poets from the beginning of the 20th century, they really resonate with me — Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Else Lasker-Schüler, Rilke, Gottfried Benn — those are the kings and queens of poetry for me. And always have been. We read Hermann Hesse in 8th grade, and I was like, „whoa, this is crazy, I need to dig deeper into this“. So from there I moved over to Kafka and others and was just always reading a lot of that stuff.

Growing up, listening to artists such as Tyler, the Creator, I would google every single word I didn’t understand and treated lyrics as poems. For me they’re on the same level, there’s no difference.

N: I don’t really think about it in that context, but if I had to, I’d say it’s a circle that closes, sort of finishing off the previous three albums. It almost sophisticates my previous works where I was experimenting more – many techniques and approaches  that I was developing for the past six years I could finally apply instead of experimenting with them.

N: Everything has meaning and reference, it’s all thought through. But it’s important to me that, just like you said, it’s also feelings and vibes, because then the words gain a whole new meaning. They gain a new quality that means more to me than their alleged meaning.
There are plenty of deep reasons, such as: „How does meaning work?“ There’s this theory that we limit words to what they mean, but in reality there’s much more, such as the sound of it. The sound, the vibe is what actually sets our body into vibrations. And I really like to play with that. 

Open texts inspire more people to click onto that and continue writing, or not necessarily writing but just expression in general.
Like Kafka, his works are open, „not finished“, with an open ending. And there’s this huge argument about whether they are actually unfinished or intended like that. His novels are endless, such as in „The Trial“, the protagonist is just trying to understand what’s happening to him and there’s no end to it. If there was one, it would be too easy — we could say, okay, that’s the moral of the story, done. But with the story remaining open, there are all these threads continuing forever. And that’s one of the reasons why Kafka is so popular, it simply doesn’t end.

N: Right now it’s a bit of a transition phase, to see what’s happening, what’s working. I have the feeling I want to change my name again. For now, I’ve always done three albums for each artist name, like trilogies. I have the feeling I haven’t reached my final form yet and the name has a lot to do with that somehow. But the new identity hasn’t revealed their sound to me yet – just some feelings and playing around a bit, but nothing final yet. To me that’s the most beautiful phase of creating, when you’re figuring it out and are insecure and tripping over like a child that has just learned how to walk, it’s cute.

N: Gratefulness, consciousness, empathy, love of one’s neighbour as well as your enemies. We haven’t really covered that yet, but somehow I really found Jesus in the past year, my whole life just flipped around.
Gratefulness is so important — for example before my song „Prayer 3“, in which I am saying „I am hella thankful“, I’ve never done anything like that. I never expressed gratitude in a song. So many times I’ve worked through my anger and sadness, but when I made this song, I was levitating. When recording, you need to repeat it maybe 50 times. So for 50 times I was saying „I am hella thankful, I am thankful, I am thankful“. After that I was flying. And I realized: „Oh my god, this is it, I must be way more aware and thankful and actually say ‘thank you’ after each day.“
Same as for my song „Im Licht“, where I’m saying „You’re being heard when praying“, and it’s true. You are being heard when you pray, you can manifest everything. And that’s something that is far from finished for me, I want to really get to the bottom of this and work with it.

CHRISTINE WÜRFEL-STAUSS: It does not feel like a transition between two separate worlds to me. I would rather describe it as a continuous dialogue that unfolds differently depending on the context. Art and fashion essentially address very similar questions, even if they both operate under different circumstances. Both explore how people relate to the world they live in, how individuals express their place within our era and how creative design reacts to its time. What differs, however, are the conditions under which they operate – and with them the range of what they can do.

It must also function within everyday life and social contexts while remaining bound to economic factors. So they are not two separate worlds, but art is far less constrained than fashion.

CWS: For me, fashion is all of this at once. Fashion is foremost a form of personal expression, how to dress is a decision that is part of your own identity. It can align with your own values and references, it can also function as powerful tool to take on different roles. Ideally, it can give the wearer the feeling of facing the world in the best possible way within a given context. This is particularly interesting because fashion is one aspect of who you are that always remains visible to others in social spaces. 

