Closing the circle

In 2003 I went to Metzingen looking for fabric for my wedding dress. I found instead a wonderful summer-wool black fabric, made by the first provider for Hugo Boss and meant for men´s suits. I kept the fabric in a corner of my closet for years, waiting for the best occasion to  make something out of it, and for the idea of what to do with it.

Last year everything came together: the occasion —the vernissage of our group exhibition "Stuttgart illustriert"— and the idea —it would be a black dress, simple but special. I took the final decision about what to do with the fabric as I discovered the most delightful shop-atelier (in my own street, after having lived here for eight years!). It is called "Das Kleine Schwarze" and its name says it all. The designer Annette Meyer has specialized herself in black dresses. She sews also other pieces but she has a flair for the little black dress and her whole atelier tells about it and speaks the same language as the flexible, elegant and maybe most famous clothing piece of the XXth century.

She arranges her shop window every month with some minimalistic and quite artistic little installations that are a treat for the ones passing by. I remember that winter, as I met her, has been a quite long, cold and hard one and the window was showing a wild butterflies fabric draped around a dress form and hanging close to it was the nicely printed and framed sentence: "yes, me too, I have enough of this winter".

So, she sewed my favourite dress, she even came to the vernissage and we talked loosely about, maybe, one day doing something together for her shop window. Then I got one invitation from BeFF to exhibit in their office space, whatever I wanted. And since BeFF is an organization that supports women in their careers I thought of merging it all: why not imagining the black dresses for different professions? It was an fun game, playing with different interpretations of the black dress. Graphically it has a certain strength and a simplicity that helps focusing in the other aspects of the drawing: the colour is already decided. And it fascinates me the diversity of characteristics that this colour can irradiate: serious, sexy, intellectual, rebel, spiritual... It sort of backs off and leaves the whole weight on the details of the design: collar, sleeves, laces, seams, length.

The exhibition at BeFF is over and next month the twelve drawings* are coming back to the place where they started as an idea: they will hang in the shop window of "Das Kleine Schwarze". And a local newspaper already told about it. I am happy the circle is closing.

*Quality prints can be bought at Digiprinz (for shipments to Germany) and RedBubble (if you are abroad). The prices are new and improved.

Join the mailing list and get updates whenever a new collection of drawings is out there.