Af vandervorst blad

HANNIBAL

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Inge Grognard & Ronald Stoops Sarah Mower Dries Van Noten Walter Van Beirendonck Geert Bruloot & Eddy Michiels Sally Singer Linda Loppa Sarah Mower Dan Thawley Caroline de Maigret Nicole Phelps Katie Burnett Christiane Arp Hannelore Knuts Suzy Menkes Patti Wilson Elisabeth Clauss Valerie Steele Veerle Windels Chelsea Wolfe Alastair McKimm Blixa Bargeld Stephen Jones Mel Ottenberg Nina Petters Dirk Braeckman Vicki Sarge Moses Moreno Damian Foxe Sebastian Manes Mario Testino Joris Van de Moortel Luke Leitch James Goldstein Natalie Wansbrough-Jones Didier Grumbach Tim Blanks Melanie Chokron & Marco Innocenti Akeem Smith Francesco Mezzabotta Jan Hoet Junior & Delphine Bekaert Marjolijn Vanslembrouck

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Foreword by Alix Browne Preface by Michael Schwartz

A.F.World Humble Beginnings Bold Beginning Blixa Bargeld First Encounters Graduation Joseph Beuys Uniforms Red Cross Collection One Partnership Ende Neu

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The Academy Years 1998 - 2018

Nightfall Fetish Aktionen

Translations Photo Credits Acknowledgement Colophon

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In 1990 Susan Sontag wrote a play based on the life of Alice James, sister of the great American novelist Henry James and of the great American moral philosopher William James. Her subject matter, Sontag wrote, was women – women’s anguish, women’s consciousness of self. Alice James, though apparently no less an intellectual powerhouse than her famous siblings, succumbed to deep depression, and spent the last several years of her life confined to her bed, having declared her desire to commit suicide. ‘The all too common reality of a woman who does not know what to do with her genius, her originality, her aggressiveness, and therefore becomes a career invalid’, Sontag explained, ‘merged in my mind with the fictional figure of the Victorian girl-child, who discovers the world of adult arbitrariness in the form of a dream (in the style produced by that perfectly legal and widely used nineteenth-century drug, opium) in which the changes in and perplexities about her feelings are imagined as arbitrary changes in physical size and scale’. Interestingly, Sontag also noted that while she had written the play over the course of two weeks that winter, she had first dreamed the entire thing, from beginning to end, a decade before. She titled the play ‘Alice in Bed’.

When it opened at the New York Theater Workshop in the fall of 2000, the Dutch/American production featured costumes by An Vandevorst and Filip Arickx, partners in work and in life, and the duo behind the Belgian label A.F.Vandevorst.

One can only assume that the young fashion designers – who, having only very recently established their label under the sign of the red cross, had scant collections under their belt – had been selected to work on the Sontag play on the basis of their phenomenal Spring 1999 runway show. ‘Our second collection was inspired by the behaviour of a woman lying on her bed and the integration of that environment into her wardrobe, such as: sheets, pillows, blankets, pleats and wrinkles, white cotton, pyjamas, etc.’, An explained, adding that the bed serves many purposes and functions: to rest, read, sleep, heal, cure. ‘So not only the bedroom, but also a hospital, a sanatorium, a dormitory, a spa.’

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As such, they forewent the traditional – and, I might add, entirely conventional – elevated runway, opting instead for the ambiance of a dorm. With the help of their production designer, Etienne Russo, they found 32 vintage hospital beds and had them transported to Paris, where they lined the glass-ceilinged courtyard of a school in the Marais. When the doors opened, guests were confronted by the sight of the models all prone in the beds, in various states of slumber. ‘At first nobody dared to enter as it was so serene, truly magical’, An would recall. ‘Once the people came in, they could sit next to the beds as though they were visiting a loved one.’

There were chairs positioned along the aisle of this makeshift hospital ward, at the feet of the beds, but also at their heads. In fashion, placement is political. But in this case, the second or third row, which situated people in closest proximity to the sleeping beauties, might well have been reserved for those among us with the most fortitude. It is a strange feeling to watch someone sleeping – an intimacy that is the province of mothers and their children, of lovers who share the same bed. Magazine editors, store buyers and other such regular fashion-show invitees have no problem staring at models – scrutinizing their hair, their make-up, the clothes on their backs – as they parade before us on a catwalk under the glare of bright lights. But this was different. Here we were intruders.

And the sense of otherness was profound.

An and Filip met in 1987, on their first day as students at the Royal Academy in Antwerp. I can only imagine their surprise, that moment of recognition, when they discovered they shared a weirdly esoteric common obsession with hospital design. Filip had once found an entire suite of cast-off hospital furniture on the street and taken it home with him. An arrived at her own fixation through the work of the shamanistic German artist Joseph Beuys. (For one of Beuys’s best-known ‘actions’ or works of performance, 1974’s ‘I Like America and America Likes Me’, he lived with a coyote for three days in a New York City art gallery, arriving and departing in an ambulance.) When she graduated from the academy, An presented her final collection on hospital beds. ‘Without any doubt, it became the DNA of our brand’, she said.

Indeed, AKTION, their decidedly clinical pop-up guerrilla store in Antwerp in 2009, was outfitted with antique sick beds and glass cabinets borrowed from the Dr Guislain Museum in Ghent. And for the Arnhem Mode Biennale in 2011, they reprised the theme from their by then legendary runway show, creating a full-scale human model out of translucent wax. The girl lay on her side, in the fetal position, clutching her pillow. As small flames flickered along the ridge of her body, she slowly melted away into oblivion, like Alice James withering away in her bed.

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Red Cross encounters and inspirations.

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This season we introduced the first full Nightfall collection. We had been including lingerie since the creation of our first collection, but this was our first full and complete line of intimates.

The staging for our show was an enormous red cross pulsating in the light design.

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Paris, Palais Omnisports de Paris Bercy, Salle Marcel Cerdan, show Autumn/Winter '06-'07, first look on a giant red cross stage.

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Paris, show Autumn/Winter ’14-’15, caps by Stephen Jones.

At the entrance of the show space, we had a girl on display for the audience to walk past when finding the way to their seats. On a white bed enclosed in a glass case supported by a felted plinth, she lay there like our very own sleeping beauty in a very simple white silk dress and the world’s most expensive boots, made of gold and diamonds, on her feet.

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Christmas card, 2017.

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Spring/Summer ’12, laced Fetish ankle boots with matching trousers.

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