Fashion is also significant as a source of inspiration, since during its creation a variety of design principles such as color, proportions, rhythm, and materiality are being applied. These are often elements that have their origins in artistic or architectural ways of thinking. When you recognize aspects of those visual structures in fashion, it often brings their origins back to mind. And also each day, everyone subconsciously makes so many decisions that have a creative component which mirror the sartorial trends around us. Observing the current developments in fashion from runway collections to the way individuals dress in certain contexts influences your own approach and the ability to interpret situations in a certain way through observing sartorial choices. 

And collectability – yes, but only in specific cases. It certainly applies to couture, which often can be considered a work of art. This is partly because it is unique and created only once, and partly because of the technical precision and the immense effort involved. Furthermore, it is rooted in clear conceptual thinking, which brings fashion and art very close together. Another aspect to think of in terms of collectability is your own personal wardrobe. It is one of the most precious collections of our memories. An archive of lived moments of our life that embodies time as almost no other personal collection does. Our clothes contributed to how we felt and how we were perceived by others in certain moments. They can be a diary of happy moments or special situations. I often still know exactly what I was wearing when something significant happened and I cherish those pieces.

CWS: Yes, sometimes I can not recall who was there or exactly where it was, but I still remember exactly what I was wearing. Preserving these garments is part of keeping these memories alive. These pieces are irreplaceable, not even by an identical item. They are a collection of personal treasures, invaluable, at least that is what I think. 

Something else that needs to be mentioned in the context of collectability are key pieces of vintage fashion that serve as a sentinel of the sartorial culture of their time. Collecting such pieces preserves the design languages and the cultural attitudes of specific eras. It tells of social ideals and also of technical possibilities. I cherish that because it is a cultural memory in the form of a garment. A beautiful example was the exhibition Gabrielle Chanel – Fashion Manifesto which was first shown at the Palais Galliera in Paris till 2021 and then traveled to Melbourne and London till recently. It traced, through garments such as swimwear and daywear, how shifts in silhouettes and material reflected a broader change in the perception of women and showed how fashion can articulate changing roles within a cultural context.

CWS: When it comes to couture, I think less about practicability than the incredible skill set and abundance of hours of elaborate work that went into the creation. I am always in awe at the highly specialized craftsmanship that is required and that only very few artisans still master today. The level of skill going into the creation of those collections is beyond impressive. I just recently came across a piece in The New Yorker about an atelier in Paris that creates just the featherwork for couture pieces. The techniques involved are so specific and complicated that they are the only atelier remaining that can process these feathers in these ways using techniques refined over decades. When hundreds of hours of work go into the smallest piece of embroidery, it is simply magnificent. But couture collections and their presentations are usually very special cultural moments for several reasons. A few weeks back, I attended the first couture defile by Matthieu Blazy for Chanel at the Grand Palais, which I found absolutely spectacular. As soon as you arrived you walked into a world of its own, a surreal, pink fantasy forest. It resembled an immersive artwork in many ways. The entire Grand Palais was covered in a light pink, fluffy carpet: a very delicate, powdery pink. Even the seating was all covered in it. And then there were giant mushrooms, up to five meters high. Added to that were weeping willows hanging down, all in orange, pink, and yellow. It was massive, and on top of that, there was birdsong; it was breathtaking to me. An immersive, ephemeral world that was intriguingly beautiful. Just the week before, I had been in Milan at the Fondazione Prada and had seen Carsten Höller’s permanent installation there – an entire room where giant fly agarics hung upside down from the ceiling and rotated. The show in Paris came very close to this work. You experienced a real shift in perception because suddenly everything which usually is of a small size appeared giant; you walk through it and wondered if Alice in Wonderland had felt that way. I had the sensation of suddenly being inside a form of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’. When the show began and the collection was presented within this setting while the audience sat right in the middle of it, each guest became part of the whole. For me, the presentation with all its different components clearly belonged in the realm of art.

