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superlocal has added a photo to the pool: postcard Ines Kaag and Desiree Heiss BLESS CASCO interview www.cascoprojects.org/data/html/c00492.html BLESS, Interview by Alexandra Bradley ‘Bless is an outspoken female – more woman than girl. She’s not a chosen beauty, but doesn’t go unnoticed. Without a definite age she could be between her mid twenties and forties. B. hangs around with a special style of man. She has no nationality and thinks sport is quite nice. She’s always attracted by temptations and loves change. She lives right now and her surroundings are charged by her presence. She tends to be future orientated.’ (Bless#1) by Alexandra Bradley Split between the European capitals of Berlin and Paris, Bless is the working name for German fashion designers Ines Kaag and Desiree Heiss. Bless creates single products rather than seasonal collections. There are four products per year and each product has its own particularly designed packaging and graphics, marketed as a limited edition accessory, a buyable design concept. Ranging from disposable T-shirts to a questionnaire, Bless’ products are anything but predictable. Existing as an anonymous team with an intriguing name is important for the designers, whose work is underpinned by a sense of irony as well as an investigation of how clothing informs character and the narratives surrounding it. For Bless N° 07, Kaag and Heiss created ‘Living Room Conquerors’, a series of accessories for domestic furniture. Curiously titled ‘Chairware’, ‘Tablecare’ and ‘Doorflair’, the products weren’t in the slightest bit practical, yet at the same time they seemed to make reasonable sense. For their most recent project ‘Fanitems’, Kaag and Heiss took their inspiration from a very modern cultural phenomenon – the ‘fan’. The result is a series of products which mimic the cheap, homogenous brand clothing sold the world over to different types of fans. Football scarves and pyjamas are emblazoned with the Bless logo and printed T-shirts come in unisex, ‘unisizes’. ‘Fanitems’ is an investigation of clothes as a signifier for cultural and social identity as well as an incisive and witty take on team psychology: ‘Since its not about the clothes themselves but the ideal values that they may transport through their speaking front and quiet back, they can be worn at any kind of occasion to demonstrate a personal attitude or to give a fashionable statement or not.’ this interview was via e-mail AB An obvious one to start with, but could you mention something about the concept of Bless as a fictitious woman? IK & DH For us, Bless is a name that you can pronounce in every language, which sounds nice and a little bit feminine. In a way, when we reflected on our situation as beginners, we created the person Bless as a subject for the personal communication between us. Our image of the potential target audience included ourselves in the first row of a show, but then advanced to a summation of our personal preferences with the half-ideal, half-real characteristics of our life concepts. For us it was the first official thing that we wanted to tell people who were looking for more than just a ‘product’. AB Could you mention something about the way that you are ‘anonymous’ designers in the sense that you do not publicise yourselves as ‘name’ designers? IK & DH It simply relates more to our characters which are inclined to ‘pull the threads from backstage’ instead of being exposed too much. You could say that it’s more important to change the world softly through inventions than to have one more temporary star with two heads, who offers an interested audience the chance to identify their loneliness with it. But since we are so realistic we could say that we are doing this for practical reasons, to exist as boring people without ideas, which is what we sometimes need. AB Do you feel that you strategically create an identity for Bless, or has it just formulated itself along the way? IK & DH Bless is a very personal thing and we try hard to keep this spirit. The big task is being able to survive and having the luxury of being able to do what we want to do. The strategy is to realise that we can continue to invest our time in things which are interesting for us. AB How does an idea for a Bless project/object come into existence. Could you describe the process of how an initial idea gets transformed into an object? IK & DH If the idea is a clear one, you only have to realise it. Mostly the idea is more like the headline for a subject we are interested in. For example with Bless N° 07 ‘Living Room Conquerors’ we discovered that we are definitely more interested in furniture and the surrounding objects than in pieces of clothing. You could say that it came about because we felt the personal need to find a solution for living room objects and we just started to work with this in mind. So, an idea is very often a kind of task that we set ourselves as designers from which we do a series of experiments and in the best case we find a result which is surprising enough worth realising and worth offering to the public as a product or a concept or as a thought or an idea. With Bless N° 07 it was more a concept, an idea of how you can think about the immediate surroundings just a bit further away from your body, but still being a very personal thing, as a frame of your personality. The editions are ‘dresses for your living room’, the result of fashion designers thinking about how to ‘dress’ their room. AB Do you see your designs as being almost pieces of art? IK & DH We are aware of the different reactions to our things, coming from the art sector. It would be a lie to say that we don’t care about our work in an art context, but we never do projects which we set out to be art projects. We are some-where in between and open to more than one field. AB How do you see your interventions in other designer’s collections – for example the wigs that you did for La Maison Margiela? IK & DH The collaboration with La Maison Margiela was our first big job and gave us the chance to show our work to an inte-rested fashion public. Of course we were concerned with the credits for our efforts, but we primarily saw it as a big chance to have a look in on one of our possible fields of activity in the future. Besides the fact that we still feel very honoured and lucky for having worked with Margiela, there is no sort of further connection. Bless is not that kind of collective, but we are two designers, working as a team, some-times in the mood or having the need to collaborate with others. AB Do you see Bless as pushing boundaries within design, between fashion, jewellery, accessories, furniture and even architecture? It seems that you explore the links between a body’s relation to its clothes, or to furniture; the idea of the space that surrounds the body? IK & DH We simply like to work in more than one field. It’s more the time around us which gives different possibilities of explanations and interpretations. Our concept is to follow our feelings, needs and own possibilities. AB It seems that in a similar way, a lot of your work is about the mechanisms or media around fashion rather than the clothes themselves. How do you go about the way that you present an idea, the marketing of it, the advertising and the graphics which accompany it? IK & DH We started with the intention to concentrate on one product, one single idea, because we believed in concentration and limitation which should make our product strong and to do everything around by ourselves, or better: the only person who was very close with us from the beginning is our graphic designer and friend Hendrik who helped us a lot, but never tried to give us a certain direction. We just tried to work on different fields because it was our concern to realise our very special life concept as an experiment. AB How do you see your website function-ing – as an extra space for your work, as a selling mechanism or as a discursive medium to contextualise the work? IK & DH We would love to see it as how you describe it, but unfortunately we are always a little bit too slow to do our updates and there is also still a lack of technical equipment, especially in the fashion oriented public so that we see this more as a growing project under construction. AB Could you describe your last project Fanitems? What made you want to make a series of clothes about fans? IK & DH We thought about ‘Fanitems’ because the message shown on the pieces of clothes is more important than the shape and the right size. People should like the clothes because of their patterns, colours, images and handcrafted inspired techniques and not because it is obviously a new shape. Our aim was to create something very personal in clothes, which is not too easy to do, something which also offered the option for identification. At the same time, we were responding to our fans who are encouraged enough to wear our pieces. As well as this, we had an idea to use drawings of our faces as an answer to all the requests from the press who always want to show the people behind the products. In the past, we’ve always said that it would be better if they simply showed the products … so we thought in the future we could have a kind of ‘two’ in one situation. AB Is humour important in your work? IK & DH Never thought about it, but it seems to be something that would be good to have.