CWS: For me, fashion approaches art when it moves beyond pure utility and is shaped by a clearly articulated design concept. When fashion is limited to covering or protecting the body, it fulfills its central purpose, but it operates in a different category. Art begins where it becomes apparent that every design decision, such as color, cut, and material, is part of a larger conceptual structure. So what matters to me in this context is not only the complexity of a creation or the craftsmanship that went into it, but whether a collection or a certain garment is based on a meaningful idea that extends beyond the pieces themselves.

This can even be seen, for example, in pre-modern painting:  clothing functioned as a system of signification. One could often situate the depicted figures within their social and cultural context just through the reading of their attire. Clothing conveyed social position, moral values, and affiliation. This way of reading clothing is still present today, though less clearly defined than in earlier periods.

This distinction between making and an idea that extends beyond the object can be seen in the work of several designers. Some of those whose work I have closely followed or retrospectively studied include Azzedine Alaïa who was a pioneer in approaching clothing as a sculptural practice, shaping and molding fabric in direct relation to the female body and constructing garments with a level of precision that recalled sculptural practices.

Matthieu Blazy also belongs in this context. A significant part of his work is the way his collections and their presentation through shows and campaigns form a narrative. His garments especially now for Chanel are not shown on their own, but as part of a larger spatial and perceptual setting which shapes how they are perceived. 

Albert Kriemler of Akris takes specific artistic position as a starting point for most of his collections. Rather than just referencing art, he translates distinct visual languages into garments allowing them to exist in new contexts, where they become visible in entirely new contexts beyond the museum context.

CWS: It was a completely organic development. I grew up near Kassel, where the Documenta takes place every five years. At Documenta, I saw an expansive art installation for the very first time in my life, which was such a formative experience for me that it became the starting point for everything that followed. The work was by Rebecca Horn and was installed in an actual school building that had been closed for the summer holidays. Extending across an entire classroom, historical school desks were mounted upside down to the ceiling. From each desk, thick metal wires ran downward, gathered into a bundle, and continued out through the window into the ground outside. Along these wires, liquid ink made its way downward. Even today, I would still find this work striking, but back then as a child, it was beyond anything I had ever encountered. It made me realize just how powerful art can be.

Much later, when it became possible to live with art, I began to experience what that means in everyday life: surrounding oneself with art shapes our thinking, how we relate to ourselves and others and it directs our attention.

Over time, this shifted to something less about my personal space, but about cultural responsibility, about how to contribute to the cultural systems that sustain diverse artistic practices and artistic freedom. Collecting to me today is much less about an individual work rather than about being supportive in various ways. To help that independent artistic practices will remain a vital part of society.

CWS: Of course, I remember exactly. It was a work by the Italian artist Turi Simeti, who passed away recently. It is a completely white canvas with wooden ellipses mounted on the back of the canvas, creating slight elevations across the surface. When the work is displayed on the wall, light and shadow shift depending on the surrounding light conditions. Conceptually, the work is rooted in the Zero movement of the 1960s, which was concerned with its focus on reduction, light, space and perception. What drew me to it from the beginning was its calm presence, it radiated a kind of visual quiet. The work still hangs in my home today and it continues to respond to the light and atmosphere in changing ways. That still fascinates me. 

CWS: Fashion has been integral to my thinking from very early on. It fascinated me already as a child, and I enjoyed studying books we had at home about dress making across past centuries as well as international fashion magazines we had at home, I loved playing in my mother’s wardrobe and I would even make things myself. Clothing is part of everyday life and of course you learn quickly that it is an important part of how you feel. But later, I started to pay close attention to what makes certain garments so special as a piece of design – the materials, the levels of craftsmanship, the underlying ideas, whether in terms of design or heritage. This was a different way of looking at it, what it conveys. This awareness only develops over time and is linked to the nature of clothing itself. You live with it, there is no immediate reason to search for deeper layers of meaning. But once you become aware of those some parallels to art can become apparent – in underlying conceptual thinking, precision, techniques, and in how all of these choices shape cultural reality.

With art, aspects as institutional context, art-historical classification, and market value among many others play an immediate role, while with fashion, especially as part of everyday life, there is no such threshold.  

CWS: A true artistic symbiosis with genuine added value exists when both sides can learn from one another and when the collaboration leads to something meaningful that neither could achieve on their own. So the question is what fashion can take from art and what in turn art can learn from fashion. Looking at fashion first, this becomes evident. In art history color, material, and proportions are never neutral, but deliberately used to express something. In historical portrait painting, as we discussed earlier, clothing was never accidental. It communicated character, social status, and much more. This helps fashion to understand how clothing can take on a specific meaning through certain design decisions as for example material and color. The same applies to motifs: in the 1930s, Elsa Schiaparelli created several pieces with Salvador Dalí, including the famous Lobster Dress. In this couture creation, a surrealist symbol, the lobster, was used as an embellishment. This challenged and subverted established codes of femininity and contemporary ideas of evening wear at the time. And vice versa: what is it that art learns from fashion? In particular the engagement with the human body. Everything fashion does, material, color, structure, is done with the awareness that the result must be wearable and usable in that sense. Fashion always exists within a social context and must function in everyday reality. And it is subject to an entirely different set of constraints than art since it requires continuous renewal. Works of art mostly endure only because of their intellectual or aesthetic significance across eras; fashion, by contrast, must constantly adapt: seasonally, socially, as well as to practical and economic conditions. From this permanent responsiveness of fashion, art could learn how visual languages can change and still retain their relevance.

CWS: I would say that the questions they ask one another are not symmetrical – and that is one of the reasons that makes the dialogue between art and fashion so intriguing . Art might ask fashion how it is still possible today to consistently realize aesthetic concepts without being absorbed by economic constraints. And how one can remain committed to a set of design principles while operating within market logic and being exposed to the demand of constant renewal. What does it mean, from the designer’s perspective, to see one’s work worn and interpreted by others. The wearer may adopt the intended visual language, but not necessarily the values or positions associated with it. 

Conversely, what could fashion ask? Could some forms of art still retreat into mainly aesthetic concepts, allowing its positions to unfold through form, material, and perceptions rather than stating them directly – or do the conditions of the present, shaped by global challenges, require a more direct articulation of where it stands? And, more fundamentally, can a practice that resists such declaration still sustain its relevance today?

CWS: It would definitely be Rebecca Horn. She unfortunately passed away two years ago, but will remain one of the most significant artists of our time. She became known primarily for her performative works as well as her expansive installations and kinetic sculptures. Her work often engages with physicality, perception, power, and structures. In a conversation with her, one of the topics I would love to touch on would be her work series called Body Extensions. In these works, she artificially extended parts of the body, arms, legs, even the hands, by attaching feathers, rods, or elongated elements to the fingertips. Through this, she explored the boundaries of the body, intensifying perception and sensitivity; she described this herself as an attempt to make the boundaries of the body more tangible. Today, forms of body modification -artificial nails and other aesthetic interventions – are omnipresent. When Rebecca Horn began working on her series in the 1970s, none of this existed in this form. How would she relate to this phenomenon today? Are there continuities or clear shifts?

She also worked in a distinctly political way and engaged deeply with environmental questions. I would ask her how she assesses the current political and ecological moment, and how she would position herself in relation to that through her work today.

CWS: Likewise! Thank you for your exciting questions!

LISA MIMOUN: It truly began with a little black dress. At the time, I was working in the art world, traveling constantly – New York, Los Angeles, London, the Middle East. On one trip, I lost my luggage. I was away for two months, with professional obligations almost every evening: dinners, galas, exhibitions. And suddenly I realised that the one thing I needed most was missing: a little black dress. What shocked me was that, despite having access to beautiful stores and budgets, no one was really focusing on that essential piece. From 25 to 75, women often want the same thing in their suitcase: a few garments that can shift with context. You change your shoes, your jewellery, and you’re ready. So I decided to design those pieces myself – but with an absolute obsession for quality. For me, true luxury reveals itself when you turn a garment inside out. The lining, the construction, the finishing – this is where confidence is born. You feel it immediately. It changes how you stand, how you move. You stop thinking about your clothes, and that in itself is empowering.

LM: Completely. Empowerment doesn’t come from spectacle. It comes from how a garment supports you throughout the day. When something is properly cut, lined in silk, finished the way couture used to be finished, it gives you a sense of grounding. There is also something quietly sensual about that relationship between body and clothing. Not loud, not obvious. When you take the dress off, it is just as beautiful as when you wear it. That intimacy matters.

LM: Because quality and know-how cannot be rushed. When I decided to produce in France, I quickly realised that many ateliers could no longer execute this level of finishing—especially silk linings. It’s technically difficult. The fabric moves, it slides. I left everything else behind and committed fully. I met Nadia, who became my atelier partner, and we decided to work the way couture houses once did: one piece at a time. It’s more expensive, yes. But the world does not need more clothes. It needs fewer, better ones. Pieces that last, that can be transmitted. It took five years to train our small team to achieve this level of craftsmanship. But once know-how disappears, it is gone forever.

LM: Hubert de Givenchy dressing Audrey Hepburn is an obvious reference. I also love early Courrèges, Pierre Cardin. That clarity of line, those A-shapes – they flatter almost every body. They are chic, intelligent, and uncomplicated. One of our dresses is even named after Audrey Hepburn’s character in *Breakfast at Tiffany’s*. But it’s not nostalgia. It’s about translating that elegance into today’s reality.

LM: They are empowered women. They have careers, responsibilities, ambition. They don’t have hours to spend getting dressed. They move from meetings to dinners, from travel to events. They need clothes that don’t wrinkle, that feel good after a flight, that allow them to focus on their lives. Comfort is essential. I truly believe women are most beautiful when they are comfortable. Fashion has too often used the female body as an object, a surface for effect. That is not respectful – and it is not feminist. I try on every single piece myself. I move in it, I sit, I walk. If it doesn’t feel right, we change it. Clothes should accompany women, not restrict them.

LM: Of course. When you design for women but don’t wear the clothes yourself, something is missing. This is not about being against men – it’s about lived experience. You cannot fully understand what it means to inhabit a female body if you’ve never done so. There are incredible female pioneers – Elsa Schiaparelli, Sonia Rykiel – who understood that femininity and power are not opposites. Today, too often, women are told they must become more masculine to be taken seriously. That misunderstands power entirely.

LM: Female power is not about erasing softness. It is about owning it. You can be strong, ambitious, intellectual – and still deeply feminine. Equality alone is not an ambitious goal. Women bring something else into the world. A powerful wardrobe allows you to enter the world fully present. When you don’t have to think about how you look or whether you feel comfortable, your energy goes elsewhere – towards creation, leadership, change. I’ve had women cry in my atelier. They see themselves differently for the first time. Clothing can be therapeutic. It can truly change how you move through life.

LM: She was incredibly elegant. She had a room in her Paris apartment filled with clothes—a private archive. Sometimes she would take me inside and show me the linings, the lace, the finishing. She treated her garments like works of art. That sense of reverence stayed with me. Today, it is rare to feel that intimacy with clothing. I wanted to bring it back—to create pieces that are cherished, not consumed.

LM: Know-how is everything. Creativity and craftsmanship are what make us human. Once they disappear, they cannot be recreated – not even with unlimited money. Look at the sculptures in the Louvre. No one could make them today. Creating beauty is an act of resistance. Supporting artisans, preserving techniques – this is cultural work. And it matters deeply.